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An inspiring way to learn English? By watching TED Talks

An inspiring way to learn English? By watching TED Talks

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“The world has a new mania — a mania for learning English,” said Jay Walker on the TED stage in 2009. English is accepted as a shared language of science, a language of global business and the language of the Internet, with at least 1.5 billion students learning it worldwide. So the TED Distribution team []

How to learn a new language: 7 secrets from TED Translators

How to learn a new language: 7 secrets from TED Translators

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By Krystian Aparta They say that children learn languages the best. But that doesn’t mean that adults should give up. We asked some of the polyglots in TED’s Open Translation Project to share their secrets to mastering a foreign language. Their best strategies distill into seven basic principles: Get real. Decide on a simple, attainable []

Translation as language preservation: Why a Kazakh journalist is translating TED Talks

Translation as language preservation: Why a Kazakh journalist is translating TED Talks

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By Krystian Aparta When Kazakh journalist Asqat Yerkimbay learned about TED’s Open Translation Project, he realized it could be instrumental in reviving his native tongue. Under Soviet rule, communicating in Kazakh became viewed as a sign of ignorance, and although it regained its standing as the national language after Kazakhstan declared independence in 1991, Russian []

What’s the funniest talk? The one you learned the most from? Translators answer for OTP’s 5th birthday

What’s the funniest talk? The one you learned the most from? Translators answer for OTP’s 5th birthday

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Happy birthday, Open Translation Project! Our global initiative to bring TED Talks beyond the English-speaking world turned five this week. To celebrate, OTP asked its global network of volunteers—who, by the way, have translated nearly 57,000 talks at this point—to answer a few questions via Twitter. Below, see who they are and why they translate, as []

Is math the language of the universe? A bilingual TED-Ed Club explores

Is math the language of the universe? A bilingual TED-Ed Club explores

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In New York City, it’s common to hear ten different languages just on your walk to work in the morning. For the students at Lycée Français de New York, that kind of multicultural exposure doesn’t stop at the schoolhouse doors. With a combination French-English curriculum, this PreK-12 school educates students who represent more than 50 nationalities. And when []

How language transformed humanity: Mark Pagel on TED.com

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Biologist Mark Pagel shares an intriguing theory about why humans evolved our complex system of language. He suggests that language is a piece of “social technology” that allowed early human tribes to access a powerful new tool: cooperation. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2011, July 2011, in Edinburgh, Scotland. Duration: 20:11.) [ted id=1203] Watch Mark Pagel’s talk []