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Why Traditional Language Learning Methods Don’t Work
You studied for years. You passed the exams. You can conjugate verbs on paper and recite vocabulary lists from memory. But when someone speaks to you in the language you supposedly “know,” you freeze. If this sounds familiar, it’s not…
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How to Learn Mandarin Chinese Online
If you want to learn Mandarin Chinese as a foreign language — what’s known in Chinese as duìwài Hànyǔ jiàoxué (对外汉语教学）— there has never been more opportunity than right now. Online tools, apps, courses, and communities have made it possible…
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7 Actions to Learn Any Language Fast
Principles are good, but you need action. In my TEDx talk, alongside the 5 principles of accelerated language acquisition, I proposed seven actions that turn those principles into daily progress. These actions aren’t theoretical. They’re what I used when I…
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5 Principles of Accelerated Language Acquisition
Most language courses start with a textbook, a vocabulary list, and a grammar table. They’re built around what’s easy to teach, not around how the brain actually learns. After more than forty years of working at the intersection of psychology,…
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How I Learned Mandarin Chinese in 6 Months
Imagine you hold a question in your mind so long that it becomes part of how you think. That was my question for many years: how can you speed up learning? If you could learn faster, you could spend less…
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Knowledge versus Language
The biggest limitation of today’s Large Language models (LLMs)—or just ChatGPT for many people who aren’t in the AI space—is the tight coupling between the language, knowledge and context. I call today’s kind of statistical approximation ‘lossy’ because its representation…
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Understanding isn’t just memorization
We learn all the time, continuously, regardless of our age. We never stop, but would it surprise you that many scientists propose the model where we stop learning while we are young? That is false, although more research would help…
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New language model for human conversation!
The breathtaking view from Kobe University looking over Osaka Bay – home to the RRG 2025 bi-annual conference. Linguistic Conference: RRG 2025 The linguistic conference in Kobe, Japan, has just wrapped up. Expert linguists from around the world gave English…
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Magic from the Speech Genie
Learning a new language as an adult is difficult, requiring years of work to progress. Or does it? Today’s discussion is with Chris Lonsdale, the creator of Kungfu English, a system designed to mimic his success in learning Mandarin and…
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What’s missing from AI – Part 1
A brain in hand, a robot here ponders the use of ‘contextual meaning’ to help it emulate humans. But how do we store meaning? Photo by julien Tromeur on Unsplash Background In the 1930s, the American focus on behaviourism turned…
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Patom Theory Understands the Meaning Behind Language
For most of my life, I have pondered a question that sits at the very center of howour brain works: how do we understand language?The question isn’t how we repeat language, nor how we recognize its surfacepatterns, but how we…
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Your Struggles Aren’t Your Fault – Rebooting the Brain’s Natural Language System
For more than forty years I have asked myself a simple question: why do some people learn languages quickly and naturally, while others struggle despite years of study? This question has shaped almost every major decision of my life. It…
