Letters Remain

Tag: learning

  • Language Incomprehensibility Flowchart (It’s All Greek To Me)

    Language Log was asked; When an English speaker doesn’t understand a word one says, it’s “Greek to me”. When a Hebrew speaker encounters this difficulty, it “sounds like Chinese”. […] Has there been a study of this phrase phenomenon, relating different languages on some kind of Directed Graph? To answer the query, Mark Liberman checks…

  • University of the People

    Three weeks ago the United Nations announced the launch of the world’s first tuition-free online university; the University of the People. With a high school diploma and a sufficient level of English as entry requirements, students from over 52 countries have already enrolled. Students will be placed in classes of 20, after which they can…

  • The Higher Education ‘Bubble’

    Is the current ‘value’ of higher education artificially inflated and unsustainable? In other words, could higher education be the next ‘bubble to burst’? The Chronicle of Higher Education looks at some of the early warning signs that seem to be suggesting so, and offers a couple of solutions to this apparently looming crisis. Over the…

  • Deliberate Practice Breeds Genius

    I initially thought that this was just going to be another superfluous variation on the 10,000 hours theme (from Malcolm Gladwell’s latest, Outliers). OK, so while it actually is that, David Brooks’ look at how to forge modern creative genius is still fairly interesting. Coyle describes a tennis academy in Russia where they enact rallies without a…

  • What Should Any Educated Person Know?

    Tucker Max creates a list of what he believes is the information any educated person should know. By no means a definitive list (far from it), but some good information regardless. English lit: Read lots of novels, especially the classics. There are hundreds of sites out there that purport to list the Western Canon, browse a…

  • Huge List of Free Online Langauge Courses

    From Abenaki to Xhosa, Hmong to Hungarian – Word2Word provides a huge database of links to free online language courses. An essential bookmark for anyone considering another language.

  • On Business Books, Self-Education, and Mental Models

    I mentioned the Personal MBA Book List last week, and today have come across this interview between Josh Kaufman and Ben Casnocha, author of My Start-Up Life. Josh runs the Personal MBA Recommended Reading List — a list of the best business books one would need to read for a comprehensive business education. It’s a…

  • A Guide for Learning Foreign Languages (Resources)

    Latin was probably the single most useful subject I was taught in school. I despised it at the time, but now I have come to realise its importance and many applications–the greatest of which is how it has helped me learn other languages. In learning languages (although none to fluency… yet) I have found the…