Language News

Practice what you preach, right? For professional linguists and casual language learners, we preach reviewing early and reviewing often, so we’re taking our advice and looking back on our year. What have we been working on? CL-150 Updates CL-150 Cohorts: To help professional linguists sustain and strengthen their language skills, we’ve expanded the CL-150 Cohorts…

Productivity is typically associated with time. How long does a task take? How much can you get done in a certain amount of time? Could you do it faster—and thereby be more productive? Managing time alone is no longer enough. With the entire world at our fingertips, time management has met its match: endless distractions…

From the Cold War era to the 2014 Ebola outbreak, we need not look back too far to realize the scale of America’s language gap—and why we must fill it before history repeats itself. There is a reason we offer more than 100 languages in our learning platforms: we believe all languages matter. That’s not…

Alphabet learning is like the “accessory work” of language learning. A Crossfit athlete, for example, cares mostly about the big movements: squats, cleans, snatches, muscle-ups, etc. To improve these movements, dedicated athletes will do accessory exercises like hammer curls, rows, or glute bridges. Less fun to spend lots of time on, no doubt, but necessary…

To get serious about skills training, organizations “need to embrace a new generation of e-learning.” According to the former head of Google France, Jean-Marc Tassetto, e-learning platforms are on “the brink of an engagement revolution.” He predicts that e-learning will be more personalized, adaptive, and aligned with individual goals. Less MOOC-style show-and-tell and more, well…

In a popular op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, Patrice Apodaca makes the case that it’s time to invest in foreign-language instruction, namely in public schools. We couldn’t agree more, but the buck doesn’t stop there. Apodaca wastes little time reiterating the need for foreign languages in the modern, globalized economy. That topic has been…

In response to America’s language deficit, a bipartisan Congressional report has called for the country to “to value language education as a persistent national need similar to education in math or English, and to ensure that a useful level of proficiency is within every student’s reach.” Earlier this year, CIA Director Gina Haspel included “emphasizing…