Language Learning
The Novel as Teacher: How Long Books Become Your Best Language Tutor
Reading a novel in your target language is ambitious. Reading it the right way — with re-reading woven in at every scale — is transformative.
Latest
Language Learning
Seriously Though: Why Jokes Are Some of the Best Language Learning Material Around
Short story jokes are tiny, ruthlessly efficient packages of vocabulary, culture, and grammar. And they are surprisingly hard to forget.
Language Learning
How Many Times Should You Re-Read? (And What to Do Each Time)
Re-reading without a plan is just reading twice. Here is how to make every pass count — and how to know when you are done.
Language Learning
What to Re-Read: Choosing Materials That Actually Teach
Not all content rewards a second look equally. Here is how to find texts worth returning to — at every level.
Language Learning
Why Re-Reading Is a Must for Language Learners
What children and their bedtime books can teach us about acquiring a new language.
Language Learning
How to Fit Two Hours of Language Study into a Busy Day
Two hours of language study on a busy day rarely looks like two hours. It looks like twenty minutes here, ten minutes there, half an hour while walking. The trick isn't finding more time — it's asking better questions about the time you already have.
Builder Diary
Book Payoff: designing a smarter vocabulary triage system for Ember Reader
Not every saved word deserves the same future. I have been thinking about what a smarter handoff from reading to learning might look like — and what "Book Payoff" actually means.
Ember Reader
Why saving a word is not the same as deciding to learn it
When people read in another language, they save words, phrases, and half-understood moments all the time. But saving something is not the same as deciding to learn it. Between saving and study, there should be judgment.
Ideas
A Learning Serial for Vocabulary Growth
This idea has been with me for years. What if vocabulary were taught not mainly through lists, and not mainly through exercises, but through a serial? A story with recurring characters. Recurring situations. Recurring language. Something between a course and a novel, or maybe between a textbook and a TV
Ideas
Ideas → Experiments → Products
I’ve been thinking about a simple structure for my work and for this website: Ideas → Experiments → Products It describes how things actually grow. A thought starts out vague. Sometimes it becomes something testable. A few survive long enough to turn into tools. I want to make that path visible.
How Many Words Do You Actually Know?
You may have a rough sense of your level in a language. You can read some articles, follow some podcasts, hold some conversations. But if someone asked you a more concrete question — how many words do you actually know? — most people would struggle to answer. That question is harder than
The Lab is starting to do real work
I launched the Lab as a place for small language-learning tools and experiments. At first, it was mostly structure: the catalog, the filtering, the overall shell. Now it has its first real tool. There is a text difficulty checker on lab.vinidiktov.com. You paste in a text, and it