Jes
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What if you can’t hear something because you don’t have language for it?
For generations, Alaska Native communities described the northern lights as more than something you could see. They also described hearing them crackle, rustle, hiss, even speak. These weren’t isolated stories. Similar accounts appear across Inuit and other Arctic oral traditions, long before scientists took the idea seriously. Scientists dismissed those stories for years. The aurora…
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The moment “correct” English starts to sound wrong
“I would like to inform you that I have completed the task.” There’s nothing wrong with this sentence. But… no one actually talks like this. This is just what happens when correctness overfires. From a psycholinguistics perspective, language is constantly competing for attention. Your brain prefers sentences that are fast, predictable, and easy to process.…
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Breaking the rule is the rule (sometimes)
“Me and him went to the meeting.”“Sounds good.”“Gonna send it over.” You’ve been told these are wrong… yet you hear them constantly. In casual speech, meetings, emails, everywhere. Sometimes breaking the rule is a signal.“Me and him…” isn’t careless: it’s casual.“Sounds good” drops structure, but keeps the meaning fast and natural.“Gonna” isn’t incorrect: it signals…
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Your English already has a personality
…you just don’t know what it is yet. You don’t sound random in English. It might feel like you’re only getting the words out, but if you examine your word choices, there’s a pattern. The way you disagree, the way you give feedback, and the way you turn something down all has a pattern. Let’s…
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English is ambiguous, but you don’t ✨feel✨ it
“I saw her duck.”“Let’s meet next Friday.”“I’m on my way (just left my house).” You probably understood all three instantly. Each one is ambiguous. “Duck” could be a verb or a noun. “Next Friday” depends on where you are in the week. “On my way” might mean five minutes or forty-five. Your brain fills in…
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Fluent… but not here
I’m American, and I had to rewind a sentence that made no sense to me in English. “Drop call my phone.” I paused the show, went back, and listened again. In that context, it meant: call me so I can save your number. It made sense. It just didn’t make sense to me. The same…
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A sentence can be grammatically perfect… and still lose the room
A lot of multilingual professionals focus on using clean grammar, having a solid vocabulary, and figuring out whether a sentence makes sense. But what they say still doesn’t land the way they want. Persuasion isn’t built on correctness. It’s built on how language functions in real time. Aristotle mapped this out a long time ago…
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AI can write jokes. They aren’t funny.
An English language learner was telling a joke: “Every time his phone rang, his wife plugged it into the charger… why?” He paused. “His girlfriend was Low Battery!” No one laughed. The answer was honestly clever. The cheating husband had saved his girlfriend’s name as “low battery.” But it didn’t land. We can understand the…
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“That’s not how I’d say it” isn’t a rule
There’s (unfortunately) a moment where someone hears a non-native speaker and decides, almost instantly, that something is off. They can understand the person, but it doesn’t sound like what they’re used to. A multilingual speaker might say something in a way a native speaker wouldn’t. They might use a slightly different structure, emphasize a different…
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Multilingual speakers don’t have a thinking problem
Teaching ESL, I hear this all the time: “I know what I want to say. I just don’t know how to say it.” This is because multilingual speakers don’t struggle to think. They struggle to translate their thinking into what sounds right to someone else. Multilingual speakers are working with multiple options at once. Different…