Canguro English

It’s an unfortunate fact that many people don’t know the truth about how language works outside of their grammar books, in the real world, but recently I spoke to someone who is trying to change that. Shana Poplack and her sociolinguistics laboratory at the University of Ottawa are known as the mythbusters, because they destroy damaging myths about language and language change. They don’t look at language in its ideal state: they look at how language is used every day by real people, and the discoveries they make are often controversial, and fly in the face of deeply-held beliefs, but their discoveries are always based in truth.

There are few people in the world who know as much about where words come from as Mark Forsyth. His first book, The Etymologicon, was a journey through the origins of many common words and their connections, and he has since written various other books about words, language, and writing. In this interview Mark tells fascinating and entertaining stories about where words come from, how to remember them, and how to use those words to be a better communicator.

It’s an unfortunate fact that most of linguistic theory is based on a few major European languages, especially English, which actually damages our understanding of how the thousands of languages in the world might work. But there is one man who has spent his career trying to correct the balance. Robert Van Valin is one of the developers of Role and Reference Grammar or RRG which aims to explain language by focusing on some of the most unfamiliar languages in the world. In this interview we talk about the fundamentals of RRG, and what unites and divides the world's languages.

In this podcast you will learn the connection between Pixar, red triangles, information, thought, and fluency. Enjoy!

In this podcast I talk about the positive and negative effects of the weight of expectation, and how living the in past or the future might be stopping you from getting fluency in English.

In this episode you'll learn why touching wood, throwing salt, and car accidents can help you to see the truth about learning a language.

In this episode you'll learn why culture connects London taxi drivers, donuts, smiling Japanese people, and Australian shop assistants.

In this episode you'll learn the hard lessons of my army father-in-law, who failed to learn a language after 14 years of 'immersion'.

In this episode you will learn about the differences and similarities between humans and animals, and why you shouldn't take everything you know about language learning for granted.

In this episode I talk about what mathematics really means, why Mathematicians asked schools to stop teaching calculus, and the parallels between maths and language. In this episode you might be surprised to learn that the secret to fluency is to slow down.