# learning language (blogs) — RSS Amplifier Recent posts from the 5 feeds in the RSS Amplifier directory that cover learning language. Page: Feed: --- ## [This site has been migrated to thomasdhughes.com.](https://thinkings.bearblog.dev/this-site-has-been-migrated-to-thomasdhughescomhttpwwwthomasdhughescom/) _2026-03-02 · thinkings · Thinkings_ This site has been migrated to thomasdhughes.com . ## [learning a language is NOT about vocabulary or grammar rules](https://mijk.bearblog.dev/learning-a-language-is-not-about-vocabulary-or-grammar-rules/) _2026-02-28 · mijk · Traveling + others?_ I think we've got it all wrong. Learning a language isn't about memorizing vocabulary or grammar rules. I was lucky enough to have learned a bit of Spanish while traveling in Latin America. When I was talking with the people there, I realized that they know a lot more words in English than I know in Spanish; for instance, they knew the English word for "blueberry" but I had no clue what it was in… ## [Do you know which room is above the kitchen?](https://namelessvirtue.com/2025/12/01/do-you-know-which-room-is-above-the-kitchen/) _2025-12-01 · Alex Altair · The Nameless Virtue_ This is my post for day 30 of the Inkhaven writing retreat. If you ve ever played video games, you might be familiar with the concept of a mini game. Mini games are a separate, smaller game within a larger game, with different rules and a well-defined context. They can add more novelty to the player s \[ \] ## [Will we ever complete the Epic of Gilgamesh?](https://namelessvirtue.com/2025/11/30/will-we-ever-complete-the-epic-of-gilgamesh/) _2025-11-30 · Alex Altair · The Nameless Virtue_ This is my post for day 29 of the Inkhaven writing retreat. Here is an idea for a research project I would do if I had infinite time. The Epic of Gilgamesh, often called the oldest piece of literature, is known to us only through a large collection of fragmentary tablets buried in the ground. \[ \] ## [A silly scheme for learning a language](https://namelessvirtue.com/2025/11/29/a-silly-scheme-for-learning-a-language/) _2025-11-29 · Alex Altair · The Nameless Virtue_ This is my post for day 28 of the Inkhaven writing retreat. Learning a language is notoriously difficult. You have to learn a thousand things before you can hold even a basic conversation at the grocery store. The gap is huge. It s widely recognized that children have some kind of biological advantage in learning their \[ \] ## [On not becoming an old man](https://namelessvirtue.com/2025/11/28/on-not-becoming-an-old-man/) _2025-11-28 · Alex Altair · The Nameless Virtue_ This is my post for day 27 of the Inkhaven writing retreat. I grew up just about at pace with the rise of the internet, laptops, and smart phones. It was fast enough that I could tell it was revolutionary, but slow enough for me to stay up to date. Along the way, I saw \[ \] ## [You’ll never believe where blood is made](https://namelessvirtue.com/2025/11/26/youll-never-believe-where-blood-is-made/) _2025-11-26 · Alex Altair · The Nameless Virtue_ This is my post for day 26 of the Inkhaven writing retreat. Okay, so you might just know the answer to this one. If so, I think it could still be fun to imagine you don t, and play along. I was once chatting with a friend who knew a lot about biology. I don t remember \[ \] ## [Why might one want to be a policy?](https://namelessvirtue.com/2025/11/26/why-might-one-want-to-be-a-policy/) _2025-11-26 · Alex Altair · The Nameless Virtue_ This is my post for day 25 of the Inkhaven writing retreat. In a previous post, I described the state of what I called being a policy . I contrasted this with habits, heuristics, and plain old conscious deciding. I think a reasonable response to this would be, why would one want to be a policy ? \[ \] ## [What if the world had been flat, but infinite?](https://namelessvirtue.com/2025/11/25/what-if-the-world-had-been-flat-but-infinite/) _2025-11-25 · Alex Altair · The Nameless Virtue_ This is my post for day 24 of the Inkhaven writing retreat. Imagine you re in the ancestral environment. (People do that, right? That s normal?) The only thing you know about