Tag: languages

Project Gutenberg Goodies : Free Reading for Language Learners

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I’ve been spending a lot of time lately in the Project Gutenberg annals – wearing my research, rather than my language learning hat. Victorian novelists like Eliot and Hardy are a goldmine of dialect writing, which is what sent me back to this quietly heroic archive of public-domain texts.

And in doing so, I was reminded of something easy to forget: Gutenberg isn’t just a treasure trove for English literature. It holds an enormous amount of French, German, Spanish and Italian writing too, amongst other languages – much of it far more modern, linguistically speaking, than people assume.

When people hear “public domain”, they often imagine pre-modern archives full of dusty stuff only classicists would be interested in. But in most European contexts, public domain simply means “published roughly before the 1920s”.

That’s not ancient. That’s late 19th or early 20th century – and linguistically, that’s reassuringly modern.

Project Gutenberg is therefore an extraordinary (and free) resource for language learners who want authentic reading material that still feels recognisably contemporary.

Why the Language Isn’t “Too Old”

In French, German, Spanish and Italian, the core grammar and spelling conventions were largely standardised by the late 19th century. That means:

  • The verb systems are settled into the patterns we see today.
  • The spelling is (almost entirely) modern.
  • The syntax may feel more formal, but not archaic.
  • Most high-frequency vocabulary is still current.

You may encounter slightly more formal phrasing or the occasional dated word. But you are not learning an obsolete language – just a form of it a couple of generations removed. Think of it as reading early 20th-century English: recognisable, rich, and still practically useful as a linguistic template.

In fact, reading slightly older prose often strengthens your command of formal written style — which is still relevant in academic, journalistic and literary contexts.

So where to start, in an archive of thousands of resources? Here are a few highly readable gems, some of which you’ll almost certainly recognise as cultural touchstones. Download them to your reader of choice – I use the free send to Kindle service myself to get Gutenberg’s epub files onto my device. I’m also increasingly falling for the open source Calibre reader – not only free, but also not tied to any corporate behemoth.

🇫🇷 French

French orthography has been extremely stable for some centuries (as with English). A learner reading Verne or Leblanc is reading something visibly very close to modern written French.

🇩🇪 German

Kafka in particular feels strikingly modern. German spelling reforms have occurred since, but older orthography is easily recognisable (and Gutenberg editions are often standardised anyway).

🇪🇸 Spanish

Modern Spanish spelling was largely standardised in the 18th and 19th centuries. Early 20th-century prose feels very close to today’s standard language.

🇮🇹 Italian

Modern Italian largely crystallised in the 19th century. Many works from this period are linguistically very close to contemporary written Italian.

And more languages are available! I found Hamsun’s Norwegian classic Sult (Hunger) on there, for example.

Choosing the Right Level

The above selection cover a good range of books that should be accessible to lower intermediate learners upwards. But Project Gutenberg isn’t only for experienced readers. You can search for texts strategically:

  • Upper beginner: short stories, fairy tales, episodic narratives.
  • Intermediate: novellas, adventure fiction, children’s literature.
  • Advanced: literary realism, philosophical novels, modernist prose.

How you approach these works also makes a difference. Start with shorter chapters. Choose familiar stories. Use your Kindle’s dictionary function. Treat reading as graded exposure, not a heroic test of endurance. Little and often is often the best way to develop a foreign language reading habit.

Why Project Gutenberg Matters

There’s something quite powerful – not to mention digitally sovereign – about building fluency through public-domain literature. It costs nothing. It democratises cultural history. And it reminds us that “free” doesn’t have to mean “low quality”. In an era of subscriptions, paywalls and microtransactions, that feels quietly radical.

In fact, public domain literature doesn’t even have to mean fiction. There are plenty of non-fiction titles there, many on language itself. There’s a 19th-century Gaelic grammar, for instance, that teaches rules that are still relevant today. And if we suspend our “nearly contemporary” rule for a moment, there are historical treasures like this 16th-century French language primer, written for the English royal court. It’s surprisingly familiar to anyone who’s used traditional language learning textbooks.

