“I don’t teach. I let them learn.” This quote from legendary educator and mathematician Caleb Gattegno encapsulates his educational philosophy of promoting learner independence. Gattegno believed that real teaching could never be accomplished by force-feeding learners material they didn’t understand, and even worse, didn't want to understand. The Silent Way of teaching a foreign language aims to largely mute [...]
Ask someone to do an impression of a California accent and you’re likely to get a laidback “Fersure, dude,” with perhaps a shaka hand sign thrown in for good measure. But does anyone in California actually even speak like this? Fersure, dude. Not everyone though, and the standard baseline “California accent” is quite moderate and more akin to “General [...]
A common complaint from those who suffered through baffling and boring foreign language classes in high school or college is that they later can’t remember any of it. Despite all the struggles and sometimes years of work, the end result was like they’d really never been in the class at all. At some point in time, they could likely [...]
How's your Yiddish? Probably slightly better than you'd thought, as many words from this Ashkenazi Jewish language have schlepped their way into modern American English. And if you're a fan of classics like Seinfeld or Curb Your Enthusiasm, or later hits like Unorthodox or Shtisel, then you've probably picked up enough to be a real mensch. Is Yiddish the [...]
From Southern drawl to Midwest normy to California cool, the United States is made all the more colorful by its abundance of local accents. A region's accent can be as emblematic as its cuisine and history, and they give an exciting new flavor to the plain old English we use every day. No matter how formulaic Hollywood has tried [...]
Although most everyone would like to know multiple languages, there's a perfectly good reason most don't ever achieve that goal - learning a new language is exceptionally difficult. Many young people put in years of study as kids and young adults only to later find that whatever basic skills they had once attained in the classroom have evaporated over time. [...]
"Attention!" Any recruit who has survived the first few days of boot camp has already been made well aware of the extreme importance of language in the military. The armed forces, and the US Army in particular, is packed with acronyms, rank names, and other terms that absolutely must be learned on the double. Your hat, for example, is not [...]
Do you remember the day you said your first word? Probably not Although the event may mark a special memory for parents, the young speakers themselves later have no recollection of their first words. We don't start forming long-term memories until we're about two or three years old, which is a shame in this case, as our first few [...]
It's Friday night and Eddie and his friends are out to dinner at a renowned steakhouse. Eddie places his order, the waiter says "Very good, sir" with a slight smirk, and all of Eddie's friends have suddenly gone quiet. There's a pregnant pause as his friends look at one another, smiles growing on their faces. Eddie looks around the [...]
Much like the linguistic phenomenon of similar sounds for the word "mama" across diverse languages, our words for the colors that grace our world exhibit a remarkable universality, bridging cultures and generations. Like the mother-child connection, colors are part of our first and most fundamental comprehension of the environment, and they ultimately constitute a cornerstone of human perception and [...]
