How I Learned a Language in 90 Days

Is Bilingualism Really an Advantage?

For most of their lives, bilinguals might not show any real benefits. The true edge may come far later.

I Learned to Speak Four Languages in a Few Years: Here's How

Lifehacker reader Gabriel Wyner was tasked with learning four languages in the past few years for his career as an opera singer, and in the process la

How I Learned Spanish in 3 Months | Loïs Talagrand

Complete breakdown of my 90-day Spanish challenge: constraints, tools, timeline, and final 30-minute conversation result.

How To (Really) Learn A Foreign Language While You Sleep

The old saying that we can solve problems more effectively when we “sleep on it” may be especially true if the problem we’re trying to solve is learning a new language. Researchers from two Swiss universities wanted to know if they could enhance the learning of words from a foreign language [...]

How Much Money Learning a Foreign Language Is Worth

Besides the personal satisfaction of learning a new language, becoming fluent in a language could boost your lifetime earnings. The Economist takes a

Targeted Multilingual Adaptation for Low-resource Language Families

The "massively-multilingual" training of multilingual models is known to limit their utility in any one language, and they perform particularly poorly on low-resource languages. However, there is evid

What can intralingual translation do?

Published in Asia Pacific Translation and Intercultural Studies (Vol. 6, No. 1, 2019)

Is Cross-Lingual Transfer in Bilingual Models Human-Like? A Study with Overlapping Word Forms in Dutch and English

Bilingual speakers show cross-lingual activation during reading, especially for words with shared surface form. Cognates (friends) typically lead to facilitation, whereas interlingual homographs (false friends) cause interference or no effect. We examine whether cross-lingual activation in bilingual language models mirrors these patterns. We train Dutch-English causal Transformers under four vocabulary-sharing conditions that manipulate whether (false) friends receive shared or language-specific embeddings. Using psycholinguistic stimuli from bilingual reading studies, we evaluate the models through surprisal and embedding similarity analyses. The models largely maintain language separation, and cross-lingual effects arise primarily when embeddings are shared. In these cases, both friends and false friends show facilitation relative to controls. Regression analyses reveal that these effects are mainly driven by frequency rather than consistency in form-meaning mapping. Only when just friends share embeddings are the qualitative patterns of bilinguals reproduced. Overall, bilingual language models capture some cross-linguistic activation effects. However, their alignment with human processing seems to critically depend on how lexical overlap is encoded, possibly limiting their explanatory adequacy as models of bilingual reading.

OpenDeck · Learn languages you own

Learn languages with spaced-repetition flashcards you own.

Large language models are cultural technologies. What might that mean?

Four different perspectives

You can learn a foreign language in your sleep, say Swiss

Study played newly-learned foreign vocabulary to students and compared their memory with those who were played the words while awake

Learn Languages with LearnWithOliver.com

Daily language exercises, audio flashcards, arcade games, annotated texts and AI chat. Free to start.

Guide: Inclusive Language and Vocabulary for Startups and Tech

Understanding the vocabulary of diversity & inclusion can feel like learning a new (but very worthwhile!) language. Here's our incomplete but growing guide.

Mango Languages | Vancouver Public Library

Over 70 self-paced language learning courses and dialects. Learners are introduced to vocabulary, cultural insights, grammar and more. The courses are delivered by native speakers. They include critical-thinking and memory-building exercises. Sign up for a Mango profile so you can track your progress & continue where you left off.Or use “Mango as a guest” to access the resource. New to Mango? View a video tutorial.

ChatGPT Translate | Fast, Natural, 40+ Languages

ChatGPT translates across 40+ languages with accuracy, tone, and cultural nuance. Translate text, voice, or photos for everyday use, travel, school, and work — and learn grammar or phrasing as you go.