Project Gutenberg isn’t a dusty archive. For language learners, it’s a modern treasure chest – hiding in plain sight.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenksyy meets with NATO head Mark Rutte. © Press Service Of The President Of Ukraine / YPV.2026 (https://president.gov.ua/)

Adult language learning under pressure: what Zelenskyy’s English shows us

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Volodymyr Zelenskyy didn’t “learn English” via the cosy Duolingo and Netflix binge method. He’s had to sharpen it under extreme pressure – and the result is a very public reminder that adults can improve fast when the stakes and need for just-in-time practice are real.

It’s something that struck me this week as Zelenskyy addressed leaders at the Munich Security Conference. He’s a transformed figure on the international stage; back in early 2022, Zelenskyy still relied heavily on interpreters in international settings. That’s completely normal at such diplomatic levels, where precision matters and every word has consequences.

But something else was happening back then, too: he began using what you might call strategic English. He’d land short, high-impact English lines at exactly the moment they mattered most. This was picked up by Reuters, for example, where it was noted in the context of his address to the U.S. Congress. Speaking mostly through an interpreter, he closed with a direct, emotive appeal to President Biden in English.

As the years have gone on, reporting has increasingly described him switching into English in major media moments, even if much of the deeper exchange remains interpreted. One widely reported example is his use of English to directly invite Trump to visit Ukraine in the context of a 60 Minutes interview.

Now, is Zelenskyy fluent? Not in the polyglot dream, Instagram-ready sense of the word, perhaps. He lacks the slick, near-native turns of phrase Ursula von der Leyen boasts, perhaps. Some commentary even describes his English as just “mediocre”. But they also note that Zelenskyy and his team frequently switch to English in negotiations to save time. In other words: he doesn’t need perfection. He needs function.

And that’s a real lesson for adult language learners struggling with perfectionism.

What does research actually say about adults learning languages?

Yes, age is a factor in language learning. But not wholly negative, and certainly not in the melodramatic window slams shut at 12 way. Large-scale work suggests that while younger starters have an advantage for reaching native-like outcomes, the decline in underlying learning ability is gradual rather than catastrophic (see Hartshorne, Tenenbaum & Pinker, 2018). More recent reviews emphasise that adults can make substantial gains in grammar and vocabulary even if accent and ultimate nativeness are less predictable (e.g. Li, 2024).

Adults also have cognitive advantages: they’re better at using explicit knowledge and linking to previous learning, spotting patterns, and learning strategically. Research on older adults suggests aptitude and metalinguistic awareness meaningfully support later-life L2 learning (see Roehr-Brackin, 2023 and Roehr-Brackin & Pavleković, 2025). In other words, if you’re an adult who likes rules and structure, that’s not a flaw. It’s a tool.

And language learning remains biological learning. Reviews of bilingualism and ageing report measurable cognitive and neural changes associated with sustained second-language study (see Ware et al., 2021), with newer intervention studies showing behavioural and neural shifts even in later adulthood (e.g. Pliatsikas et al., 2024).

What adult learners can take from Zelenskyy

1) High-stakes practice beats “the window is closed” defeatism.
Practise what you actually need, repeatedly. Purposeful, goal-directed work consistently predicts improvement better than vague “exposure”.

2) Chunks are rocket fuel.
Learn moves, not just words: “Let me be clear…”, “What we need now is…”, “I want to address…”. Zelenskyy’s short, pointed and very effective English lines are essentially high-pressure chunking.

3) You can be ‘good enough’ and still be compelling.
Accent and minor grammar wobble don’t prevent communication. The goal isn’t to pass as native. It’s to do what you want to do in the language.

4) Improvement is visible before ‘fluency’ is.
Comfort under pressure, faster retrieval, fewer resets : that’s progress. Adults can absolutely achieve that trajectory.

The hopeful punchline

If you’ve ever thought, I’m too old; I’ve missed the magic window, remember: the window isn’t closed. It’s just a different window. One labelled purpose, repetition, and tactical bravery.

This week, try a ‘good enough’ week. Aim for clarity, not correctness. If you get your meaning across, you win. Leave perfection to the text books!

