Free About 1 hr0 learners Rev. 2026-10-21 0

A four-year-old who says "I goed outside" has never heard anyone say goed. She invented it, by applying a rule nobody taught her, and in that small mistake lies one of the deepest puzzles about the human mind. Every person you will ever meet carries a grammar of astonishing intricacy in their head, whether they speak Tokyo Japanese, rural Alabama English or American Sign Language, and almost none of them could tell you what its rules are.

Here you will find out what those rules look like, from the puff of air hidden in the word pin to the reason "Can you pass the salt?" is not really a question. You will see how a judge in colonial Calcutta guessed that English and Sanskrit are cousins, why bees and monkeys communicate without quite having language, and how Hawaiian families brought their language back from the edge. By the end you should hear speech differently, and be slower to judge anyone, including yourself, by the way they talk.

Levels

  1. 1 1. What Language Is 5-question quiz
  2. 2 2. The Sounds of Language 5-question quiz
  3. 3 3. Words and Grammar 5-question quiz
  4. 4 4. Meaning and Use 5-question quiz
  5. 5 5. How Children Acquire Language 5-question quiz
  6. 6 6. Language Change and Families 5-question quiz
  7. 7 7. Dialects, Standards and Prejudice 5-question quiz
  8. 8 8. Writing, Loss and Revival 5-question quiz

CivilSimian.com created by AxiomaticPanic, CivilSimian, Kalokagathia