In today’s newsletter:
🔸 AI for conversation practice
🔸 The pareto principle
🔸 A great etymology channel to follow
Hey Reader.
If you’ve noticed Mondecast is a little quiet lately, I’ve not gone away, I’m just focusing on a few things for the site that take a bit of work. Nothing’s ready to announce yet, but there are exciting things coming!
By coincidence, there’s a bit of a theme around speaking this week. Enjoy!
Simon
Did you know you can reply to this email? I read every response, and interesting responses can be featured in future editions.
🛠️Resource spotlight: Google Gemini
I’ve found myself exploring with Italian lately, and on a whim I decided to sign up to a few LLM APIs to see what they could do. If you’re feeling nervous about talking with real people or just want something convenient, Google Gemini’s voice model can make a pretty good conversation buddy.
If you’re learning the language to speak with people, I can’t stress enough how far a bit of conversation practice can take you. Give it a go if it sounds like it might help!
🌐Language learning
The Pareto Principle (or the 80/20 rule) states that roughly 80% of outcomes come from 20% of causes. When it comes to language learning, have you found yourself feeling like some activities just weren’t really moving the needle? If you want to upgrade your language learning, have a think, what are the 20% of activities that you’ve found work best for you?
You don’t really start learning a language until you’re okay with sounding dumb - Discussion on r/languagelearning. One person’s comment felt relatable:
Yeah, one of the most disappointing things I discovered traveling abroad is it takes a little bit of courage to speak your target language with native speakers. I studied French in school and, being American, never had a whole lot of opportunity to use the language irl. Then I traveled around Europe and had a number of opportunities but just stuck with English because I knew they spoke it and I was embarrassed my French wouldn't sound perfect.
Over on r/languagelearning, we had a Georgetown Linguistics Professor and Preply language learning expert do an AMA.
💻From around the web:
If you like languages and words and want to follow something fun, check out Useless Etymology on Instagram, TikTok. The owner of these channels also co-hosts Words Unravelled.
A recent one I liked was on the curious origin of “earthling”.
Mondecast is a bi-weekly newsletter about people: their lives, their languages, and their cultures
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