【推荐2】Life offers its fair share of challenges. At any given time, anyone can face difficult seasons in their life. It is true for you. When you’re experiencing difficulty, it’s always helpful to have a support system to get through it. No man is an island. Knowing this, there are a few ways you can become supportive of a family member who is in the midst of a struggle.

Offer legal resources. If you have family members who are in trouble with the law, you can offer assistance by pointing in the direction of various legal resources, you can even decide to cover a part of their legal fees in court.     1    

Provide encouragement. When people are down on their luck, it’s really easy for them to get discouraged and give up. Instead, it’s a wise move to offer words of encouragement to the person. Always remind them that they’re strong, capable, and more powerful than they realize.     2    

Be a safe place. Sometimes, people struggle because they don’t feel any love or support from anyone around them.     3    Be their light in the dark places. This can do so much for someone who is carrying a lot on the inside.

    4    You never want to make a person feel like they can’t make it without you in their life. If you’re allowing the family member to live with you for a certain period of time, be strict about what needs to happen during that time. Make sure that they develop a plan, time line and measured action steps that can help them get back on their feet.

【推荐1】Language learning apps are very popular now and offer opportunities to learn vocabulary and practice grammar. But there has been a discussion about just how effective such apps can be.

Among the most popular apps are Duolingo and Busuu. A former research found positive results on the use of them. But it mainly concentrated on studies with learners who had signed up for language courses and these apps worked as an after-class support, so the results were not always reliable. A recent study of 4,095 Busuu users has been carried out to find out if users can actually learn a language with an app.

Busuu provides learning materials for 12 different languages. It offers special models where some contents are ready for use for free while some contents are not. We find that its users are an even mix of men and women. More than half consider themselves to be at the beginner level because there is a reduction in users as their language levels go up. Most people use the app because of personal interest, or because they want to study or live abroad. Female users are likely to use it less often but for longer periods of time than male users.

Feedback in the app is highly thought of. More than 92% of the users say that the app has met their expectations and 86% consider the app as very good or good. In fact, more than 80% of the users surveyed strongly agree that using the app has helped them improve their knowledge of the language they are learning.

Besides, language learning apps also create an environment where mistakes are only known to the users, and this can address the performance nervousness that many learners suffer from when asked to speak a foreign language. So language teachers should encourage their students to use them to do the grammar work, leaving precious class time for more language communication.

【推荐2】It sounds almost too good to be true, but a new study on sleeping brains suggests that listening to languages while you sleep can actually help you to learn them.“What we found in our study is that the sleeping brain can actually encode (编码) new information and store it for a long term,” said Marc lust, co-first-author of the paper.

For the study, researchers played recordings of foreign words and their translations to sleeping subjects enjoying deep sleep, a stage when a person has little consciousness (意识) of their environment. To ensure that the results were not compromised by foreign language words that subjects may have had some connection with at some point in their waking lives, researchers made up totally artificial foreign words. When the subjects woke up, they were presented with the artificial words again without their translations. The subjects were then asked to imagine whether they meant an object that was smaller or larger than a shoebox.

Unbelievably, the subjects were able to correctly classify the words in this way at an accuracy rate that was 10 per cent higher than random chance. That’s not a rate high enough to have them suddenly speak in a foreign tongue, but it is enough to suggest that the brain is still absorbing information on some level, even during sleep.

“If you present ‘biktum’ and ‘bird’ to sleeping humans, their brains can make a new connection between the known concept ‘bird’ and the completely new and unknown word ‘biktum’,” Züst explained. “This sleep-formed memory trace (痕迹) lasts until the following wakefulness and can influence how you react to ‘biktum’ even though you think you’ve never met with that word before.“I find it amazing that humans are competent at such complex information processing without consciousness,”said Züst.

The next step for researchers will he to see if new information can be acquired quicker during wakefulness if it is already presented during sleep. If so, it could forever change how we train our brains to learn new things. Sleep learning might become a widespread practice.