the shape of the world is what you ve seen with your own eyes. You and your tribe have roamed around quite a bit, so you ve \[ \] ## [Wait, IS oracle bone script older than bronze script? A mini research quest](https://namelessvirtue.com/2025/11/24/253/) _2025-11-24 · Alex Altair · The Nameless Virtue_ This is my post for day 23 of the Inkhaven writing retreat. Oracle bone script is considered the oldest known form of written Chinese. When you look at it, this makes sense; it looks more primitive , more pictorial, less unified in its stroke patterns. Bronze script, the next one, looks more like modern Chinese. But \[ \] ## [Home Internet From Space (Sponsored)](https://crawlproof.com/a/5yG4FXzmhI3j) _2025-11-24 · **Sponsored**_ Residential satellite internet that brings connectivity to homes beyond conventional networks ## [Knowing thyself does not imply fixing thyself](https://namelessvirtue.com/2025/11/23/knowing-thyself-does-not-imply-fixing-thyself/) _2025-11-23 · Alex Altair · The Nameless Virtue_ This is my post for day 22 of the Inkhaven writing retreat. The basic promise of science is this; by using the scientific method, you can figure out how the world works, and thereby take better actions to get the outcomes you want. This is the primary justification for funding scientific endeavors with taxpayer dollars. \[ \] ## [Inkhaven check-in: how is blogging going?](https://namelessvirtue.com/2025/11/22/inkhaven-check-in-how-is-blogging-going/) _2025-11-22 · Alex Altair · The Nameless Virtue_ It s day 21 of 30 days of daily blogging at the Inkhaven writing retreat. The social accountability structure is doing an excellent job at causing me to actually write something every day. This kind of structure is rare and valuable; you can t just go out and get 40 people to do a daily goal with \[ \] ## [A Guide for Applying to Grad School With ADHD](https://adapthd.com/topics/coping-strategies/a-guide-for-applying-to-grad-school-with-adhd/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=a-guide-for-applying-to-grad-school-with-adhd) _2025-08-02 · Neil Petersen · ADaptHD_ For many of us with ADHD, school was not our happy place. Personally, if you want to see the worst side of my ADHD symptoms, just do the following: stick me in a classroom, ask me to listen to a 1-hour lecture, and then give me an exam about it. Yet despite my ambivalence about \[ \] ## [Discord on gentoo (tips)](https://mitatefe.bearblog.dev/discord-on-gentoo-tips/) _2025-07-01 · mitatefe · A Cool Blog Name Here_ Install Discord with portage: doas emerge --sync && doas emerge --ask discord Disable the update check via appending "SKIP\_HOST\_UPDATE": true to ~/.config/discord/settings.json . ## [Can you learn a language in 1 year?](https://mitatefe.bearblog.dev/can-you-learn-a-language-in-1-year/) _2025-06-12 · mitatefe · A Cool Blog Name Here_ Hello, and for the folks that are coming back, welcome back. If you don't know (yet), I have been learning languages for as long as I know myself. I started learning languages at the age of 7 with English, and now I can speak English and Turkish fluently, and have a certain level of comfort in Chinese and French. If you are coming from the clickbait(y) title, the short answer is no. Umm, well,… ## [Keyboard Pong](https://thinkings.bearblog.dev/keyboard-pong/) _2025-06-12 · thinkings · Thinkings_ Experimenting with inputs. ## [The death and it's grief.](https://mitatefe.bearblog.dev/the-death-and-its-grief/) _2025-06-06 · mitatefe · A Cool Blog Name Here_ Hi, long time no see, huh? I am still standing (not so) strong. And yes, I didn't forget that I had a blog. I just couldn't find a thing to write, and it wasn't just 'writer's block', it was just that I couldn't find anything to do or write about because my life became dull. This isn't a post, this is like a rant to myself. Today, around midday, my grandfather from my mother's side went away. I… ## [A review of the HSK books and why I am transitioning to ACCC.](https://mitatefe.bearblog.dev/a-review-of-the-hsk-books-and-why-i-am-transitioning-to-accc/) _2025-05-15 · mitatefe · A Cool Blog Name Here_ When I first started learning