This is your brain on languages.

The image you see here is a visualization (which is obviously not comprehensive) of how a given piece of information in a language might get lodged into your brain. The piece of information could be anything: a vocabulary word, a grammar rule, pronunciation, a character, etc.

Every one of those lines emanating from the piece of information connects with one kind of exposure. The more exposures you get, the more connections your brain draws to that piece of information. The more repetitions of a given kind of exposure, the stronger that exposure becomes (imagine the lines getting thicker with each exposure). The stronger and more plentiful your exposures are, the more likely you are to remember the piece of information.

Exposure to a language can be largely divided into reading, listening, writing, and speaking. It doesn't matter if an exposure is via reading/listening (i.e., input from an external source) or writing/speaking (i.e, output to an external target). These traditional ideas of "output" and "input" are both input as far as your brain is concerned.

Output is input.

thatwhichmatter: Advanced English grammar via Twitter

If you're learning English (as some of us native speakers still are), thatwhichmatter on Twitter (via Lifehacker via Daring Fireball) is full of bite-sized nuggets of English wisdom. While aimed at native speakers, I'm guessing if native speakers are screwing things up, so are the non-native learners, so get your advanced-English cap on and dive in.

Links:
ThatWhichMatter Delivers Grammar Tips in Tweets [Lifehacker]
ThatWhichMatter, a Splendid Twitter Feed on Grammar and Usage [Daring Fireball]

Follow this blog on Twitter

Thanks to a couple of friendly tweets mentioning this blog on Twitter, I can finally cross off "set up Twitter account for Street-Smart Language Learning" from the to-do list.

You can follow this blog on Twitter at streetsmartlang, and the obligatory tweet feed has been added to the right column.