Rethinking comprehensible input : Is i+1 still enough?

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If you’ve ever been told that the key to language learning is exposure to material that’s just a bit harder than what you already know, you’ve met i+1.

It’s an idea that has a lot of currency in polyglot and language pedagogy circles; it’s a key concept in Stephen Krashen’s Comprehensible Input theory, and it has informed all manner of language courses. Quite simply, i+1 encapsulates the idea of microprogression:

i = your current level
+1 = a small, manageable stretch

It’s a simple idea. Read texts you mostly understand. Listen to language that’s familiar on the whole, but challenges you to understand new material from context. Do this often enough, and acquisition of rules and vocabulary will happen naturally, without heavy grammar instruction or constant correction.

It’s such an elegant, easily applied idea, and it’s shaped language teaching for decades. But a new paper has started asking whether input on its own is really enough.

A newer view: the brain doesn’t just absorb language

A recent article, Beyond comprehensible input: a neuro-ecological critique of Krashen’s hypothesis, doesn’t reject comprehensible input outright. Instead, it argues that it’s based on a too-passive view of learning. It’s something that’s dogged pragmatic language learners all along – does all that material really just work its way in via osmosis, and settle into neat patterns in our brains?

Drawing on neuroscience and embodied cognition, the paper’s authors suggest that the brain doesn’t, in fact, learn language by quietly soaking it up. It learns through interaction, action, and feedback.

In other words, understanding language matters. But doing things with it matters just as much, if not more.

From “input” to opportunities to act

A key concept in the paper is affordances: the opportunities an environment gives you to use language competencies (like listening, reading, writing).

  • A podcast affords listening.
  • A conversation affords responding, repairing, negotiating meaning.
  • A task affords choice, intention, and consequence.

The argument is that input without action is weak. Learners may understand plenty, but without chances to respond or adapt, progress can stall.

This also explains a familiar polyglot experience: massive input can lead to excellent comprehension, yet hesitant or fragile speaking. If you’re a shy polyglot (not an oxymoron, I can assure you!), then you’ll know this practice gap – you can have great passive understanding, but lack practical confidence.

So what changes in practice?

Not as much as you might fear.

Comprehensible input still matters — but it works best when it’s embedded in interaction:

  • reading and then reacting
  • listening and then responding
  • input that leads somewhere, rather than stopping at understanding

For teachers, this means designing tasks with feedback loops. For self-directed learners, it means pairing input with use: shadowing, retelling, chatting, or writing back.

A small shift with big implications

Krashen made a huge contribution to language pedagogy in helping move language learning away from drills and fear of mistakes. This newer perspective builds on that legacy, but nudges us from receiving language towards acting with language.

In other words, i+1 is still central to progression in language learning. It just turns out that +action is its vital partner — something we should all be mindful of, whether designing courses or working through our own language-learning projects.

Content Sequencing in Language Learning : Does It Make a Difference?

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Most of us spend a lot of time thinking about what to learn in a language. Far fewer of us think seriously about the order in which we learn it. But some research suggests that content sequencing in language learning – the structure and progression of input – may play a much bigger role in successful learning than we usually assume.

One particularly fascinating study by Romain, Milin and Divjak (Language Learning, 2024/2025) explored specifically whether the order in which learners encounter grammatical patterns affects how well those patterns are learned. Interesting stuff for someone like me, who regularly dips in and out of grammars with no particular plan. Perhaps I should think again: their answer was a fairly resounding yes, order matters.

Content Sequencing in Language Learning

Content sequencing quite simply refers to how material is organised and introduced over time. There are a few considerations to make here, as both a self-paced learner and a course designer. Do we meet the most regular, high-frequency patterns first? Or should we focus on a mixture of typical and exceptional (irregular) cases from the outset? Should learning pathways build gradually on stable foundations, or can we effectively jump between topics based on our engagement and level of interest without adverse effects?

Well, the study systematised these questions within the frame of EFL teaching, and came up with some pretty clear answers. Learners who were first exposed to clear, reliable and prototypical examples of a structure before encountering messier edge cases developed stronger, more flexible understanding than learners who saw everything mixed together from the start.

