The most common roadblock when learning a foreign language is: you study a lot of vocabulary and grammar, but when you actually try to speak, you can only use a few familiar words. Recently, I came across a very practical method called "narrow learning."
The concept is simple: find a topic that you are genuinely interested in and curious about, and then repeatedly expose yourself to it through different materials and mediums. The key is not to constantly learn new content, but to have the same language appear repeatedly in different contexts. Once the content is fixed, your attention can gradually shift from "understanding the content" to "how to express this."
The original author gave an example of his own experience. He likes coffee, so when he saw a discussion about "don't drink coffee immediately after waking up," he used this topic to practice English: he listened to Andrew Huberman's podcast, asked ChatGPT to explain it in English, used ChatGPT's voice as a tutor for direct conversation, read articles online, and listened to podcasts in both English and Chinese from different perspectives.
He didn't learn much new information about coffee, but the linguistic gains were completely different. He originally only knew how to say "drink coffee later," but later, in different materials, he encountered phrases like "delay your morning coffee," "wait about 90–120 minutes," "There's solid evidence that…," and "consume caffeine on an empty stomach." He also learned words like "overly wired" (feeling overly excited after drinking coffee) and "lethargy" (feeling sluggish). Reading a single article, these phrases are just "seen"; but by listening, reading, and speaking about the same topic multiple times, they start to appear repeatedly in different contexts.
I think this passage is well-written: it's not about repeating words, but about repeating real-life language usage scenarios. You will start to notice what kind of content a word usually appears with, what situations it is used in, and how people actually say things.
This method is especially suitable for those who already have a basic foundation but are stuck in the "knowing but not being able to recall" phase. The article discusses English, but I think it can be applied to any language: first, choose a topic that you are currently very curious about, and then follow it through podcasts, videos, articles, and AI conversations. Finally, try to express it in your own words.
Source: 創勝文教 NTE
When I decided to go on an exchange, I made the classic mistake of starting by choosing the destination. The truth is that the starting point is your goal: do you want to learn a language, work abroad, or earn a degree? Each answer leads to a different type of program — language course, Work and Travel, Au Pair, Working Holiday, or volunteering — each with its own costs and timelines.
Once your goal is set, choosing a destination gets easier. The US, Canada, Australia, and Ireland attract most exchange students, but Portugal, Malta, Spain, and South Africa are much cheaper. It's worth comparing the cost of living: a shared room in Dublin easily tops €800 a month, while in Lisbon it runs around €500 to €700.
Then comes the paperwork and the budget. A passport valid for at least six months, a visa depending on the destination, international health insurance, and a letter of acceptance from the school. I built a spreadsheet with three sections: upfront investment before traveling, monthly costs abroad, and an emergency fund covering at least two months.
Doing it on your own is increasingly common, and most schools accept direct enrollment through their website. If you do use an agency, compare at least three quotes. The most important thing is to start early: the sooner, the better.
Source: Tudo Sobre Intercâmbio
There is interesting news for anyone who follows the fate of languages. The Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education (Kemendikdasmen) aims to make Bahasa Indonesia an international language in United Nations forums by 2045, the year tied to Indonesia Emas and the centenary of independence. The target was stated by Hafidz Muksin, Head of the Language Development and Fostering Agency, after the Festival Handai Indonesia 2026 appreciation event in Jakarta on August 21, 2026.
As a basis for optimism, he pointed to the BIPA program (Bahasa Indonesia for Foreign Speakers), now run in 62 countries. There is also a BIPA class for diplomats, held from September 15, 2025 to May 31, 2026, both in person and online, in two programs: 50 hours and 100 hours. Participants were ambassadors, diplomats and representatives of international organizations in Jakarta.
The numbers are fairly detailed: 181 people registered, from 67 friendly countries and international organizations. Of those, 63 finished the 50-hour program and 42 finished the 100-hour program. According to Hafidz, Bahasa Indonesia is already one of UNESCO's official languages, and classes like this are expected to strengthen language diplomacy.
I was glad to read this, because learning a language often starts with curiosity about a country's culture. 2045 is still far away and the target is ambitious, but the number of countries opening BIPA classes shows real interest.
