The QWERTY Effect: How typing shapes the meanings of words
This 6-page PDF report is a really interesting read.
Bwahaha. Grammar nazi fail.
Sorry, there's no such thing as 'correct grammar' [The Guardian]
Finally, an article that gets it right.
Calvin on verbs.
Daily List of Free Kindle eBooks for Foreign Language Study
Earlier this week I published a list of free Kindle books that were related to language learning. I’ve decided to make that a thing, and I’ll be updating the list every day. Today there are materials in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Hindi, Indonesian, and English. Go check them out and download them ASAP. Most of them are free for today only.
How do you become fluent in 11 languages? [BBC VIDEO]
This 20-year-old is fluent in English, Greek, German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Afrikaans, French, Hebrew, Catalan, and Italian.
Today’s Free Language-Related Kindle Books (2/19/12)
These ebooks from Amazon may be free only for today (and only in the US), so grab them while you can. They can be read on Kindles, in a web browser, on a Mac or PC, on an iPhone or iPad, and on Android devices.
Every day there are new free Kindle books in or on a variety of languages. If this type of list is something you’d like to see more often, please like it or reblog it so I know.
SPANISH
CHINESE
HINDI
- Hindi Children’s Book of Flowers
- Aamoo and Numbers (Hindi Children’s Book Level 1 Easy Reader)
- Tara on a Trip (Hindi Children’s Book Level 2 Easy Reader)
- Sonu’s Trip (Hindi Children’s Book Level 3 Easy Reader)
ENGLISH
Dotsies: An Alphabet Designed for Reading, Not Writing
Dotsies is a font/alphabet designed to help us read more efficiently. Its letters look like this:
As the Dotsies site says:
Since latin letters (a, b, c, etc.) are optimized to be written by hand, they take up a lot of unnecessary space. Your eyes have to move at a frantic pace from left to right to read. Use screen space more efficiently! Have a more relaxed reading experience!
So in other words, these letters are all narrower than the Latin letters we currently use. This means that more letters and words can fit on a line, meaning that we can read faster and not have to move our eyes as much.
To illustrate how much screen space this saves, here’s a comparison of a regular paragraph with its Dotsies equivalent below it:
The Dotsies site has a bookmarklet that lets you convert any regular text online to the Dotsies font.
The whole thing makes sense and sounds interesting. I don’t think it’ll ever catch on beyond a few geeks and early adopters, but it is still a neat idea. I’d love to see some people study this and then do tests to see how much faster/easier it really is to read this way.