In plain terms: learners seem to benefit from building stable generalisations first, before being asked to handle complexity and exceptions. For us language learners on the ground, that means learning and internalising regular paradigms before worrying too much about irregularities.

What’s particularly interesting is that this challenges the popular assumption that more varied input earlier is always better. Instead, it suggests that thoughtful content sequencing in language not only helps us structure our learning more effectively, but also results in deeper, more solid foundations over time.

Why this matters

For individual learners, this is quietly reassuring. If you sometimes feel more comfortable with core patterns than with exceptions, that isn’t failure. It’s our natural mode of learning.

It also suggests that revisiting foundational structures repeatedly, across different contexts, isn’t wasted time. It’s part of how robust knowledge is built. Cover the core well, and you’re setting yourself up for long-term progress.

For anyone building language learning apps, courses or platforms, it’s equally insightful. Many tools prioritise variety, novelty and engagement, which are important, of course. But how many courses truly focus on recycling foundational structures at length, without succumbing to the temptation to list exceptions early on?

A quiet design principle worth taking seriously

None of this means learning must be rigid, linear or joyless. It doesn’t mean that we should ignore irregularity, either. But it does suggest that step-by-step, paradigmatic sequencing isn’t boring, or missing the detail; it’s cognitive kindness. It helps learners build confidence, coherence and flexibility over time.

Perhaps we should spend less time asking how much content we can squeeze into a curriculum or an app, and more time asking whether the order of that content actually supports how learning unfolds.

Because in language learning, progress isn’t just about exposure. It’s about architecture.

The CEFR scale - a ladder to fluency in language learning

CEFR and Interactive Language Learning: Bringing the Threads Together

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The Council of Europe’s CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference) scale is something we’re almost instinctively aware of as language learners. A1/2, B1/2 and C1/2 are the shorthand we regularly use for fluency. A recent paper by Gökhan Haldun Demirdöven in Frontiers in Education takes a long-overdue fresh look at the framework in light of new immersive, technology-mediated language learning. How does our common language ladder mesh with recent developments?

A lot of recent work on language learning tech focuses on platforms such as XR, AI-driven environments and conversational agents almost as a pedagogical end in themselves. Instead, this paper asks a more structured question: how might these technologies meaningfully align with what the CEFR already – with well-established practical application – conceptualises as language ability?

In other words, can we design immersive digital environments to support the kinds of communicative action, mediation, and interaction that CEFR descriptors actually describe?

CEFR : More Than Just Assessment

The author takes the 2020 revisions to the CEFR as a starting point, identifying features of the updated framework – particularly its emphasis on mediation, multiple competences, and real-world communicative tasks – and considers how these might map onto immersive learning contexts. Examples include simulated environments for task-based interaction, AI-supported conversational agents, and speech-recognition systems that are sensitive to sociolinguistic variation rather than enforcing a single normative model.

One enlightening conclusion is that the CEFR is not simply an assessment tool; it is also a design framework. New language learning technologies are useful as long as they support CEFR-aligned communicative action, rather than as standalone innovations. This is a helpful course correction in a space where language-learning technologies can sometimes prioritise novelty over pedagogical coherence. For me, as a language software developer, it’s certainly something that strikes home – language professionals should avoid developing new language tech in a vacuum, and instead build on previous work with a proven track record.

For teachers, curriculum designers, and language-learning app developers, it’s a really timely reminder that innovation in language learning does not have to sit outside existing standards. Frameworks like the CEFR can play an active role in shaping how new technologies are pedagogically grounded.

Christmas 2025

Christmas Gifts for Language Lovers : 2025 Edition!

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It’s that time of year again: the seasonal round-up of gifts for the language-obsessed. Whether you’re shopping for a budding bilingual, a seasoned polyglot, or the friend making language learning resolutions at last – here’s this year’s curated list of things to delight and support.

