NLPhilia Blog

Back in June I wrote about how I met a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps. Since then I’ve collected a few articles in line with that one, and I wanted to share them with you.

• Profiles in Manliness: Viktor Frankl is a post at a quite compelling blog called The Art of Manliness. I won’t try to explain it here, but if you’re a guy or are interested in guys, spend some time reading it. The article about Frankl talks about how he is a positive role model for men.
• Priorities in black and white and Priorities in black and white, part 2 are written by Rick Brinkman, one of my favorite CareerTrack presenters, and are focused on his recent relationship with his father, who survived the concentration camps.
• Here’s an amazon.com link to Frankl’s masterpiece, Man’s Search for Meaning.

A January article from the Victoria News, published by the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, shares some research by Paul Sulzberger, PhD into the teaching of languages:

Dr Sulzberger has found that the best way to learn a language is through frequent exposure to its sound patterns – even if you haven’t a clue what it all means.

“However crazy it might sound, just listening to the language, even though you don’t understand it, is critical. A lot of language teachers may not accept that,” he says.

Now, people who are good at learning languages have long said that immersion makes a massive difference, but they’ve never talked about why that’s the case. Dr. Sulzberger asserts that aural exposure to the language actually changes the brain, re-wiring it to understand what is being said:

Dr Sulzberger’s research challenges existing language learning theory. His main hypothesis is that simply listening to a new language sets up the structures in the brain required to learn the words.

“Neural tissue required to learn and understand a new language will develop automatically from simple exposure to the language—which is how babies learn their first language,” Dr Sulzberger says.

It’s an interesting idea, and it makes a lot of sense to me. You can read the rest of the article here.

And in the spirit of this snippet from the article:

“Teachers should recognise the importance of extensive aural exposure to a language. One hour a day of studying French text in a classroom is not enough—but an extra hour listening to it on the iPod would make a huge difference,” Dr Sulzberger says.

…by way of Lifehacker, here is a master list of free online language lessons.