Cheery Friday Greetings from Learning How to Learn! Jul 8, 2016
10th January 2017
Cheery Friday greetings to our Learning How to Learners!
Learn to improve your writing in English
Writing coach Daphne Grey-Grant, who did a terrific bonus interview about the writing process for Learning How to Learners, has a great post on a useful app for improving your writing. Check it out!
MOOC of the Week
As you know, we’re always interested in people’s very favorite MOOCs. A MOOC that’s developed a well-deserved cult-following is Professor Al Filreis’s ModPo, which is a “fast-paced introduction to modern and contemporary U.S. poetry, with an emphasis on experimental verse, from Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman to the present.” This MOOC, put out by the University of Pennsylvania-Coursera, is meant for complete novices and as well as those who already love poetry. We’ve been fortunate enough to see Professor Filreis speak in person—he’s an exceptionally caring and passionate instructor who sets a gold standard for commitment to his MOOC students. ModPo will be starting again on September 10th.
Using a second language—like a workout for the brain
Here’s an intriguing article by Lizzie Wade in Wired on how switching between two languages can be tiring—but can give you a good mental workout. You might be interested to learn that simultaneous translators often work in pairs, so that they can trade off after about a half an hour. Translating can be exhausting mental work!
Books of the Week
We often recommend non-fiction in our “Cheery Friday” emails, but we’d like to take a step to the side and recommend one of Barb’s all time favorite works of fiction, Memoirs of a Geisha, by Arthur Golden. This amazing story of the inner life of a geisha has over 3,000 reviews on Amazon—the vast majority of which are five stars. If you want double the fix on Japan, check out James Clavell’s riveting Shogun. Clavell, incidentally, also wrote the screenplay for the classic movie of WWII heroics, The Great Escape.
That’s all for this week. Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!
Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team
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