As you’d expect, AI is everywhere in the ‘edu-gift’ shopping lists lately. Which is why I’ll start with some old-school resources – no gimmicks, no experimental tech, just solid trad resources you can hold in your hands. That’s not to say there aren’t some techie gifts worth a look, so we’ll round off with one fun wee gadget!

📚 Journals & Notebooks

Sometimes the simplest tools are the best — especially for vocab. There’s something refreshing (and frankly more memorable) about writing things down compared to tapping buttons in an app. And with ‘functional stationery’ as strong as ever, there are a few lovely language-specific picks:

FLUENTISH: Language Learning Planner & Journal

Fluentish is a neat, structured journal for vocabulary, grammar notes, weekly goals and reflections. It’s light-touch enough not to overwhelm, but organised enough to help learners spot progress. Great for anyone juggling multiple languages or trying to build a routine.

Goldlist-Friendly Vocabulary Notebooks (various languages)

If you’ve ever flirted with the Goldlist Method — that gentle, handwriting-based approach to deep vocabulary learning — then a good layout makes all the difference. There are plenty of notebooks set up with the familiar 3-column pattern the technique requires.  If it’s for a gift, you can get some wonderfully themed ones like this Korean ‘build your own dictionary’ notepad.

Great stocking fillers, particularly lovely for learners who like to keep their notebooks tidy and colour-coded.

🎲 Card & Board Games

Language learning shouldn’t always be earnest. A few games – many of them handily portable – genuinely pull their pedagogical weight while being light-heartedly frivolous:

TOP TRUMPS: LOL SURPRISE (FRENCH EDITION)

It’s Top Trumps, but in French and with cute animé style characters — which somehow makes it both sillier and more useful. Great for kids or nostalgic adults, and brilliant for casual vocab exposure without even trying.

TOP TRUMPS: NARUTO (GERMAN EDITION)

Now this one is actual animé – but in German. The text on each card adds a surprising amount of reading practice (and speaking, if you insist on your fellow players sticking to the target language). You learn without noticing — the best kind.

KLOO SPANISH BOARD/CARD GAME

OK, this one is a bit less portable. But KLOO games are designed explicitly for language learners as resources to learn from. You build Spanish sentences as you play, picking up grammar patterns and vocabulary naturally. Ideal for families, classrooms or anyone who’d rather learn Spanish through play than through verb tables. (Personally I like both ways.)

🤖 One Fun Gadget

The gadget market is heaving with “AI translators”, many of which are… optimistic in their promises. After wading through the noise, there’s one that’s consistently reliable and genuinely useful for language learners and travellers alike:

POCKETALK S2 GLOBAL TRANSLATOR DEVICE

Supports a huge range of languages, handles two-way voice translation, and even does camera/text translation. Fabulous for travel, reading menus abroad, and giving you that extra bit of confidence in multilingual situations. It won’t quite teach you a language (wouldn’t that be lovely), but for linguistically-minded gadget fiends it’s a fun distraction.

I will add that with consumer electronics like this, you do have to do a bit of homework – there are a lot of cheap, plasticky versions about – so always browse, check the reviews and compare before buying.

Final Christmas Thoughts

This year’s list is a fun blend of handwritten learning and functional stationery, games that trick you into practising, and a single smart gadget that (almost) earns its keep. Whether you’re buying for a learner or quietly treating yourself, these picks all support real, meaningful progress — the kind that lasts longer than Boxing Day.

Wishing all Polyglossic visitors a wonderful language-learning Christmas!

Diffuse squares

SingaKids: A Glimpse of Where Multimodal AI Tutoring May Be Headed

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A recent pre-print on SingaKids, a multilingual multimodal tutoring system for young learners, offers an interesting look at how AI-supported language learning is evolving. You can read the paper here: SingaKids: A Multilingual Multimodal Dialogic Tutor for Language Learning.

Designed for early primary classrooms, SingaKids is an AI-based system that uses picture-description tasks as the basis for spoken interaction. It combines dense image captioning, multilingual speech recognition, a dialogue model tuned with pedagogical scaffolding, and child-friendly text-to-speech. The system works in English, Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil, with extra attention paid to the lower-resource languages to improve recognition and generation quality.

