Winter in the north is long and harsh, but the Danes and the Swedes have their own ways of making it comfortable and even enjoyable – and we found out their secrets. In Denmark, people greet the winter season with a smile, and it’s all thanks to hygge. Hygge is a Danish concept that can be translated loosely as enjoying the atmosphere, pleasant company and the present moment. Hygge means not letting the darkness outside get you down, but instead…
Learning and memory go hand in hand because your brain processes the new things you’re learning together with the old information you already have. You also have two different areas of memory: short-term and long-term memory. Short-term memory handles the new information received by the brain. It can only hold on to things for approximately 10-25 seconds. It also has limited capacity: it’s only possible to keep 4-7 things in mind at the same time. In contrast, long-term memory is like a nearly…
Did you know that the key to fast and efficient learning is a good night’s sleep? Sleep studies have shown that the best way to remember the things you learned during the day is to sleep well after exercising. This is because the events of the day really do feature in your dreams. While you’re sleeping, your brain is working on the things that happened during the day, such as having practiced something. This activates and strengthens the new neural…
Eetu Laamanen, 26, started judo among other sports when he was a child. He decided to concentrate on judo when he started a sports high school. Judo seemed to be the most fitting sport to him, he had had some success in it, and compared with other sports, judo is multifaceted. “In judo I have needed all my skills. Practicing includes many things, not for example only strength or stamina, but a little bit of all aspects. It makes me…
Children pick up languages with a sponge-like ease, but for many adults at different stages of life learning a foreign language is an overwhelming, if not an impossible, task. Or so it seems. Today we would like to focus on the question in the title: What is the best age to learn a new language? And, consequently, is any age better than another for language acquisition? WordDive TeamA mighty mix of language learning professionals, engineers, designers, user interface developers, gamers…
The previous article laid out the complex nature of vocabulary acquisition: new words are not learned instantly, but through a multi-stage, incremental process which normally proceeds from receptive to productive vocabulary knowledge. The first stages of this process are essential: learning the correct spelling and pronunciation and the precise meaning(s) of a word builds a solid foundation for your language skills as a whole. But the next step can be defined as critical: if a learner is not able to…
