When I was a child my parents bought a table game called “travels in Europe”. The players had to travel through the map and to answer some geography questions to advance and travel more. My parents probably bought the game because they understood the principle of incidental learning. What is […]

Psychologists recognize several principles the can help learning and efficient use of memory. Among these principles the following seem to be particularly significant: Meaning Organization Association Visualization Attention In this post, I want to focus on the role that Meaning has on learning and memorization. Why when we have to chose […]

Few months ago I stumbled upon a research paper that discussed the relationship between living abroad and creativity. The authors suggest that somehow living abroad may increase your creativity. Why so? Living abroad and creativity If you think about it, it does make sense. When we live abroad we come in […]

In this post I will explain how learning German has helped me to learn to identify medicinal plants used in the Amazon. These are apparently two unrelated skills but here I want to show how the principles of learning can be relevant in different fields such as botany and languages. […]

One of the most common errors, when people want to learn a new skill such as speaking a language, is to focus too much on theoretical knowledge rather than on methods to acquire the skill. That is often why people tend to not clearly differentiate between these two aspects of […]

Creative ideas are ideas that somehow fall outside the norm and the usual patterns of the mind. In this post I will describe a technique used to generate creative ideas and apply it to learning languages but it can be applied to find creative solutions to any kind of problem.Author […]

The Rosetta Stone, photo by Elisabeth BeersThe Rosetta Stone is, as the name suggests, a stone inscribed with the same text in three different languages: Ancient Egyptian, Demotic (Another form of Egyptian), and Ancient Greek. Researchers used the trilingual text in the Rosetta Stone as a key to understanding Egyptian […]

Thinking laterally. Photo by Rose-Zhang.Lateral thinking is a term created by Author Edward de Bono to describe a way of thinking that promotes creativity. Lateral thinking consists of solving a problem by using and generating as many solutions as possible instead of just the first obvious solution. By creating many […]

The Forgetting Curve Forgetting: A common experience It is the beginning of the summer, you are sitting on your chair staring the questions on your exam sheet and you realize that you have forgotten all the information that you have frantically read in the last week. “How is this possible? […]

In this post, I am discussing the reading & listening method to learn languages. I came across this method on the language forum “how to learn any language” a great source of inspiration for language learners. The reading & listening method (R-L) consists of reading a text while listening to […]