How Steve Jobs made language learning easier

As you may have heard, Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Inc., passed away last week at the age of 56.

Steve doesn't appear to have been much of a language learner (one somewhat unreliable source tells me that he spoke Malayalam, presumably learned during the time he spent backpacking around India), but it's hardly surprising that the course Steve cut through technology has had many reverberations in the way we study languages. The changes are really knock-off effects from what was happening at a higher level, and much of it seems to be "someone would've done this sooner or later" kinds of things, but the big changes are obvious when I compare to the way I learned languages 15 years ago, and I for one am glad those changes came sooner rather than later.

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