Chinese, I started with taking classes in my high school. They were great, and they are why I can keep continuing to learn this damn thing. The books we were using — fortunately — were NPCR. I believe before I left the school in about ~2 years, we've finished the first and the second book. I liked them, they were a classic, old school, designed to be used in classes… ## [Bubble Letters](https://thinkings.bearblog.dev/bubble-letters/) _2025-05-13 · thinkings · Thinkings_ Is this anything? (View fullscreen at https://thomasinch.github.io/bubble-letters ) ## [Snap 1: A little life update.](https://mitatefe.bearblog.dev/snap-1-a-little-life-update/) _2025-05-04 · mitatefe · A Cool Blog Name Here_ Welcome back, you might have been wondering why I was gone for a long time, and why I came back now. Well, let’s just say I was running a little personal experiment to see what happens when I step away for a while. Firstly, I can't find anything to write. Lately, I picked up a lot of new hobbies like web development, building my homelab, and other tech projects… While that is fun and all, I don't… ## [Recipe PDFs Ready Fast (Sponsored)](https://crawlproof.com/a/3zrG84tBJErP) _2025-05-04 · **Sponsored**_ Turn online or personal recipes into clean, printable PDFs in seconds. ## [o4-mini-high inexplicably inserted Russian into my code](https://thinkings.bearblog.dev/o4-russian/) _2025-04-28 · thinkings · Thinkings_ I'm working on a project and I wanted to make a minor edit but didn't want to hunt for the one line to change, so I put my script.js file into ChatGPT and asked it to make the change using the o4-mini-high model and Canvas. It made the change correctly in the Canvas, but it also did one more thing: it replaced the variable document , in all but two places, with the Russian word for document… ## [Why I blog](https://thinkings.bearblog.dev/why-i-blog/) _2025-04-25 · thinkings · Thinkings_ Faye asked me this on the bus to Everest base camp. I started writing and posting only a month or two ago, and it was because I found all these great pieces on Hacker News, and they were from peoples' personal blogs. and on some of those blogs (e.g. Simon Willison's), the authors made extremely compelling arguments about how terrific it is to have a personal blog. Now that I've done it for a month… ## [Modifying Websites with LLM-Generated Javascript Bookmarks](https://thinkings.bearblog.dev/bookmark/) _2025-04-16 · thinkings · Thinkings_ inspired by Geoffrey Litt ## [Most problems that can be solved with technology can be solved by combining things that already exist](https://thinkings.bearblog.dev/technology-problems/) _2025-04-15 · thinkings · Thinkings_ Here's a theory: Most problems that can be solved with technology can be solved by combining things that already exist in a simple way. To make that thing better and higher quality, it's about how many layers of abstraction you can understand deeply, and thus progress downwards, optimizing for your specific case at every level. If you want to make a webapp for a business, you can make it on… ## [Persistent rune storage using Svelte 5 and localStorage.](https://mitatefe.bearblog.dev/persistent-rune-storage-using-svelte-5-and-localstorage/) _2025-04-06 · mitatefe · A Cool Blog Name Here_ Welcome back, while I was working on my 1 st web app, dodoop , I've encountered a mind-boggling issue. I had to make a to-do list, and you can make that by just creating a new array in a state, such as: let todos = $state (\[\]) The problem with this approach is when the user refreshes the page, the to-do list could be, and will be, gone. If you want to make it "persistent", modern browsers like… ## [This is why kernel-level anti cheats suck.](https://mitatefe.bearblog.dev/this-is-why-kernel-level-anti-cheats-suck/) _2025-04-02 · mitatefe · A Cool Blog Name Here_ Welcome back, if you are a reader of this blog, you can comfortably say that I am a Valorant player. Not a good one, but I am a player. For the last couple of days, I can't play the game. Now, this post is in no way a defence of cheating, and I didn't cheat, and this error is not about cheating, I don't condemn cheating, and