【推荐2】The difficulty in learning a foreign language lies not only in its complexity (复杂) but also in its difference from your own. The first thing many learners will think of is the writing system. Chinese stands out for its difficulty. A learner is said to memorize at least 2,000 characters to be able to read a newspaper.

A second way languages can be hard is with sounds and differences that do not exist in the learner’s language. To an English-speaker, the novelty includes the clicks of many African languages and the ejective sounds made by a sudden release of pressure in the mouth in some Caucasian ones. But just as hard is the problem of languages that differ from your own.

The vocabulary obviously matters too. Most European languages share an ancestor (called proto-Indo-European) and so their words, too, often come in related pairs. If you know water in Spanish is agua, it is easy to figure out Italian acqua and English aquatic. But the European languages share vocabulary for another reason: they have freely borrowed from one another over the centuries. Not only will languages unrelated to the European ones lack the “genetic” similarities in vocabulary but also they, culturally distant, have far less borrowed European vocabulary too.

Finally there is grammar. Many people connect tricky grammar with long lists of endings that change according to a word’s use in a sentence. This exists all over Arabic such as prefixes, suffixes (后缀), or vowels (元音) and consonants, which accounts for the difficulty of the language. Foreign grammar is also difficult to the extent that it differs from your language.

If you want to learn a language just for fun, start with Swedish. If you want to learn more, stay in Europe. But if you really want to impress, mastering Cantonese or Korean is the sign of the true linguistic (语言的) Ironman.

Rounding the corner into the classroom to pick up my daughter, I heard the teacher tell her, "You've done the most beautiful tree. Well done." A few days later, she pointed to another of my daughter's drawings and said, "Wow, you really are an artist!"

Both times, when I heard my daughter being praised, I felt at a loss. As a mother, how could I explain to the teacher that I would prefer it if she didn't praise my daughter?

Nowadays, we give a lot of praise to our children. Praise, self-confidence and performance at school, it is commonly believed, rise and fall together. But the present research shows something else—over the past decade, a number of studies on self-confidence have suggested that praising a child as "clever" may not help her at school. In fact, it might cause her to underperform. Often a child will react to praise by quitting—why make a new drawing if you have already made "the best"? Or a child may simply repeat the same work—why draw something new, or in a new way, if the old way always gets praise?

In a now famous 1998 study of children aged 10 and 11, psychologists Carol Dweck and Claudia Mueller asked 128 children to solve a series of math problems. After completing the first set of simple exercises, the researchers gave each child just one sentence of praise. Some were praised for their intelligence—"You did really well, you're so clever"; others for their hard work—"You did really well, you must have worked really hard." Then the researchers had the children try a more challenging set of problems. The results were eye-opening. The students who were praised for their effort showed a greater willingness to work out new methods. They said they failed because of a lack of (缺少) effort, not a lack of intelligence. The children who had been praised for their cleverness worried more about failure and tended to choose tasks that they had done before. All in all, the excitement created by being told "You're so clever" gave way to an increase in anxiety and a drop in self-confidence and performance. When asked by the researchers to write to the children in another school, remembering their experience, some of the "clever" children lied about their scores. In short, all it took to knock these youngsters' confidence, to make them so unhappy that they lied, was one sentence of praise.

【推荐2】The world is full of screens. They are on TVs, computers and smartphones. Screens are at school, at home, and just about everywhere in between. The time people spend every day looking at screens is known as “screen time.” Most families have rules about how much time children can spend with screens. Why do they have rules? Are there good reasons to limit screen time?

In many ways, screens are helpful for communication and connecting with other people. Social media and video calls allow people to be always in touch with one another. ________By sharing and commenting on videos, photos, games or music, people can meet others who have similar interests.

However, some adults are worried that young people spend too much time on screens and not enough time meeting people in real life. As a result, they may not properly understand feelings or develop strong relationships.

Many kinds of screen time may be good for students. Students may use screen time to develop their skills in creating music or videos. They may even learn skills such as coding (编程) computer programs. When students use their screen time to do research online, they may meet people who are different from them or ideas they have never thought about before.

However, some researchers think that screens change how the brain processes information. Some have linked (连接) screen time to lower test scores or less attention time.

In the future, scientists will continue studying the effects of screen time. Parents will likely continue to make rules limiting screen time. Plenty of good things can come from all this screen time, but it’s a good idea for people to pay attention to how much time in a day they spend looking at a screen. They should know how screen time influences their health, relationships, and learning.

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【推荐3】It’s unlikely that you come home from a trip and stand on top of your bed still wearing your street shoes. For some travellers, putting their suitcase on their bed is just as disgusting (令人反感的). The wheels of our luggage paced the same soiled path as our shoes, rolling through airport bathrooms, sidewalks and public transportation.

While it might sound terrible to put a worldly bag on your bed, is it actually harmful to your health? According to Phyllis Kozarsky, an expert travel health consultant, most public health professionals don’t consider luggage a major transmitter (传播者) of disease.

“We have not identified outbreaks related to dirty luggage,” Kozarsky says. Travellers may benefit from cleaning their luggage if they suspect that their hotel rooms are overrun with bedbugs. “Then they certainly would benefit by cleaning it after they returned home,” Kozarsky says.

Even if your luggage touching your bed won’t hurt you, you might still be disgusted. After all, travel is an experience full of bacteria. “You have people... carrying all types of different bacteria. Some of them are sick, and you now have them populating these public travel places,” says Colleen Costello, CEO of Vital Vio, a company that makes antibacterial LED lights. Your fellow travellers have to touch all the same things you have to touch, from the TSA checkpoint to the airplane, the train ticketing machine to the handrail in your train car.

For peace of mind, Costello recommends giving your bag a quick disinfection or storing it on a luggage shelf. Of course, you could go beyond disinfecting your luggage wheels and clean thoroughly the rest of your travel experience — the airplane tray table, hotel room door and remote control.

But Kozarsky doesn’t guarantee that lifestyle. “It’s hard to keep up with every doorhandle, every railing,” Kozarsky says. “You can become a little neurotic (神经质的) that way.”

【推荐2】What makes a word real? Who has the power to make those kinds of official decisions about words? Those are the questions many people have in mind. When most people say a word isn’t real, what they mean is that it doesn’t appear in a dictionary. That, of course, raises some other questions, including, who writes dictionaries?

Now, dictionaries are good resources, but they are changeable. If you ask dictionary editors, what they’ll tell you is that they’re just trying to keep up with people as people change the language. They’re watching what people say and what people write and trying to figure out what’s going to stick and what’s not going to stick.

Every January, dictionary editors go to the American Dialect Society Meeting every year, where among other things, they decide on the word of the year. There are about 200 or 300 people who come. Some of them are the best known linguists(语言学家) in the United States. In the past, some of the winners have been “staycation” to describe a vacation spent at home and “tweet” to describe a post made on the social networking service Twitter.

So how does a word get into a dictionary? It gets in because people use it and people keep using it, and dictionary editors are paying attention to people. If a community of speakers is using a word and knows what it means, it’s real. That word might be informal and that word might be a word that you think is illogical(不合逻辑的) or unnecessary, but as long as people are using the word, it is real. I hope that what you can do is to find language change not annoying but fun and interesting, just the way dictionary editors do. I hope you can enjoy being part of the creativity that is continually remaking our language and keeping it alive.