Month: October 2026

How to learn more languages effectively?

Photo by Alex Knight on Unsplash

This post was written by a human with partial help from chatbots to summaries linguistic theories.

Today, when people can easily travel to different countries for pleasure, for work or immigration learning a new language may be an opportunity or a necessity. Hence a good question can be how is it possible to learn languages efficiently? Is there such a methodology? If you search the internet or use a chatbot for this you may find a number of various approaches to learning second, third etc. language. These approaches may vary in their effectiveness, but what’s more important, it turns out that there is a field in modern linguistics that is actually dedicated to studying how we learn languages in general and how we learn more than one language specifically.

This field is called Second Language Acquisition and second language is designated as L2 for short, while the native is L1. I’ve mentioned in the previous post that I’ve studied modern generative linguistics which was introduced by Noam Chomsky. And his Universal Grammar (UG) has a number of predictions about how children learn first and second languages. But it turns out that there are other linguistics theories that provide competing explanations of how the process of language acquisition works.

One of them is the Input Hypothesis by Steven Krashen that states that comprehensible input (CI) is important for a person studying second language. This theory is interesting and the importance of input is mentioned frequently by YouTubers who are focused on teaching Japanese. I think it’s the same with YouTubers teaching other languages as well. That’s why these YouTubers emphasize the importance of listening to a natural language.

But is comprehensible input the only important thing there is? It turns out that there is also the Output Hypothesis and others that cover various aspects of the language ‘processing’ when we study a new language.

When I recently wanted to get a better understanding of what is the latest state in the field of language acquisition Gemini produced the following summary adjusted in some places by me.

SLA textbooks

If you want a single text that contrasts Usage-Based/Emergentist theory against Universal Grammar, Skill Acquisition, and Interactionist models, these are the standard university benchmarks:

Theories in Second Language Acquisition: An Introduction (4th edition)

Why read it: This is widely considered the best comparative textbook. It devotes individual, identically structured chapters to each major theory—including dedicated chapters on Usage-Based Approaches, Emergentism/Complex Dynamic Systems, and Universal Grammar. It allows you to directly evaluate how each framework answers core acquisition questions.

Authors: Bill VanPatten, Gregory D. Keating, and Stefanie Wulff

[Me] I’ve searched and was able to find a free version of an earlier edition of this book online. It’s actually a very good book that looks at 10 theories of second language acquisition. I think even if you haven’t studied linguistics you can get a good grasp on what each theory is reading the book.

The Cambridge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition (2nd Edition, 2026)

  • Editors: Julia Herschensohn, Martha Young-Scholten, Ana Fernández Dobao, and Alex Ho-Cheong Leung (Cambridge University Press)
  • Why it’s relevant: Published in 2026, this updated 760-page handbook represents the state of the field. It includes dedicated, newly updated chapters on:
    • Chapter 28: “Emergentism, connectionism and complexity” (which directly details parallel processing, computational neural network models, and synaptic weighting in L2 acquisition).
    • “Usage-Based Approaches to Second Language Learning

[Me] I’ve read a sample of this book at Amazon and found the content very interesting. The main issue is this books is very expensive. If you can find it in a nearest university library it’s the best way to read it for free. But even what you can read in the sample is already useful. Check both latest and previous edition samples.

Usage-based Perspectives on Language and Language Acquisition (2026)

  • Editors: Karin Madlener-Charpentier, Marjolijn H. Verspoor, Mirjam Weder, and Annelies Häcki Buhofer (John Benjamins Publishing)
  • Why it’s relevant: Released in 2026, this Open Access volume is entirely dedicated to the usage-based (UB) paradigm. It includes a chapter by Nick Ellis (“What’s in a word? Cognitive-linguistic, corpus-linguistic, neuroscientific, AI, psycholinguistic, and usage-based perspectives”) that directly addresses the intersection of AI, computational learning, neuroscience, and usage-based acquisition.

[Me] I’ve skimmed through this book, but for me the first chapter about the ‘The wealth of the stimulus’ by Dan I. Slobin was most interesting.

The Handbook of the Neuroscience of Multilingualism

  • Editors: John W. Schwieter and Julia Festman
  • Why read it: If you want the biological grounding, this text covers the neuroanatomy, synaptic plasticity, memory systems (procedural vs. declarative), and probabilistic processing mechanics of the acquiring brain.

[Me] This books is super expensive, but it has a psycholinguistic and neuroscience approaches to studying SLA.

Accessible Entry Point for Self-Study

How Languages are Learned (5th edition)

  • Authors: Patsy M. Lightbown and Nina Spada
  • Why read it: If you want an engaging, highly readable overview without getting bogged down in dense academic jargon right away, this is the most popular undergraduate text. It breaks down the debate between nativist (Chomskyan) and cognitive/emergentist views in plain language.

[Me] I was also able to find an earlier edition of this book online for free, but I less liked it compared to the Theories in Second Language Acquisition: An Introduction above. Still it had some interesting content. Also, this books is more oriented towards practicing teachers.