For those of you learning Bahasa Indonesia here: which part is hardest for you, the affixes (imbuhan) or everyday vocabulary?
Source: ANTARA
Among the new books noted by the Académie française, one immediately made me want to write about it here: Les Mots qui fuient (The Words That Flee) by Barbara Cassin, published by Flammarion on September 30, 2026. When you spend your time learning and exchanging languages, the question of how words leave us hits close to home.
The starting point is simple: how do words slip away from us, is there a way to hold on to them, and what does aging do to language? To answer, the author, a member of the Académie, chose dialogue. She talks with the poet Michel Deguy, the neuroscientists Laurent Cohen, Raphaël Gaillard and Marc Verny, the psychoanalysts Françoise and Jean-Jacques Gorog, the filmmaker Nurith Aviv, the philosopher Alain Badiou, the anthropologist Vinciane Despret, and also with several artificial intelligences set up by Daphné Marnat.
The thread running through it comes down to one question: is forgetting the condition of memory? Through these exchanges the book looks at both personal aging and our own era.
One line quoted in the presentation stayed with me: "Forgetting begins with proper nouns." Anyone who has searched for a name on the tip of their tongue, in their mother tongue or in a foreign one, knows exactly what that means.
I haven't read it yet, so I won't say anything about how successful it is. But including AI among the interlocutors seems to me an interesting choice for a book about the memory of words. I'd be curious to read your own experiences of words that slip away, in any language.
Source: Académie française
On October 2, 2026, the Agency for Cultural Affairs of Japan published the results of the Reiwa 7 (FY2025) Survey on Japanese Language Opinions. Since many people who care about language look forward to this survey every year, I want to summarize the published overview.
The survey aims to understand how Japanese people think about and understand the Japanese language, to help shape language policy, and to stir public interest in the language. It targeted Japanese nationals aged 16 and over across the country and was carried out by mail in March 2026. The survey sample was 6,000 people, valid responses numbered 3,777, and the response rate was 63.0%.
The survey covers six topics: interest in the language; the habit of handwriting and attitudes toward vertical writing; attitudes toward standard Japanese and dialects; honorifics and speech style; the notation of loanwords; and the meanings of idioms and similar expressions.
The percentages for each answer are in the "overview of results" PDF attached to the publication page, so I won't go into the numbers here. Still, just seeing items such as handwriting, vertical writing, dialects and loanword notation side by side shows where today's Japanese is in flux.
For people learning Japanese, the fact that honorifics and the meanings of idioms are survey topics is a clue that even native speakers find these parts confusing. Are surveys like this conducted in your language?
Source: Agency for Cultural Affairs
A statement from the Instituto Cervantes in Chile caught my attention this week. Its director, Luis García Montero, opened the Second International Conference on Spanish as a Foreign Language (CoIELE), held from October 7 to 9, and made one clear point: artificial intelligence is already unavoidable in education, so the responsibility is to watch how it is built.
What made me think most was the risk he described. If the language of AI is programmed without human supervision or a diversity of viewpoints, the Spanish of machines could become impoverished and homogeneous, losing its accents. According to the Cervantes, this cannot be left only to engineers. It is also the job of Spanish teachers, who understand the ethical responsibility of using a language. He proposes creating resources, encouraging diverse corpora and strengthening pan-Hispanic cooperation.
Some figures put the issue in perspective. One in ten native Spanish speakers lives in a country where Spanish is neither official nor the majority language, and the potential speakers outside the Hispanic world exceed 120 million. The institute also expects that by 2050, 86% of Spanish speakers will live in cities, which, according to its analyses, could harm minority and indigenous languages.
After the conference, the Cervantes signed an agreement with the Universidad de Viña del Mar to offer language and culture courses in Chile every year. A course on culture, art and history in Viña del Mar and Valparaíso is planned for 2027.
For those of us who learn or teach languages here, I think this is a good reminder. Using an AI tool to practice is fine, but it is worth asking which varieties of the language we have taught that tool.
Source: Instituto Cervantes
While browsing the website of the Vinogradov Institute of the Russian Language of the Russian Academy of Sciences, I found a new episode of the programme "Let's Speak Russian!" (Говорим по-русски!) with a question that caught my attention: "Why does AI write poetry?" For anyone learning languages and curious about how a language behaves in the hands of a machine, the topic is fascinating.