fuck cheaters, honestly. Anyhow, recently I am getting an error when I… ## [Random Places to Learn Languages](https://mitatefe.bearblog.dev/random-places-to-learn-languages/) _2025-03-31 · mitatefe · A Cool Blog Name Here_ If you are learning a language, no matter how popular it is or how weird and hard to find immersion content in that language is, there are still plenty of ways to immerse yourself and have fun while doing it. I am learning languages as long as I can remember myself, and today I am going to present to you a list of places I go when I don't know what to do with a language. Wikipedia Yes, you heard… ## [Puerto Rico Roadtrip](https://mijk.bearblog.dev/puerto-rico-roadtrip/) _2025-03-31 · mijk · Traveling + others?_ I went to Puerto Rico for a week in March 2025 with 4 other friends, and here I'll share the route that we took as well as some photos. Unfortunately most people who go to PR only stay in San Juan and Vieques; I feel that doing this only shows you a glimpse of PR. We rented a car with Enterprise and drove around the island, and it was a lot of fun. San Juan Old San Juan was a lot of fun, but also… ## [Snap-最近我不好](https://mitatefe.bearblog.dev/snap/) _2025-03-31 · mitatefe · A Cool Blog Name Here_ 你好！最近在我的家乡有很多问题，所以我没有时间写作。今天我没去外面。我开始读一本新书，这本书叫《A Mind for Numbers》，作者是 Barbara Oakley。我好像喜欢这本书，因为我一直觉得数学很难。这本书给了我很多新的看法，让我对数学有了不同的理解。 我又开始用 Anki 了。我越来越对 SRS（间隔重复系统）感兴趣。这本书也提到了间隔重复，特别是 Anki，所以我觉得我应该在日常生活中使用 SRS。本来我不喜欢数学，但今天我读了这本书，还写了一些笔记。 最近，我经常思考什么是对的，什么是错的。很多人似乎分不清它们的区别。为什么我总是要对父母说“正确”的话？为什么很多时候，人们会撒谎？我不知道。但我知道的是，我应该继续做我想做的事，不管别人怎么说。 我回到了我的家乡——安卡拉。在这里，我很开心。但我的外公住院了。我相信一切都会好起来的。 ## [A new keyboard, and a new setup. (Logi POP Keys review)](https://mitatefe.bearblog.dev/a-new-keyboard-and-a-new-setup/) _2025-03-29 · mitatefe · A Cool Blog Name Here_ Welcome back, a while ago I have talked about how I will start writing (or blogging) in Turkish when I get my hands on my Turkish keyboard. This keyboard is from the times of me buying an iPad and then needing a keyboard and a mouse. I came back to Ankara now, which is where my original setup lies. I made some quick adjustments, including my Linux (except dwm. I am not going to patch a new… ## [Trade Smarter With IBKR (Sponsored)](https://crawlproof.com/a/Hb0GmbTPLebc) _2025-03-29 · **Sponsored**_ Join Interactive Brokers through a referral and access low-cost global trading. ## [Learning a language through immersion and shamelessness](https://thinkings.bearblog.dev/language-immersion/) _2025-03-23 · thinkings · Thinkings_ From Ali: Kids learn languages faster because their brains are more pliable, sure. But that's not the whole picture. Kids do two things better than adults in terms of learning language. They fully immerse themselves. At school or in a new country, they are using the language all the time, and are not switching back to their native language when they want to. They are forced to speak it all the… ## [How to Do Personal Projects](https://thinkings.bearblog.dev/how-to-do-personal-projects/) _2025-03-23 · thinkings · Thinkings_ Over the course of this school year, I've been tackling a handful of small projects. It's important to me to establish a framework for doing projects for myself - whether that's coding, writing, learning - when it's not for a grade or a paycheck. If I get this right, I ensure that I can continue to make progress on my passions when adult life rolls around in September. I really want to get it… ## [Set Quests, Not Goals](https://thinkings.bearblog.dev/set-quests-not-goals/) _2025-03-23 · thinkings · Thinkings_ This comes from this really great piece: https://www.raptitude.com/2024/08/do-quests-not-goals/ Instead of setting goals, you should go on quests. A goal is something that you are meant to accomplish at some point. A quest is something you start today. A quest is an adventure that you set off on. A quest changes you. When you set a goal, you're disappointed if you don't achieve it. But when you… ## [Andrej Karpathy is on bearblog](https://mijk.bearblog.dev/andrej-karpathy-is-on-bearblog/) _2025-03-20 · mijk · Traveling + others?