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Hey, y'all! I got several questions on one of my posts, asking how I study for the LSAT. One of the best questions came from @procrastinatingculture. I won't purport to be an expert, but I have studied the LSAT for a few months now. I get consistently good scores with the following method. Of course, this is just my opinion. There is no single way to learn it best.

Familarize yourself with the sections, especially if you haven't seen the test before. Learn what each section demands from you and what skill set it is trying to test. For this task, I recommend Mike Kim's The LSAT Trainer. The book is really good for getting inside the mind of the test maker. It is my favorite prep book, but not the only one I have. It is notoriously weak about teaching logic games, which I'll talk about in a sec.

Take a practice test cold. Before you dive into hardcore studying, get your hands on a practice exam and take it. Keep yourself to the standard time limits, and don't worry if you can't answer all the questions on time. The LSAT is tricky to time, and learning to complete it is part of the journey. After the test, grade yourself. Note any sections that gave you trouble. Also note any question types that you struggled with.

Study logic games. Once you complete your practice test, you will probably find that you have aptitude for most parts of it. Often times, people who think they would be a good lawyer are correct about where their strengths lie. This is not the case with the logic games. The games are the least intuitive part of the test. They require a type of thinking (formal logic) that we do not employ in regular life or school work. Be prepared to dedicate a significant portion of time to logic games. To study logic games, I use Khan Academy's free LSAT prep course and Kaplan's Logic Games Unlocked. Kaplan is pretty controversial, but it works for me. Of course, there are plenty of books for different types of learners.

Practice and assess. Once you have the practice book of your choice, follow the drills there in. Once again, I recommend Mike Kim's book. It is particularly good for self-motivated students, who aren't seeking in person instruction. You should practice several hours per week for at least a month. Assess yourself periodically with a full practice test. You can purchase individual practice tests from Kaplan. I would recommend having at least 3. It is fine to reuse them.

Practice with the time. One of the toughest parts of the LSAT is the timing. Except for the very beginning of your studies, always time yourself. For individual practice questions, you can go over time. However, make sure you are always getting faster. Another reason I like Kim's book is the time suggestions it has.

Perfect practice makes perfect. After each practice, note your strengths and weaknesses. You will not improve quickly without self-evaluation. The Kim book and several others have self-evaluations throughout. Do not skip over them. You will get better through thoughtful practice, not through the raw amount of your practice.

Anyway, that's all I have to say. As I mentioned, this is just what worked for me. There's no perfect way to go about it, but I hope this helped someone.

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To say, “This is my uncle,” in Chinese, you have no choice but to encode more information about said uncle. The language requires that you denote the side the uncle is on, whether he’s related by marriage or birth and, if it’s your father’s brother, whether he’s older or younger.

“All of this information is obligatory. Chinese doesn’t let me ignore it,” says Chen. “In fact, if I want to speak correctly, Chinese forces me to constantly think about it.”

This got Chen wondering: Is there a connection between language and how we think and behave? In particular, Chen wanted to know: does our language affect our economic decisions?

Chen designed a study — which he describes in detail in this blog post — to look at how language might affect individual’s ability to save for the future. According to his results, it does — big time.

While “futured languages,” like English, distinguish between the past, present and future, “futureless languages,” like Chinese, use the same phrasing to describe the events of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Using vast inventories of data and meticulous analysis, Chen found that huge economic differences accompany this linguistic discrepancy. Futureless language speakers are 30 percent more likely to report having saved in any given year than futured language speakers. (This amounts to 25 percent more savings by retirement, if income is held constant.) Chen’s explanation: When we speak about the future as more distinct from the present, it feels more distant — and we’re less motivated to save money now in favor of monetary comfort years down the line.

But that’s only the beginning. There’s a wide field of research on the link between language and both psychology and behavior. Here, a few fascinating examples:

Navigation and Pormpuraawans In Pormpuraaw, an Australian Aboriginal community, you wouldn’t refer to an object as on your “left” or “right,” but rather as “northeast” or “southwest,” writes Stanford psychology professor Lera Boroditsky (and an expert in linguistic-cultural connections) in the Wall Street Journal. About a third of the world’s languages discuss space in these kinds of absolute terms rather than the relative ones we use in English, according to Boroditsky. “As a result of this constant linguistic training,” she writes, “speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes.” On a research trip to Australia, Boroditsky and her colleague found that Pormpuraawans, who speak Kuuk Thaayorre, not only knew instinctively in which direction they were facing, but also always arranged pictures in a temporal progression from east to west.

Blame and English Speakers In the same article, Boroditsky notes that in English, we’ll often say that someone broke a vase even if it was an accident, but Spanish and Japanese speakers tend to say that the vase broke itself. Boroditsky describes a study by her student Caitlin Fausey in which English speakers were much more likely to remember who accidentally popped balloons, broke eggs, or spilled drinks in a video than Spanish or Japanese speakers. (Guilt alert!) Not only that, but there’s a correlation between a focus on agents in English and our criminal-justice bent toward punishing transgressors rather than restituting victims, Boroditsky argues.

Color among Zuñi and Russian Speakers Our ability to distinguish between colors follows the terms in which we describe them, as Chen notes in the academic paper in which he presents his research (forthcoming in the American Economic Review; PDF here). A 1954 study found that Zuñi speakers, who don’t differentiate between orange and yellow, have trouble telling them apart. Russian speakers, on the other hand, have separate words for light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). According to a 2007 study, they’re better than English speakers at picking out blues close to the goluboy/siniy threshold.

Gender in Finnish and Hebrew In Hebrew, gender markers are all over the place, whereas Finnish doesn’t mark gender at all, Boroditsky writes in Scientific American (PDF). A study done in the 1980s found that, yup, thought follows suit: kids who spoke Hebrew knew their own genders a year earlier than those who grew up speaking Finnish. (Speakers of English, in which gender referents fall in the middle, were in between on that timeline, too.)

09/03/21 • poem made from the handout for a lecture on the fragmentary historical sources and missing tomb of alexander the great

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