Stephen Lambacher

Professor @ Aoyama Gakuin University 🇯🇵 #CALL, #phonetics,
#appliedlinguistics, #ELT, #philately, Cleveland sports fan, Christ follower

[Stephen Lambacher @sglambach]

From soccer to ranch dressing converts: https://t.co/055GJN5bnq

[The Japan News @The_Japan_News]

More than half of junior high and high school seniors across Japan have reached the English proficiency targets set by the government, according to a survey by the education ministry.
https://t.co/vX7evlad38

[Michael Burri @michaelburri]

New co-authored #openaccess publication: Arciaga, K., Neff, J., & Burri, M. (2026). Japanese EFL students’ evolving use of GenAI tools: A two-year study. JALTCALL Trends, 2(1), 103489. https://t.co/FLpWgZ0app

[切手の博物館 @kitte_museum]

今日6月1日は1875年(明治8年)のこの日、日本初の気象台が設置されたことから「気象記念日」だそうです。
紹介する切手は「気象業務150周年」(2025年発行)から「天気図」で、ひまわり8号による2016年6月1日の天気図です。

[ArchaeoHistories @histories_arch]

Last picture of Hachiko, the faithful dog who waited for over 9 years outside Shibuya Station for his master to return even after he had died, 1935...

Hachikō, Japan’s most famous dog, became a symbol of loyalty after spending nearly a decade waiting for an owner who would never return. The Akita was born in 1923 and belonged to Professor Hidesaburō Ueno of the University of Tokyo. Each day, Hachikō accompanied Ueno to Tokyo’s Shibuya Station and returned in the afternoon to greet him.

On May 21, 1925, Professor Ueno suffered a fatal cerebral hemorrhage while at work and never came home. Yet Hachikō continued returning to Shibuya Station almost every day for the next nine years, nine months, and fifteen days, waiting at the exact spot where his owner had once arrived.

His devotion attracted national attention after a 1932 newspaper article made his story famous throughout Japan. When Hachikō died on March 8, 1935, thousands mourned him, and he was buried beside Professor Ueno in Tokyo’s Aoyama Cemetery.

A bronze statue of Hachikō was first erected outside Shibuya Station in 1934 while he was still alive. Today, the statue remains one of Tokyo’s most recognizable landmarks and a popular meeting place visited by millions each year.

(Colorized Photograph)

© History Pictures

[The Japan News @The_Japan_News]

BOJ’s Ueda Warns of Potential for Temporary Energy Shock to Become Persistent https://t.co/fMu6hi9KKu

[NHK WORLD News @NHKWORLD_News]

Japan's cutest fish is just 1cm long

A tiny fish no bigger than a fingernail draws divers to Japan’s Hyogo coast each spring. The rare Cherry Blossom Lumpfish appears only briefly, and is under threat as the seaweed it depends on disappears.
For more: https://t.co/lhNgLRfLDR

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Audrey van der Meer.

She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.

The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.

Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.

Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.

When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.

The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.

When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.

Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.

Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.

The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.

Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.

Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.

Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.

Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.

Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.

A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.

The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.

The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.

The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.

That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.

Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.

Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.

Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.

You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.

The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.

Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

[切手の博物館 @kitte_museum]

今日5月13日は1956年(昭和31年)のこの日、日比谷公園で犬のイベントが開催されたことから「愛犬の日」だそうです。
紹介する切手は「身近な動物シリーズ第4集」(2017年発行)で、中・大型犬の子犬と成犬がデザインされています。

[JALT @jaltorg]

JALT has published JALT Journal - Issue 48.1; May 2026. JALT Journal is JALT's research journal. It is published semiannually, in May and November, with submissions accepted throughout the year. https://t.co/tvfIcrFahu

[The Royal Philatelic Society London @The_RPSL]

On this day in 1840, the world's first postage stamp, the Penny Black, was sold in the UK, but was not valid as postage until 6 May 1840.

[The Japan News @The_Japan_News]

The Japanese government is planning to close or merge a significant chunk of the nation’s private universities and reduce their enrollment quotas.
https://t.co/lLnxJdz5iD

[BaseballHistoryNut @nut_history]

Watching an inside the park home run is one of the most exciting plays in baseball. Seeing Pete-Crow Armstrong hit one while only taking 8 seconds from first base to homeplate is absolutely insane to me.

[Wonder of Science @wonderofscience]

Giant Sequoias with human for scale.

📽: everchanginghorizon/ig

[切手の博物館 @kitte_museum]

今日4月28日は1729年(享保14年)のこの日、ベトナムから献上品として初めて象が天皇に披露されたことから「象の日」だそうです。
紹介する切手は「動物シリーズ第3集年発行)から「ゾウ」で、ベトナムから長崎に到着した象は2カ月間をかけて将軍のいる江戸まで歩いていったそうです。

[Stephen Lambacher @sglambach]

@quizlet Quizlet Live is getting better, but it still sometimes freezes during class when switching flashcard sets or shuffling players. I still have to restart the game at times. Anything you can do, or maybe it is just me?

[HonoluluHawaiiBrownsBackers @BrownsHawaii]

Good Morning from the Honolulu Hawaii Browns Backers!

[Mushtaq Bilal, PhD @MushtaqBilalPhD]

Taking notes by hand leads to better greater conceptual understanding and retention than typing.

[Stephen Lambacher @sglambach]

@quizlet Quizlet Live has been freezing during class when switching flashcard sets or shuffling players. I have to restart the game each time. I’ve tried different browsers, but the issue has been happening for the past 2–3 weeks. Please look into this!