_ This morning I was scrolling on the Discover page of bearblog, like I usually do. I saw a post titled "the append-and-review note". I thought it was pretty interesting, so after reading it, I clicked on the home tab. This is the first time I stumbled across a blog post by someone I know. My first instinct was that this was someone faking to be him; I went on his own page and it just turns out, he… ## [⭐️ I write my diaries on Google Calendar](https://mijk.bearblog.dev/diaries-in-calendar/) _2025-02-28 · mijk · Traveling + others?_ I. I journal a lot. Some days I sit down and write for hours, about events on that day and my thoughts on them. Some days I just briefly write down what I did. Why? To me, if I don't remember what happened, it's as if all that time just vanished. This feeling is even stronger nowadays as we spend more time on social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram. I find that writing things down helps… ## [you're supposed to explore, not linger](https://mijk.bearblog.dev/youre-supposed-to-explore-not-linger/) _2025-02-21 · mijk · Traveling + others?_ it's okay if you don't know what you want to do. life is long. you don't need to know what your first job will be when you enter college. but you can't stay where you are. that's not an option. you have to go somewhere. talk to people. learn. read. try. you'll never know what you want if you stay here. Related: Check out Paul Graham's blog on how to spend (or lose) time; and check out this… ## [some movies i watched in 2024](https://mijk.bearblog.dev/some-movies-i-watched-in-2024/) _2025-02-07 · mijk · Traveling + others?_ Someone once said, if you talked about something to more than 2 people, you should write about it. I've been asked by many for film recommendations, and below I've compiled a list of films I watched in 2024 that I absolutely adored, in no particular order. Cidade de Deus (City of God) (2002) There is no way to summarize this movie succinctly; to me, this felt like a Brazilian version of the… ## [on driving in Baja California: details](https://mijk.bearblog.dev/on-driving-in-baja-california/) _2025-01-24 · mijk · Traveling + others?_ Prior to my trip to Baja California I've never driven in any country other than the U.S. and China, both of which are relatively safer for driving. I was nervous about it at first, too. We rented a car with Hertz in Tijuana, because on the website it was 500 bucks cheaper than Enterprise. But when we got to the counter we were charged young driver fees, and in the end it was only 200 bucks… ## [⭐️ a conversation with a 68-years-old man who worked in the food industry](https://mijk.bearblog.dev/a-conversation-with-a-68-years-old-who-worked-in-the-food-industry/) _2025-01-02 · mijk · Traveling + others?_ On a boat trip in La Paz, BCS, I sat next to a 68-years old man from Vancouver; as we shared stories of our travels, he told me he drove all the way down here, alone, and previously he spent 1 month in Loreto. He also revealed that he previously worked in the food industry, for companies such as Coca-Cola (which he was not proud of) and a couple others. I've been curious about foods and health in… ## [Baja California Roadtrip](https://mijk.bearblog.dev/baja-california-roadtrip/) _2025-01-01 · mijk · Traveling + others?_ Hey, I'm glad we called last night. You seemed to be somewhat interested in what happened on the trip, though you didn't want to admit it, and I didn't have enough time to tell you everything. Perhaps I never will have enough time to tell you everything - I wish you were here. I traveled with H and R, and as we were looking for one other person, C told me one of her friends is interested; none of… ## [Producers and Consumers](https://mijk.bearblog.dev/producers-and-consumers/) _2024-11-29 · mijk · Traveling + others?_ Here's how it worked in the past: some people use time and energy to produce for others, in exchange for some currency; some people buy these products using the same currency. Most people are both producers and consumers: we produce make what we do best and buy what we don't. In recent years, though, that's not completely the case. When we watch YouTube videos, or Instagram reels, we're not…