The guest was Boris Orekhov, a PhD in philology and associate professor at the National Research University Higher School of Economics. He experiments digitally with poetry and wrote the book "Electronic Lyre" (Электронная лира).
The conversation covers three themes. First, why artificial intelligence writes poetry at all, and how it does it. Second, whether poetry can be compared to cryptography, and a poetic text to a chess game that can be played out. Third, who should be considered the author of a prompt: the writer, or the AI as co-author.
The second idea interests me most. Comparing a poem to a cipher or a chess game turns poetry into a system of rules within which one can search for moves, and that makes it clear why such a task suits language models. The third question, about authorship of the prompt, still looks open, and I would love to read how you would answer it.
The episode is available on the YouTube channels of IRYa RAS and on the project's VK channel. If you are studying Russian, programmes like this are a good way to listen to philologists talking about a fascinating subject in lively speech.
Source: Vinogradov Institute of the Russian Language, Russian Academy of Sciences
The Polish Language Council (Rada Języka Polskiego), attached to the Presidium of the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN), is celebrating thirty years since its founding. The jubilee took place on 29 September 2026 in the Senate of the Republic of Poland. The Council itself published a note about the event on 8 October, and I decided to summarise it here, because it is a good occasion to remember who looks after the Polish language.
The Senate co-organised the event, and Deputy Marshal Rafał Grupiński welcomed those gathered. Speeches were given by Prof. Aleksander Welfe, Vice-President of PAN, and Dr Karolina Zioło-Pużuk, Deputy Minister of Science and Higher Education. The Council's chair, Prof. Katarzyna Kłosińska, received a gold medal, and the members of the Presidium received silver medals of the Minister of Science and Higher Education, "Zasłużony dla Nauki Polskiej Sapientia et Veritas" (Merited for Polish Science).
In the conference part, Katarzyna Kłosińska gave a lecture on thirty years of the Council's work. The chair of the Silesian Language Council, Prof. Jolanta Tambor, and the chair of the Kashubian Language Council, Danuta Pioch, also spoke briefly. Their presence pleased me especially, because it shows that the conversation about language in Poland includes regional languages too.
The event closed with a debate, "What is caring for language?" (Czym jest troska o język?), moderated by Małgorzata Tułowiecka. Participants included, among others, Prof. Anna Dąbrowska, Prof. Ewa Kołodziejek, Prof. Jerzy Bralczyk and Bartłomiej Chaciński.
If you are learning Polish, or simply enjoy hearing linguists talk about correctness and language change, it is worth visiting the Council's website. It publishes, among other things, opinions, reports and information about the dictation contest. And how is it in your country: who decides what is correct?
Source: Polish Language Council (Rada Języka Polskiego)
A project announced by the Turkish Language Association (TDK) caught my attention: the Turkish Language Information System, or DİLBİS. The protocol signed between TDK and HAVELSAN was announced at a ceremony hosted by HAVELSAN on August 6, 2026, and the news came out the following day.
The ceremony was attended by Council of Higher Education (YÖK) President Prof. Dr. Derya Örs, TDK President Prof. Dr. Osman Mert, HAVELSAN General Manager Dr. Mehmet Akif Nacar, and administrators from both institutions. The goal of the project is to bring the deep heritage of the Turkish language together with modern information technology and to lay the foundation for domestic language technologies.
The article lists these points: a data management infrastructure will be built for TDK; the target is a Turkish language database containing written texts, spoken sources and visual materials, centered on Turkish as used in Türkiye, which Örs described as billions of labeled data points and words; AI technologies will be made available to TDK; and HAVELSAN's national AI platform MAIN will be integrated into this infrastructure.
According to Nacar, the project will strengthen the use of Turkish in the digital world and increase Türkiye's competitiveness in language technologies. The article gives no information on budget, duration or timeline, so I should say that we do not know those details yet.
What interests me most: large language models are mostly trained on English data, so a language institution that labels its own corpus and builds a database could also be valuable to people learning and researching Turkish. Is there a similar effort in your language?
