LLM tutored writing practice for secondary language acquisition

Language learning for the contemporary adult learner can be broken down roughly into four highly correlated, but distinct, skillsets. Passive understanding Active production The written word Reading Writing The spoken word Listening Speaking You may know from my FOSS software that I have been learning Finnish for the past 4 years or so. For the first few years I pretty much focused exclusively on reading comprehension, as I consider that to be the easiest quadrant to skill up in first....

June 1, 2025

LLMs make Perl great again

Perl 5 went through a long nadir of unpopularity due in large part to its deserved “Write Once, Read Never” reputation. So I was surprised to find out not only is it installed by default on Debian, it’s installed nearly everywhere by default. It’s even the non-shell scripting language of choice on OpenBSD! Perhaps the only thing more impressive than Perl’s utter ubiquity is its longevity. The latest major version of Perl was first released in 1994....

May 24, 2025

What I would recommend to teens in 2024 who want to get into development

September 8, 2024

The 10 sentences heuristic for foreign vocabulary acquisition

In order to learn a word, we need to come across it several times. It seems that the minimum amount of times we need to meet a word is somehwere around 7 or 8 meetings, but it's very hard to put a figure on it. -- Paul Nation, [2020 Victorial University of Wellington](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlJj8vpJxfE) He’s right, but that never stopped me. I say 10 sentences in a specific practice: When you come across a word you don’t know enough times for it to bother you,...

April 1, 2024