Learning to Communicate

Learn Kana by Memorizing 38 Words!

"King Will" (A Phase 1 Story)

Introducing: Phonicizer!
Many different strategies may be employed when designing programs for the public good, but the most obvious involves simple charity. However, perhaps even more effective and certainly more efficient is education. Language education in particular can have very far-reaching benefits as it facilitates other forms of learning. For example, imagine taking a college-level biology course without a good technical vocabulary or the ability to read fluently. When the English language is an educational target, the most obvious difficulty that must be overcome by young children and non-native speakers alike is its complicated and unreliable spelling system. Certainly, proper spelling is diff

Teaching Passives with QWERTY
Here's another pair of paragraphs that can be used to illustrate a particular structure of English grammar: the passive voice. The level is a little advanced, but textbooks do tend to put off passives for a while, so that might be fine. As with my post on Bigfoot, I've marked the subject and verb of each sentence, but this time I've also enclosed embedded clauses in curly braces so that they can be marked as well. The first paragraph below uses no passive constructions, and the second keeps approximately the same content but introduces several passives. Just by perusing the sentential subjects o

Teaching Embedded Clauses with Bigfoot
Here's an assignment I recently completed for a course in English pedagogy. These two paragraphs are basically the same, but the second includes several embedded sentences which make use of the complementizer "that". Both of the paragraphs have their subjects and verbs (well, verb strings really) marked, and the embedded clauses are marked in the list that follows. Humans have quite a lot in common with chimpanzees, but we may have an even closer relative living in our forests. Many thousands of people have seen this creature personally. Are they all mistaken? Could a giant, hairy ape-like b

Jones Romanization: Mandarin Chinese
This may seem strange since I don't speak much Chinese, I have no Chinese ancestry, and I've never been to China, but I've been nursing an obsession with Mandarin phonology for several years now, since before I even got into linguistics. It's not like I have a lot of time to kill. Aside from my family life, I'm currently working on my Master's thesis, managing a language acquisition research lab, and preparing to teach my first ESOL course next semester. But I still can't help working on stuff l

Using Timelines to Sort Out Verb Forms
When comparing English verb forms, the grammatical complexity of each form must be taken into account. Even where a clear semantic distinction can be made between two forms, such as the "simple present" and the "present progressive", the grammatically simpler of the two tends to be used (regardless of its semantics) in the absence of such a distinction. This is most clearly exemplified in the class of verbs known as "statives". Statives can be considered verbs with no inherent punctuality. They describe states or properties rather than complete actions. 1) a. She has an apple. b. You're crazy. c. I like this town. d. They want to leave. The vast major