I just finished one of the best books I’ve read on the science of learning. Daniel Willingham is a Harvard educated cognitive scientist who writes books and articles about how to learn and teach better. The title of his book, Why Don’t Students Like School?, is a tad unfortunate, I think, because the book isn’t […]
I Was Wrong About China: A First Two Weeks in China (and Chinese)
A little less than two weeks ago, Vat and I arrived in Kunming, China with the goal of not speaking any English. Now that we’re in I wanted to write about life in China and first impressions on learning Chinese. I wanted to be as thorough as possible documenting the progress in learning Chinese, so […]
Don’t Think For Yourself
If you care about being correct more often, here’s a handy rule of thumb: Figure out which groups of people have spent their lives studying the issue you want an answer to. If there is a significant majority who believe conclusion X, then make conclusion X your default answer unless you have very strong evidence […]
Learning Spanish in 11 Weeks | 10-Min Documentary
After hundreds of hours of work filming, editing, translating and transcribing (mostly by Vat), the video documenting learning Spanish in 11-weeks is finally ready. We wanted to try to capture both the progress of learning a language, as well as the experience of living in Spain.