Source: Türk Dil Kurumu
On 24 November 2026 it will be two hundred years since Carlo Collodi was born, and the Accademia della Crusca has presented a project that seems like a great occasion for anyone who loves the Italian language: "Le parole di Pinocchio" (The words of Pinocchio). The activities run from October 2026 to April 2027 and are aimed above all at young people, with the idea of reflecting on Collodi's contribution to forming a unified language and culture. The project is funded by the Ministry of Sport and Youth, with the support of Unicoop Firenze and the Associazione Amici dell’Accademia della Crusca.
It has three parts. The first is a programme in schools: twenty classes in the first two years of upper secondary school, one per region, with training lessons for teachers in October and, in November, an online workshop for 415 students analysing the most significant words and expressions in the novel. The class with the best work will receive a prize on 15 April 2027.
The second is a creative writing workshop for young people aged 18 to 30, on 10 December 2026 at the Teatro della Pergola in Florence, coordinated by Paolo di Paolo. Texts must be submitted by 28 February 2027, and the five best will be published on cruscascuola.it.
The third is the exhibition "Pinocchio all’Accademia della Crusca", at the Villa Medicea di Castello: from 1 October to 25 November 2026 and again from 2 February to 31 December 2027, by reservation. The pieces on display include the autograph papers of Ornella Castellani Pollidori for the 1983 critical edition, the 1884 first edition of the Grammatica di Giannettino, and twenty-two editions of Pinocchio in foreign languages.
I really like that last detail: seeing the same puppet translated into so many languages is a reminder of how far a book can travel.
Source: Accademia della Crusca
After this hot summer, I wanted to take a closer look at a word that keeps turning up in the news: "Hitzedom" (heat dome). The German Language Society (GfdS) published an article on it by Angélica Prediger in its Sprachdienst 4–5/2026 issue, and it explained quite a lot to me.
Until 2017 the word was hardly known in German; from 2018 on it appeared in the media more and more often. In newspaper corpora it is attested 147 times in total between 2018 and 2025. It is a direct translation of the English "heat dome", which has been documented since 1969. Other languages have their own images: Spanish says domo de calor or cúpula de calor, Italian says bolla di calore (literally "heat ball"), and Hungarian says hőkupola.
What I find interesting is that the German word has an older rival: Hitzeglocke ("heat bell"), attested since 1959. According to DWDS, both are synonyms. There are also variants such as Hitzedeckel ("heat lid") or Hitzekuppel.
Meteorologically, a heat dome forms under high pressure: the air sinks and acts like a lid, there are no updrafts or cloud formation, and rain is unlikely. This blocked pattern is called an omega block, after the shape of the Greek letter Ω. In cities, sealed surfaces and little shade strengthen the effect. Unlike a heat wave, a heat dome does not move.
Its counterpart is most likely the cold-air lake (Kaltluftsee), a pool of cold air that collects in a hollow in the terrain. The article also points out that cold-air corridors, such as green strips, rivers or wide tree-lined streets, can slow heat domes down.
I like how a single loanword here ties together language history, weather science and urban planning. What is this phenomenon called in your language?
Source: Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache (GfdS)
I've been practising Dutch with native speakers for a while, and one thing keeps surprising me: the understatement. You give someone a gift, they nod and say “Nou, dat is niet verkeerd.” Is that good? Bad? Did you ruin it?
According to a recent piece by Dutch Fluency, it isn't rudeness but a cultural code. Dutch people love modesty. Instead of “fantastic” they say “not bad”, “not unpleasant” or “it doesn't disappoint”. Hofstede's egalitarian picture fits here: consensus over boasting.
Handy phrases I'm now deliberately practising:
• “Dat is niet verkeerd.” = That's good.
• “Het valt me niet tegen.” = Pleasantly surprised.
• “Hij is niet op zijn achterhoofd gevallen.” = He's smart.
• “Het kan ermee door.” = Good enough.
The tip that stuck with me: watch tone and behaviour. If someone takes a second helping, the food was good — even if they said “het is te doen”. And as a learner you sound more natural right away if you say “niet slecht” instead of “amazing”.
So yes: understatement isn't a bug, it's a feature. Once you hear it as a compliment, the Netherlands feels a lot warmer.
Source: Dutch Fluency