Flexible Scaffolding

Something that stood out to me in particular was the system’s focus on scaffolding rather than straightforward correction. That approach is flexible; depending on a child’s response, the system shifts between prompts, hints, explanations, and more structured guidance. Higher-performing learners are pushed towards fuller reasoning; less confident learners get clearer cues and more supportive turns. It’s a step away from the rigid “question–answer–score” pattern and closer to the texture of real classroom dialogue.

Although the work is aimed at children, several ideas have wider implications for the rest of us. Picture-guided dialogue isn’t new in ‘grown-up’ resources – think Rosetta Stone, for instance. But it could easily support adult learners practising free production in AI tools, too. Improved multilingual ASR – especially for hesitant, accented, or code-switched speech – would benefit almost every speaking-practice tool. And the flexible scaffolding approach hints at future e-tutors that adapt to the learner’s behaviour dynamically, rather than funnelling everyone down the same path.

The project sits firmly in the research space, but it points towards what the next generation of tools may look like: multimodal, context-aware systems that don’t just respond to learners but actively guide, prompt, and adjust. For anyone keeping an eye on developments in educational AI, it’s a nice indication of the direction of travel (and I’m probably a wee bit envious of those kids getting a chance to try it first!).

Macmillan’s “Mastering” Series: Language Learning Stalwarts of the 80s and 90s

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You might remember that I was reminiscing about the forgotten Made Simple series the other week. It led me to recall another language learning series of old, and one I often mix up with Made Simple, I must admit. It’s Macmillan’s Mastering … series, another once much more familiar name in the self-paced and further ed market.

It’s not surprising that they sometimes merge into Made Simple in my language book memory. The book format itself was similar – a somewhat taller paperback, with that thick, off-white paper that feels really satisfying to turn (and crease, for fellow page corner turner-downers like me). Even the covers features that black, yellow and red of their Made Simple cousins. Like those books, these feel like grown-up courses, and, were likewise staples at night classes in the 80s and 90s.

The Mastering library overlapped with Made Simple in topics, but with a couple of important differences. For one thing, the series contained an intermediate stage for the mainstream languages; Mastering German 2, for example, is a very decent second-tier course that picks up where the first leaves off.

Impression of Mastering French I (Macmillan)

Mastering … take a slightly broader path with its titles, too. Mastering Arabic, for example, is one of the few really accessible, off-the-shelf courses in the language from the time. Perhaps that’s the reason it’s one of the titles that’s still very much with us; now acquired by Bloomsbury, Mastering Arabic continues as a respected and well-used course book today.

That’s not to say the old ones aren’t worth a look, too. And you can often pick them up on eBay for just a couple of pounds – you know we like a bargain at Polyglossic!

Perplexity Tasks for Language Learners

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AI techniques to support language learning are pretty well-known now. From structured conversation partners to resource creators, LLM platforms have been embraced by the polyglot community.

Like many of us, I dip in and out of them almost unthinkingly now. Often, I’ll snap in a page from a chapter I’m working on with my Greek teacher, and it’ll help me prepare ahead of a lesson. Sometimes, I’ll get it to reel off a list of useful phrases on a topic I’m studying. LLMs can make great worksheet creators, too. In many ways, it’s simply a very interactive reference tool, giving (mostly) reliable answers but with a big nod to context.

I’d been pretty dogged in my choice of platform, sticking for the most part with ChatGPT Plus. Claude and Gemini were also in the mix, alongside some fun running local models. But for the most part, I thought my tool choices were pretty settled.

But then I gave Perplexity a whirl.

Perplexity – Task Master

Perplexity isn’t an LLM in the sense that ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude are. It uses LLM technology. But it’s actually more of an intelligent, context-sensitive search tool, that uses natural language APIs to turbo-boost its web-hunting activities.

I’d clearly not found that prospect very exciting, as I’d not gone near it until now. But thanks to a bundled free upgrade, I got to try the premium tier of late. And one particular feature stands out as potentially transformative for my learning habits: Perplexity Tasks.

