full transcript

From the Ted Talk by John McWhorter: 4 reasons to learn a new language

Unscramble the Blue Letters

And more to the point, we live in an era when it's never been easier to teach yourself another language. It used to be that you had to go to a classroom, and there would be some diligent teacher — some genius teehacr in there — but that person was only in there at certain times and you had to go then, and then was not most tmeis. You had to go to class. If you didn't have that, you had something claled a record. I cut my teeth on those. There was only so much data on a rcored, or a cassette, or even that antique object known as a CD. Other than that you had books that didn't work, that's just the way it was.

Open Cloze

And more to the point, we live in an era when it's never been easier to teach yourself another language. It used to be that you had to go to a classroom, and there would be some diligent teacher — some genius _______ in there — but that person was only in there at certain times and you had to go then, and then was not most _____. You had to go to class. If you didn't have that, you had something ______ a record. I cut my teeth on those. There was only so much data on a ______, or a cassette, or even that antique object known as a CD. Other than that you had books that didn't work, that's just the way it was.

Solution

  1. times
  2. called
  3. record
  4. teacher

Original Text

And more to the point, we live in an era when it's never been easier to teach yourself another language. It used to be that you had to go to a classroom, and there would be some diligent teacher — some genius teacher in there — but that person was only in there at certain times and you had to go then, and then was not most times. You had to go to class. If you didn't have that, you had something called a record. I cut my teeth on those. There was only so much data on a record, or a cassette, or even that antique object known as a CD. Other than that you had books that didn't work, that's just the way it was.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations

ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
speak english 4
language channels 2
english speaker 2
speaks english 2
english language 2
awful lot 2
highly recommend 2

Important Words

  1. antique
  2. books
  3. called
  4. cassette
  5. cd
  6. class
  7. classroom
  8. cut
  9. data
  10. diligent
  11. easier
  12. era
  13. genius
  14. language
  15. live
  16. object
  17. person
  18. point
  19. record
  20. teach
  21. teacher
  22. teeth
  23. times
  24. work