Learning Strategies

Recent Posts

• Death of the Party

  By ljd42 on February 22, 2026

  

  Take one part gothic thriller, two parts cozy mystery clichés, and three parts Agatha Christie, stir them all up and you get Carolyn Hart’s Death of the Party. It’s a serviceable combination of those components, but what stands out is… Read More ›

• Everything you wanted to know about the Great Vowel Shift but were afraid to ask

  By ljd42 on February 8, 2026

  

  Odds are that you studied a European language back in high school — most likely Spanish or French, possibly German or Italian — and you quickly realized that the vowels in those languages are not pronounced as they are in… Read More ›

• Streets of Minneapolis

  By ljd42 on January 28, 2026

• Definitely a bonded pair

  By ljd42 on January 25, 2026

  

• Who’s better at understanding written English — you or some random teen in South Korea?

  By ljd42 on January 22, 2026

  

  Statistically speaking, as a reader of this blog, you are most likely a native speaker of English, so surely you must understand written English better than a random South Korean teen. Right? Well, maybe so. Or maybe not. A recent… Read More ›

• Cassie being Cute on Purpose

  By ljd42 on January 20, 2026

  

• Will the real John McWhorter please stand up? (No, no, that’s not the real one; that’s the AI John McWhorter!)

  By ljd42 on January 18, 2026

  

  John McWhorter is a professor of linguistics at Columbia University who is both a professional linguist and a popular linguist. In other words, he writes both for his colleagues and for the general public. He also podcasts for the latter… Read More ›

• Milkweed

  By ljd42 on January 16, 2026

  

  After getting haircuts at SuperCuts, Barbara and I walked to the storefront right next door to it and ate brunch at Milkweed. What excellent geography we have here in Dorchester! Barbara had the traditional homemade house-made corned beef hash, which… Read More ›

• They understand us across the pond.

  By ljd42 on January 11, 2026

  Trump claims that the USA has regained the respect of everyone across the globe, but the Marsh Family knows the truth:

• A note from Langston Hughes to my dad

  By ljd42 on January 10, 2026

  

  Seventy years ago the great Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes penned this inscription in the front of my dad’s copy of Hughes’s A Pictorial History of the Negro in America. (Note that Hughes’s co-author, Milton Meltzer, added his own autograph… Read More ›

• Enough is enuf.

  By ljd42 on January 8, 2026

  

  This book would have made an excellent New Yorker article. But a whole book? Not so much. All right, I suppose many a New Yorker article does feel like an entire book — but Enough is Enuf by Gabe Henry… Read More ›

• Is Modern Hebrew a conlang?

  By ljd42 on January 6, 2026

  

  So I keep seeing references to posts on Reddit…and I always ignore them. But then I said to myself, “Why not give Reddit a chance? What’s there to lose?” That led me to sign up for a few subreddits in… Read More ›

• Friends with words

  By ljd42 on January 4, 2026

  

  Yes, you read that correctly: the title really is Friends with Words, not the more familiar phrase Words with Friends. And even the correct phrase, Friends with Words, has at least two meanings (think about it). If you yourself are… Read More ›

• This year’s traditional Christmas dinner

  By ljd42 on December 26, 2025

  

  In accordance with long-established tradition, Barbara and I went to Chau Chow yesterday for a delicious Christmas feast: beef noodle, Chinese broccoli, har gao, shumai, xiao long bao, shrimp paste in tofu skin, stuffed taro, and pan-fried noodles with jumbo… Read More ›

• Where are you dining today?

  By ljd42 on December 25, 2025

  

• Claude predicts the future of English.

  By ljd42 on December 24, 2025

  

  Recently I’ve been playing with Claude AI, so I asked it (him? are we personifying AI’s these days?) to predict how English will change over the next 600 years. (Why 600? Because Middle English was spoken about 600 years ago,… Read More ›

• A Chanukah carol (in Yiddish)

  By ljd42 on December 21, 2025

• Two pop linguists who are worth listening to…

  By ljd42 on December 17, 2025

  

  and whose videos nevertheless share one particular flaw. I’m talking about Julie Maksimova, better known as Julingo, and Dr. Taylor Jones, better known as Language Jones. You can see what they’ve both done there with their noms, but that has… Read More ›

• The kittens say hello.

  By ljd42 on December 10, 2025

  

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