Tasks are scheduled searches you set up with natural language instructions. And those instructions can be as rich as your usual LLM prompts in terms of requested formatting and such like, so in essence, you can build regular bulletins with up-to-date information in any language you like. Take one of mine, that runs daily:

Search the global news for the biggest world news story of the day. Summarise it in French, German, Modern Greek, Polish, Scottish Gaelic and Swahili at a level appropriate for an intermediate learner, ensuring that the translation is of the highest, native speaker standard quality, idiomatic and natural-sounding. Summaries should be 3-4 sentences long. Highlight key words in bold.

Accompany each summary text with a glossary / vocabulary list detailing all the key / difficult words from it in dictionary format (listing word class, irregular parts if applicable etc.). Hyperlink glossary items to Wiktionary entries where available with further information on them (use the English version en.wiktionary.com).

Lay it all out neatly to make it easy on the eye. Use plenty of emojis for impact too. Make this a fabulous resource for polyglot language learning! 🌍

Now, every morning, I get a wee news digest emailed straight to my inbox in multiple languages. It’s learner-friendly, includes vocab support, and gives me something to talk about in my language meets and lessons. I’ve done the same for academic paper searches in linguistics, and stories on dialect appearing in news outlets.

It feels like a proper game changer!

Tasking on Other Platforms

Now, you don’t need Perplexity to do this – it’s just one of the most user-friendly ways I’ve found to do it. If you have ChatGPT,  check out Scheduled Tasks. In Gemini, Scheduled Actions will do the trick for Pro members. Copilot is in on the game too. Others will no doubt follow suit shortly – clearly, task scheduling is becoming one of those features AI platforms are expected to have.

What I like about Perplexity, though, is that its whole raison d’être is the search – it feels particularly suited to web-based tasks like news digests. It’s also quite nice to keep the separation between my everyday LLM ramblings, and my more structured, scheduled items (use it for a few weeks and you’ll have clogged your timeline up with dozens of chats!).

If you’ve been looking for a way to make AI genuinely work for your learning rather than distract from it, try setting up a task or two – you might just find it becomes part of your morning ritual as well.

The Made Simple Series : Language Learning Blasts from the Past

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While helping my uncle clear out some old boxes lately, I came across a proper forgotten classic of language learning: the Made Simple series.

I knew it as soon as I spied the familiar black, red and yellow paperback – it was an early nineties edition of Spanish Made Simple, chunky, well-worn, and still with my teenage pencil notes in it. I’d passed it on to my globetrotting uncle ahead of a trip he made to South America, so it had done some serious miles.

Spanish Made Simple, Third Edition - cover impression

Made Simple was a series familiar to many who took evening classes back then. And with its slightly polytechnic-esque look and feel, it sat naturally alongside Teach Yourself, Colloquial, Hugo In Three Months and language course stalwarts, keeping up but not quite displacing them. They covered the usual mainstream languages – French, German and Spanish – but also featured other self-teach titles from Electronics to Philosophy. 

And they feel solid, with a no-fluff, down-to-brass-tacks grammar-vocab-reading model. There’s a real ‘adult ed’ feel to them, which is probably why I loved them as a language-obsessed teen. They just felt grown-up.

Made Simple… Made Disappear?

Despite the Spanish edition making it to 2.5 million copies in print, the series never held the primacy that rivals like Teach Yourself and Colloquial hung onto. Other series expanded into more languages, for example, and shifting formats – especially the rise of audio media – made keeping courses like these a real specialist undertaking. In fact, they did manage to cling on in a modern incarnation by Penguin Random House, with fresh, up-to-date jackets. But those original, ubiquitous Made Simple language titles drifted into obscurity, and you’ll only spot their tricolore jackets on the shelves of second-hand booksellers these days.

That said, being obscure and forgotten doesn’t mean being obsolete. You will know, by now, my take on old language learning gems! For those of us who cut our language learning teeth before apps and streaks, they’re a charming reminder that all you really need is a pencil, a bit of patience, and a good old-fashioned tome.

So with that, consider the original Made Simple series unearthed and celebrated once again in this post. If you’re hankering after a new angle on your language, those old Made Simple volumes are still well worth a look!