The Vako journal
Notes on learning a language from real video: what the evidence says, what we measure, and what we decided to build because of it.
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Comprehensible input, and the part nobody tells you about getting some
What comprehensible input actually means, why most beginners never find any, and a practical way to get it from video you would have watched anyway.
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Why you can read the sentence and still not catch a word of it
Native speakers are not mumbling. They are speaking at two to three times the rate of your textbook audio, and the fix is not more vocabulary.
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How many words you need to understand a language
A few hundred words carry most of ordinary speech, and the last few per cent take years. Here is what the coverage curve means for what you learn first.
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How long it really takes to learn a language, at fifteen minutes a day
The honest arithmetic behind every study plan: what the FSI hour estimates mean, why they are not your number, and what a daily habit actually buys.
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The problem with flashcards is not the flashcards
Spaced repetition works. Grading yourself does not. Here is why a card you reveal and rate measures confidence, and what to do about it instead.
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A1 to C2 explained by what you can actually watch
What the CEFR levels mean in practice, how to tell which one you are at without a test, and why a level tag on a video is usually somebody guessing.
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How to learn Japanese from YouTube Shorts without wasting your time
A practical method for using short-form Japanese video as real study: what to watch, what order to do it in, and the three traps that make it feel useless.
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Learning Spanish from short videos: a method that survives contact with reality
Spanish is the easiest major language for English speakers and still hard to listen to. Here is how to use short-form video to close that specific gap.
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Learning Korean from short videos, and the sound changes nobody warns you about
Hangul takes a weekend. The hard part is that Korean words are not pronounced the way they are spelled, and short video is the fastest way to fix that.
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Subtitles when learning a language: which ones, and when to turn them off
English subtitles, target-language subtitles, or none. What each one trains, what the evidence suggests, and a rule that survives real use.