Why do learners still make basic grammar mistakes even when they know the rules? Maybe the problem is not understanding, but automaticity. I am exploring a product idea called Atomic Grammar: English grammar broken into small trainable patterns.
Reading a novel in your target language is ambitious. Reading it the right way — with re-reading woven in at every scale — is transformative.
Short story jokes are tiny, ruthlessly efficient packages of vocabulary, culture, and grammar. And they are surprisingly hard to forget.
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.
Not all content rewards a second look equally. Here is how to find texts worth returning to — at every level.
What children and their bedtime books can teach us about acquiring a new language.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
Builder Diary
Not every unknown word deserves time in review. The question isn't whether a word is unfamiliar. It's whether knowing it is likely to help you again.
I’ve wanted to build a proper home for this work for a long time. Not a product site, not a blog, not another account on someone else’s platform. Just one place where I could bring together the different parts of my language-learning life — the languages, methods, tools, books,