How Languages Work
Look beneath the surface of speech to see the hidden machinery of human communication. Discover how sound inventories, grammatical blueprints, social rituals, and historical contact shape the world's tongues.
Like Duolingo, but for How Languages Work. Tomo turns the whole topic into a game you play five minutes a day, until it actually sticks.
25 levels across 4 sections, about 50 minutes end to end, roughly 10 days at five minutes a day. It moves through Decoding Sound and Rhythm; The Architecture of Meaning; Context, Status, and Conversation; and Drift, Lineage, and Contact. It assumes you already know the basics.
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Key ideas in How Languages Work
- The inner ear still registers acoustic differences, but the brain groups them into one native category.
- Categorical perception discards sub-phonemic acoustic variance that does not change meaning in your language.
- Infants can distinguish nearly all human speech contrasts, but native tuning narrows this filter by age one.
- A minimal pair consists of two words distinguished in meaning by a single contrasting sound.
- If changing an acoustic feature yields a new word, the sounds are distinct phonemes in that language.
- If swapping sounds merely alters accent or pronunciation without changing word identity, they are allophones.
- Phonotactic constraints determine legal arrangements of consonants and vowels in a syllable.
- Languages with strict consonant limits insert epenthetic vowels to break up forbidden clusters.
- Restrictions against syllable codas force borrowed words to add terminal vowels or drop final consonants.
- Stress-timed languages space major stresses evenly, forcing unstressed syllables to compress.
- Unstressed vowels in stress-timed systems regularly reduce to a neutral, centralized schwa [ə].
- Syllable-timed languages give roughly equal duration to each syllable, preserving pure vowel qualities.
- In tone languages, pitch contour belongs directly to individual syllables to define the word itself.
- Non-tonal languages use pitch intonation over whole sentences to mark questions, mood, or attitude.
- Changing pitch on a single word in a tone language changes the lexical item, not just speaker emphasis.
- Languages convey information at a remarkably consistent global rate across speech.
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 How Languages Work 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.
Picture listening to different people say the word 'cat'. Why does your brain ignore tiny differences in how they pronounce the 'c'?
Get it right to open this lesson and 24 more in the app.
Where How Languages Work takes you
- 1
Decoding Sound and Rhythm
- Hearing Sound Inventories and Shapes
- Sound Systems in Motion
- 2
The Architecture of Meaning
- Morphological Strategies: Building Words
- Sentence Logic and Grammatical Categories
- 3
Context, Status, and Conversation
- Pragmatics and Implied Meaning
- Sociolinguistic Borders and Registers
- 4
Drift, Lineage, and Contact
- Historical Drift and Reconstruction
- When Languages Collide
4 sections · 8 units · 25 levels. Built to play, not to enroll.
Tomo is in ChatGPT
Tomo is also a ChatGPT plugin: the same playable courses, built and played inside your chat.
Add Tomo to ChatGPT- What to ask
- “Make me a Tomo course on black holes.” “Turn this chat into a Tomo course.”
- What you get
- Quick questions with instant feedback, hearts and stars, ready to play in about a minute.
- Where it goes
- No sign-up to start. Connect your Tomo account and your streak carries on in the app.
You pick the voice
How Languages Work is taught in the Storyteller style: every lesson is a story. 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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Start How Languages Work today.
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