language learning

Chris Lonsdale presents a TEDx talk on how adults can learn a language in about six months, centering on immersion, comprehensible input and a practical learning methodology.

A 15-minute clip of linguist Stephen Krashen discussing language acquisition, drawn from the 1980s. It presents his input hypothesis and the distinction between acquisition and learning.

A lecture from the 1980s by linguist Stephen Krashen on how people acquire language. He explains his comprehensible input hypothesis for second-language acquisition.

Bassist Victor Wooten argues that music should be learned the way children learn their first language: by immersion and play, without early correction or rigid academic instruction. He draws on how babies pick up speech from the people around them.

A George Carlin stand-up bit from Doin' It Again about soft language and euphemism, showing how softened words hide uncomfortable facts. It touches on topics like shell shock and aging.

A Polish linguist tests whether speakers of Bulgarian, Polish and Croatian can understand Interslavic, a constructed language built from Slavic languages. It shows how well they follow it without prior study.

A sketch from the Norwegian NRK show Uti Var Hage poking fun at the Danish language and how hard it is to understand.

Finnish comedian Ismo does a stand-up routine on Conan about the many meanings of the English word 'ass'. He riffs on the confusing quirks of English as a second language.

A kinetic typography animation set to Stephen Fry's spoken essay on language. Fry argues against grammar pedantry and for the way language evolves, including the verbing of nouns.

A clip from George Carlin's 1990 special 'Doin' It Again' in which he describes how American English has been sterilized with euphemisms, using examples such as shell shock becoming PTSD.

A Fry and Laurie sketch about language, full of absurd phrases and wordplay, which also plays on the distinction between langue and parole.

The first episode of Google's Machine Learning Recipes series. It introduces machine learning and builds a first supervised-learning classifier in about six lines of Python using scikit-learn.

Stephen Wolfram gives a 13-minute tour of the Wolfram Language, a symbolic, functional programming language with a built-in knowledgebase. He demos querying large datasets, interactivity and deployment.

Mark Rober and Jabril build an app that uses machine learning to decode baseball sign sequences. The video also explains neural networks in a simple, accessible way.

A 10-minute clip from a Jonathan Blow Twitch stream in which he argues that game engines do not really need separate scripting languages. He questions the value of embedded interpreters when the main language can do the job.

An animated ranking of the most popular programming languages from 1965 to 2019, built from popularity indexes, GitHub access data and historical surveys.

An RSA Animate in which Steven Pinker explains how the mind builds infinite meanings from finite language, and why people often speak indirectly. It covers ambiguity, politeness and mutual knowledge, including the emperor's new clothes example.

An episode of jan Misali's Conlang Critic series reviewing Toki Pona, a minimalist constructed language with about a hundred words. It is a short, humorous critique of the language's design.

Luis von Ahn, creator of CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA, presents Duolingo at TEDxCMU 2011. The idea is to have millions of people translate the web for free while learning a language, an example of human computation.

Tom Scott, with linguists Gretchen McCulloch and Molly Ruhl, examines whether the language you speak changes how you think. The short answer is mostly no, with caveats about the weak version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

Yuta asks whether native Japanese speakers can actually write kanji by hand, showing that many struggle to recall characters from memory.

A short cartoon explaining how language models like ChatGPT work, from autocomplete and conditional probabilities to neural networks, gradient descent and backpropagation. It shows how networks act as universal function approximators.

Leandro Facchinetti explains why he thinks Racket is a great language and why he stopped using it. He describes his backstory and experiences with the Racket community.

A George Carlin stand-up bit on euphemisms, tracing how language gets softened, such as shell shock becoming PTSD, until it loses its emotional force.

3Blue1Brown's first chapter on deep learning explains what neurons and layers are and the math underlying a basic neural network, using handwritten digit recognition with visual animations.

A George Carlin routine on euphemisms and political correctness, tracing how shell shock became PTSD. The uploader adds context about euphemism in political language.

Veritasium debunks the idea of learning styles, such as being a visual learner, with an interview with Daniel Willingham and a memory experiment. It argues that a multimodal approach helps everyone.

3Blue1Brown's third deep learning chapter gives a visual, intuitive account of backpropagation and what happens to a neural network as it learns. A follow-up video covers the underlying calculus.

A short smartphone-recorded clip from a 2014 event in Paris where DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis presents an AI learning to play old Atari games. The system learns from only the video signal and the score. Audio quality is poor.

A short clip of Simon Peyton Jones talking about the future of programming languages, saying Haskell is useless in the sense that pure programs cannot have effects, while mainstream languages are useful but unsafe. He describes languages converging, with ideas such as STM and LINQ moving between them.

Tom Scott, who never learned to ride a bike, gets lessons from Mike Boyd, a YouTuber known for learning skills quickly. The video follows an adult's attempt to learn cycling in a short time.

An excerpt from the documentary Mountain Talk on Appalachian English. Residents of Southern Appalachia talk about their dialect and give examples of its distinctive words.

Vox explains the Berlin and Kay research showing that languages around the world tend to invent color words in the same order. It walks through the hierarchy and the debate around it.

'Skwerl' is a short film by Brian and Karl made entirely in fake English, imitating how English sounds to people who don't speak it. It was made for Kino Sydney and shown on QI.

Tom Scott makes a short descriptivist argument that language keeps changing and that casual internet writing conventions, like lowercase typing and dropped full stops, are legitimate. It is part of his Language Files series, written with Gretchen McCulloch.

SethBling shows MarI/O, a program using neural networks and the NEAT genetic algorithm to learn to play Super Mario World. The description links the source code, the paper and background reading.

Destin of Smarter Every Day learns to ride a bicycle whose steering is reversed, taking about eight months, and compares it with how his young son learned much faster. It illustrates knowledge versus understanding and brain plasticity in adults versus children.

A 13-minute OSCON 2010 talk in which Rob Pike argues about what is wrong with mainstream languages like C++, Java and C#, and presents Go as a response. He discusses verbosity and what lightness means in a language.

Sal Khan of Khan Academy argues that schools push students forward with gaps in their foundations, and that students should instead master concepts at their own pace. He compares it to building a house on an unfinished foundation.

Matt Parker of Stand-up Maths demonstrates MENACE, Donald Michie's 1961 machine made of matchboxes that learns to play noughts and crosses through reinforcement. He builds and trains a physical version.