The Secrets of Human Speech
Like Duolingo, but for The Secrets of Human Speech. Tomo turns the whole topic into a game you play five minutes a day, until it actually sticks.
For the part of you with thirty open tabs that never became anything.
215 levels across 10 sections, about 430 minutes end to end, roughly 86 days at five minutes a day. It moves through Start Talking Like a Pro, Mastering the Building Blocks of Words, The Architecture of a Sentence, The Physics of Sound, The Music and Rhythm of Speech, Decoding Meaning and Context, Language in the Real World, How the Brain Handles Language, The Deep History of Human Speech, and The Future of Communication. It starts from scratch.
Free forever · No credit card · iPhone & Android
Key ideas in The Secrets of Human Speech
- Native speakers have subconscious 'mental grammars'
- Competence is the underlying knowledge
- Grammaticality is based on internal intuition, not school rules
- Performance is the observable use of language
- Competence vs Performance
- Language is generative and allows for infinite combinations
- Speech errors follow systematic linguistic patterns
- Humans create brand new sentences constantly
- The brain organizes sounds and structures before they are spoken
- The distinction between competence and performance
- Words are stored with multi-dimensional information
- Children extract rules from the environment without explicit teaching
- The generative nature of language
- The mental lexicon is accessed subconsciously during speech
- Language acquisition happens naturally through exposure
- What slips of the tongue reveal about mental structure
You've tried the other tabs
Thirty open tabs. Four facts you actually kept.
You watched. You nodded. By Sunday it was gone.
One answer, then back to scrolling.
Eight weeks. You meant to finish. You didn't.
Tomo gives The Secrets of Human Speech the Duolingo treatment: levels, streaks, and quick quizzes that test what you just learned. That game loop is what the tabs above never had, so it's the one you actually finish.
Here's what playing it feels like
A real question from this course. Take your best guess.
What do we call the perfect set of language rules stored deep inside your mind?
Get it right to open this lesson and 214 more in the app.
Where The Secrets of Human Speech takes you
Unlock the hidden patterns in how we talk, write, and think. From cracking the code of slang to understanding how your brain builds sentences, you'll never hear a conversation the same way again.
- 1
Start Talking Like a Pro
- Why you already know more than you think
- Spotting the patterns in your daily chat
- The difference between 'correct' and 'natural'
- How to describe a language you don't speak
- 2
Mastering the Building Blocks of Words
- Breaking words into their smallest pieces
- How we invent brand new words
- Prefixes, suffixes, and the bits in between
- Why some languages pack a whole sentence into one word
- Irregular verbs and why they stick around
- 3
The Architecture of a Sentence
- The hidden trees inside your sentences
- Why word order matters (and when it doesn't)
- How your brain handles 'Who did what to whom'
- 4
The Physics of Sound
- Using your mouth as a musical instrument
- Vowels, consonants, and the air in your lungs
- Why 'p' and 'b' are almost the same sound
- The International Phonetic Alphabet: A cheat sheet
- Clicking, popping, and whistling sounds
- How tone changes meaning in Mandarin and beyond
- 5
The Music and Rhythm of Speech
- The rules for combining sounds
- Why 'bn' isn't a word in English
- How accents actually work
- The rhythm of syllables and stress
- 6
Decoding Meaning and Context
- The difference between what we say and what we mean
- How to be polite in different cultures
- Reading between the lines of a conversation
- Metaphors and how they shape our world
- Why some jokes only work in one language
- 7
Language in the Real World
- Why men and women talk differently
- The power of slang and identity
- How dialects form and disappear
- Language and social class
- 8
How the Brain Handles Language
- Where words live in your head
- How babies learn to talk without being taught
- What happens when the brain's language center is hurt
- The mystery of the 'Critical Period'
- Thinking in two languages at once
- 9
The Deep History of Human Speech
- Tracing languages back to a single ancestor
- How English became a 'mutt' language
- Dead languages and how we revive them
- 10
The Future of Communication
- How the internet is changing grammar
- Teaching computers to understand us
- Constructed languages: From Elvish to Klingon
- Will we all speak one language someday?
10 sections · 43 units · 215 levels. Built to play, not to enroll.
You pick the voice
The Secrets of Human Speech is taught in the Explain Like I'm 5 style: no big words. promise.. Want a different feel? In the app you can spin up the same topic in any of Tomo's teaching styles. Same facts, totally different vibe.
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