Well, there are all these books above, but what should a person learning a second, third, etc. language do in practice? It turns out that despite ample theories about Second Language Acquisition there is still no good understanding of how to learn a new language effectively :). So, some authors and practitioners suggest to combine various parts of the theories that seem to work in practice.

Also, in time of abundance of LLMs that can translate from almost any language into any other who needs to learn a new language anyway?

Good things from Japan are quite a few

This post was written by a human.

In late August my family and I visited Japan for the first time. I cannot say that we actually planned to visit Japan, since not all of us are crazy about it, but speaking for myself I wanted to visit it one day. I think it all started back in my childhood when I first saw Chinese characters and was intrigued by them. Then martial arts and movies about them were quite a few back in 80’s-90’s. Then I myself practiced Kyokushinkay Karate Do and other martial arts. This partially influenced me to enroll into East Asian Studies and Linguistics at the university. In the end I switched to engineering, but I had a chance to take courses on India, China and Japan cultures and Japanese language which I studied for a year and a half.

This brings me to these days. A couple of years ago I wrote a post about OHTO GS01 pen that I bought at the time. I very much liked it, but after visiting Japan I met a new love there OHTO GS01-05 roller gel pen, which felt as a right fit right away. The pen below feels solid in hand. It writes smoothly even though it has a 0.5 mm needle tip. And it’s a pleasure to use.

It comes with a black refill if you plan to buy it outside Japan. But in Japan it’s possible to buy a blue refill as well. What’s important this pen is a good companion in studying Chinese characters, also known as kanji in Japanese.

We visited a number of cities in Japan. Those that most of tourist visit as well, Tokyo, Kyoto, Nara and Inari. Each one with its unique character, nature, mostly in Kyoto and Nara, and food.

Overall, I liked this trip very much for Japanese people, language and culture are quite distinct. Having studied Japanese a long time ago, helped a little bit in navigating in Japan on a daily basis. But what really helped was using Gen AI apps to get information about various places and Google Translate visual translation to buy things at stores.

What a person like me would buy in Japan except for a new pen? Well, Japanese textbooks and quite a few of them. Oh, well and a Japanese Hump Back rock-band CD. Yes, CDs can be still bought there, in particular this album: Ningen nanosa. If you’d like to listen to a full album it is here.

Speaking about textbooks and books from Japan. Following are the books that I bought there to study Japanese and which I recommend if you’d like to study Japanese as well. Pay attention, to be able to read bi-lingual books mentioned below there is a need to know hiragana and katakana beforehand.

  • The Complete Guide to Japanese Kanji by by Christopher Seely, Kenneth G. Henshall, Jiageng Fan.
    • This one I didn’t buy in Japan. But was able to find online.
    • This book is the best in my opinion for studying kanji. It provides an etymological information that I find invaluable.
  • Learning Japanese Kanji by Glen Nolan Grant.
    • This book is interesting since it has mnemonic stories that help to remember kanji, but it fails to mention what are determinatives or radicals. Which in my opinion is an essential knowledge for a person learning kanji and Chinese characters.
  • Basic Japanese by Samuel E. Martin and Erico Sato.
    • This book provides a solid foundation of Japanese grammar and is one of the best books on the subject.
    • It turned out that books by Erico Sato are very good and helpful. I bought one more that she wrote below.
  • Japanese Stories for Language Learners by Anne McNulty and Erico Sato.
    • I find such books the best in studying Japanese. Kanji are there in context. Stories have some repetition so you practice reading same thing a number of times. Also, you learn about Japanese culture and history.
  • Japanese Folktales for Language Learners by Eriko Sato and Anna Sato.
    • Same comment as above. This book contains quite a few stories and it is 320 pages long. What I like the most that there is English and Japanese texts there. And Japanese text has detailed translations and grammar notes.
  • Tuttle Concise Japanese Dictionary by Samuel E. Martin.
    • I bought this book after returning home. It turns out that prof. Erico Sato updated the Basic Japanese book that Samuel E. Martin wrote. And Samule E. Martin was a world expert on Japanese and Korean languages.

I cannot finish this post without mentioning Japanese YouTube channels, and there are lots of them, that provide a learner with an opportunity to listen to speaking Japanese. There are channels that have slowly spoken Japanese or regular tempo Japanese. People speaking on various topics or traveling around Japan and later narrating what they saw while being there. I personally, find them very helpful in studying Japanese and will recommend the ones below. All of them provide subtitles in Japanese which is very helpful since you can read what is said.

  • Japanese Talk with Himawari channel provides Japanese spoken in a simple and slower fashion, which easy to understand if you already know some basics. Himawari speaks about topics related to Japanese day to day life like Japanese trains, seasons, places, culture etc. When I listen to it I copy and paste kanji or sentences that I’d like to translate and use MS Copilot to translate and explain kanji.
  • 【Wasabi】 listening daily Japanese channel provides visual Japanese by narrating what the author sees while traveling around Japan.
  • NihongoDekita Podcast and NihongoDekita with Sayaka channel features regular speed spoken Japanese which is a little bit more challenging to listen to.