What can’t you do on Twitter these days, right? Everyone’s talking about it. (If you haven’t yet heard of Twitter, try reading Wikipedia’s take or watch this helpful video.) Well, we were playing with this bite-size social networking service before all the hype started and we’ve accumulated an impressive family of Twitter accounts, each dedicated to a different [...]
Category Archives: Language-Learning
The Linguists Documentary and Beyond: Saving Endangered Languages
February 24, 2009 – 2:18 pm
The topic of saving endangered languages is buzzing once again, this time in the form of a documentary. The Linguists, a documentary airing Thursday on PBS, follows David Harrison and Greg Anderson in their “amazing language race” to document endangered languages in far away corners of the planet such as Siberia, Bolivia and India. The [...]
A World of Byki Videos
January 15, 2009 – 1:34 pm
I remember as a kid wishing I had my own TV channel. Now there’s YouTube and I could have my own TV channel, but it’s too late… the dream is gone. Luckily for all you language-learners, though: Byki has its own YouTube channel now (!) and it’s starting to pick up the pace. [...]
How to Achieve “The Click” Moment
December 1, 2008 – 1:28 pm
Giving up on a new language is too easy. It’s because starting out is so difficult to do. Now matter how you approach the task, your mind and memory are often ill-prepared for the, well, foreign nature of the language you’re trying to understand. With so many scholars, Web sites, and books [...]
4 ways to understand how Byki teaches foreign languages
September 1, 2008 – 5:35 pm
Both Byki Express and Byki Deluxe subscribe to the idea that to master a language you must collect as many words in your memory as possible. Many langauge teaching tools try to have users memorize packaged, finished phrases, like, “Excuse me, could you please point me to the nearest post office?” While that may [...]
Using Wrong Answers
August 1, 2008 – 3:39 pm
School has trained us all to think of wrong answers as failures. Red ink on a test represents a lower grade and thus a worse educational outcome. Teachers tell us to “learn from our mistakes,” but really the damage is done: our GPA has suffered. On to the next unit. Hope for better luck this [...]
