Cheery Friday Greetings from Learning How to Learn! Feb 5, 2016

Cheery Friday greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Are You a Medical School or Pre-Medical School Student—or Just Interested in Learning Hard Stuff?

Check out this excellent article “How We Studied for the Boards,” by Farokh Jamalyaria, MD. Farokh discusses a medicine-specific strategy that many of his physician colleagues and he have used over the years to learn dense, complicated information quickly and effectively, and to do well on board exams.

Class Central

Here’s Class Central’s latest article from their series of roundup articles about trends in MOOCs: “Less Experimentation, More Iteration: A Review of MOOC Stats and Trends in 2015.” The increasing interest is astonishing! We believe a particularly important trend are MOOCs which provide college credit. Class Central feels similarly—here’s an intriguing article about precisely that phenomenon: MOOCWatch Jan 2016: Credits and Credentials. This latter article was written by Anuar Andres Lequerica, an expert on the intersection between games and learning—he manages a podcast/newsletter where he summarize the latest news, research, events, and job postings.

Exciting News—Learning How to Learn is now in complete Chinese and Spanish as well as Portuguese versions!

Yes, it’s true—now Learning How to Learn is available in complete translation (meaning that the webpages and quizzes are all translated, as well as captions on the videos), in three different languages: Chinese and Spanish as well as Portuguese. It is a tribute to Coursera’s heartfelt desire to help people learn effectively around the world that Learning How to Learn is now Coursera’s most-translated course. Do you have Chinese, Spanish, or Portuguese-speaking friends? You might ask them to spread the word!

Help with Translating Learning How to Learn

Speaking of translations, Coursera is working hard to try to streamline the process of helping with translations. If you’d like to help with translating Learning How to Learn into your favorite language, please sign up for the Coursera Global Translator Community (GTC). (Take a look at the great pdf that walks you through the sign up process.) Once you’re signed up with a Transifex account, just make sure you’re logged in to Transifex and you should then be able to find the translation project for Learning How to Learn here. If you have a problem, just email our own special Learning How to Learn contact at Coursera, at LHTL-translations@coursera.org.

A Language Learning Resolution

Haven’t made a New Year’s resolution? As Learning How to Learn Senior Mentor Linda Walker notes, it’s not too late. “Dr Ruth Arber and Dr Michiko Weinmann, Co-Directors of Deakin University’s Centre for Teaching and Learning Languages (CTaLL), argue that learning a new language should be top of your list”: Why learning a new language should be your New Year’s resolution. In Learning How to Learn, we always encourage doing something unexpected, and what better unexpected thing to do than a New Year’s resolution in February!

Our Top Recommendations for Language Learning Books

Since we’re on the topic of language learning, we’d like to give you our top three language-learning books. Here they are:

• Fluent in 3 Months: How Anyone at Any Age Can Learn to Speak Any Language from Anywhere in the World. This book is by Barb’s friend Benny Lewis–it’s an inspirational as well as pointed how to manual about how to pick up other languages. Benny originally thought he couldn’t learn other languages. But when he changed his approach, it worked wonders–he now speaks ten different languages!
• Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It by Gabriel Wyner is a great complementary volume to Fluent in 3 Months. Like Benny, Gabriel is self-taught in his foreign-language learning–he uses imagery to help remember faster and more fluently.
• Harmony of Babel: Profiles of Famous Polyglots of Europe by Kató Lomb. This is an older book, but it’s fun to read because of its inspirational stories and great insights from a variety of perspectives into language learning.

Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!

Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team