Language learning can be a matter of much concern for new parents, who often worry about what their baby is saying, how they’re saying it, and when. With previous research suggesting that frequent verbal engagement with babies can boost vocabulary and reading comprehension, this preoccupation is not without merit.

Understanding commonly used levels of language proficiency allows you to know how far you need to go in learning to achieve your dream of fluency.

To learn new things, we must sometimes fail. But what's the right amount of failure? New research led by the University of Arizona proposes a mathematical answer to that question. 

Check out our top of the best language learning apps in 2020 that will help you get the practice you need to get closer to language mastery.

I was a wayward kid who grew up on the literary side of life, treating math and science as if they were pustules from the plague. So it’s a little strange how I’ve ended up now—someone who dances daily with triple integrals, Fourier transforms, and that crown jewel of mathematics, Euler’s equation. It’s hard to believe I’ve flipped from a virtually congenital math-phobe to a professor of engineering. One day, one of my students asked me how I did it—how I changed my brain.

Three years later Daniel Kreitman still chokes up when he talks about what he saw, and how it changed him. Kreitman, an upholsterer by trade, had taken psilocybin, a hallucinogen derived from mushrooms, in a trial at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine for nicotine addiction. He was 52, and he’d smoked between one and two packs a day for nearly 40 years. After his first psilocybin session, his urge to smoke was gone.

Jozef Jason came to the Fuller Cut barbershop for one reason: the kid's mohawk. It's almost second-grade picture day, and he wants to look good. He hops up onto an antique swivel chair and asks his barber for the new 'do. "It's high on the top and short on the bottom, and lines that go in a diagonal line where the top is gonna be," explains the 7-year-old.

How to prevent the most salient feature from being the least informative

Video games are apparently better than their reputation. Neuropsychologists of the Ruhr-Universität Bochum let video gamers compete against non-gamers in a learning competition. During the test, the video gamers performed significantly better and showed an increased brain activity in the brain areas that are relevant for learning. Prof Dr Boris Suchan, Sabrina Schenk and Robert Lech report their findings in the journal Behavioural Brain Research.

Benefits from learning another language considerably improve your well-being and they're covered in an all-inclusive infographic, so dig in!

Today's students see themselves as digital natives, the first generation to grow up surrounded by technology like smartphones, tablets and e-readers. Teachers, parents and policymakers certainly acknowledge the growing influence of technology and have responded in kind. We've seen more investment in classroom technologies, with students now equipped with school-issued iPads and access to e-textbooks.

A brain device that can increase learning by up to 40 percent has been revealed by scientists funded by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA). While the device was originally tested on macaques, researchers said it could be a cheap and non-invasive way of “altering functional connectivity in humans” in the future. The device is a non-invasive cap that stimulates parts of the brain via electrical currents. It was developed by researchers at HRL Laboratories, California, McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and Soterix Medical in New York.

Americans are not good readers. Many blame the ubiquity of digital media. We’re too busy on Snapchat to read, or perhaps internet skimming has made us incapable of reading serious prose. But Americans’ trouble with reading predates digital technologies. The problem is not bad reading habits engendered by smartphones, but bad education habits engendered by a misunderstanding of how the mind reads.

The brains of adolescents react more responsively to receiving rewards. This can lead to risky behaviour, but, according to Leiden University research, it also has a positive function: it makes learning easier. Publication in Nature Communications.

Some great advice, completely out of context.

Your brain needs to forget in order to grow. By Ferris Jabr.

"Currently, there is striking evidence showing that both plastic changes in the auditory-related cortex (ARC), as well as altered neural network characteristics, lead to remarkable behavioral advantages of musicians..." Says Stefan Elmer - Lead author of the study, 'Theta Coherence Asymmetry in the Dorsal Stream of Musicians Facilitates Word Learning' published in Nature on 15th March 2018

Intelligence is one of those terms that causes quite the turmoil within society but also within ourselves. From a very young age, each person is raised to perceive intelligence as probably the most critical factor that will determine his or her well-being. The truth, however, is that the way intelligence is portrayed and eventually interpreted leads to a myriad of issues that every generation needs to face.

Structured music lessons significantly enhance children's cognitive abilities, including language-based reasoning, short-term memory, planning and inhibition, which lead to improved academic performance. Published in Frontiers in Neuroscience, the research is the first large-scale, longitudinal study to be adapted into the regular school curriculum. Visual arts lessons were also found to significantly improve children's visual and spatial memory.

Schools usually focus on teaching comprehension skills instead of general knowledge—even though education researchers know better.