BLOG
-
How To Learn Any Language in Six Months
How to Learn Any Language in Six Months – Transcript. Welcome to the Transcript page for How to Learn Any Language in Six Months. Content reproduced here with permission. Read on! Or scroll to the bottom for the pdf download…
-
What is a Language Parent?
If you’re scratching your head, wondering what on earth a language parent is, don’t worry. You’re not alone! A language parent is someone, or a role that someone plays, that is ESSENTIAL to how you learn any language, especially if it…
-
How Long Does it Take to Learn Mandarin?
If you’re wondering how long it would take to learn Mandarin Chinese, the answer of course has to be: “it depends”. If you make a decision to use your brain and your time in the correct way, and put in adequate…
-
A Thought Experiment to Improve AI
Why aren’t artificial neural network systems replacing people? In AI, machines should replicate what we do, not perform statistical calculations. What can we do with a thought experiment to improve our AI? Photo by Kazi Mizan on Unsplash Progress in…
-
Upcoming Book: Modern Cognitive AI
How to build AI that’s like us and its benefit to society! Language, like our ability to navigate the world with our senses and muscles, comes from our brain. AGI needs better ‘cognitive AI.’ We choose our words carefully, because…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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,…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
What’s missing from AI – Part 1
Background In the 1930s, the American focus on behaviourism turned the linguistics world from the science of signs (semiotics) to one aligned with one of the great scientists in history, Pāṇini, who lived perhaps as far back as the 7th century…
-
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…
-
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…