Updated 03-Aug-2025 The other day I was looking at the Thai keyboard (a fascinating subject, especially when we have to distinguish between Unicode characters, Thai letters, and Thai script elements, and keyboard keys (these do not match up). I noticed there is no space in the Thai unicode standard. Which means a Thai keyboard maps ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Fluency and automaticity Building fluency in math and language is significantly (though not exclusively) building automaticity in recognizing and recalling math facts, and the sounds, spelling, and meaning of words, respectively. Foundationally, building automaticity must in fact be based on tasks which do so. This seems obvious but isn't so, as an incisive ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Learning Spanish (Spain or Central American) is a popular past time, and is fourth in the number of non-native speakers (behind English, Mandarin, and Hindustani). It is also the fourth most spoken language by native speakers. For an English language speaker there are many similarities that can help in Spanish language acquisition. There ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 One learns a language to speak with a people and/or read their writing. All languages are useful to someone who has some use for them, though in general not all languages are equally useful in the abstract. Putting aside native vs. non-native speaker divides (which are hard to account for), languages are put ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Written American English Standard English is most related to written form and is standardized for a given English-speaking country. Therefore, Standard American English is the standardized form of English in the United States. Spoken American English General American English is the more or less standardized or common spoken American English. Written Standard American ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Learning second, foreign, or other language as adult is not uncomplicated. First, we need to review what we actually know about learning languages, and learning them as an adult (as there is are differences between how children and adults learn languages). What we don't know about learning a second or other language First ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 The original formulation of Zipf's law was based on naturally occurring word frequencies and their rank order in a given English language corpus. For one example, merely 135 words accounted for 50% of the total word frequencies. This could be extended to phrases as well. For foreign language learners, this means that there ... Read more