Hi there! Although I sincerely hope that you have been reading my recent git-week posts here, here, here, here and here, frankly, I myself am happy that the week is over. No, no, don't misunderstand me. I am happy that I learned and was able to share these git gems with you all. But, I am currently undergoing some stress, due to

• things not going well at work (read this to know why)
• I am starting to feel the pressure of "don't break the chain" (read about my attempt at it here)
• Being a newbie to blogging, I am having some difficulty finding good ideas/matter to write about

Anyways, I will do an honest attempt to not only not break the chain, but also to not give under-cooked material to read. Otherwise you might feel bored and go away. Now, we don't want that to happen, do we? But at the same time I will keep the topic for today light enough so that I am able to achieve my objectives

• provide useful/entertaining information to you
• improve my cognitive and writing skills
• not break the chain

So the topic for today is "difference between learnt and learned". Before I go on to the formal differences, let me tell you my version of the story. I used to think that "learnt" was something that had happened very very long time ago, like "I had learnt to ride a bicycle when I was 5 years old", whereas "learned" was something that happened very recently, or just now, like "I just learned what this means". Also, I noticed (when saying sentences containing the words in my mind) that I would lean towards using "learnt" almost always instead of using "learned".

Now I am not really sure if this is correct (along with the other definitions that I will show below) or not. What do you think? Probably you too thought similarly.

But 1 important question that I have not said anything about is "why". As in, "why" did i get interested in the difference between "learnt" and "learned" in the first place. Why does it matter to me at all? The story behind this is that when i was writing the post about speed your website 100x times, my editor showed the word "learnt" in yellow color grabbing my attention. I went into spell-check and the only option it showed was "learned"; "learnt" was not there at all in it's suggestions. This confused me because I knew for sure that "learnt" is a valid word. This piqued my curiosity enough for me to quickly search online for meanings and differences between the 2 words.

Anyways, coming back to the actual differences. Unexpectedly I found 2 unrelated differences here and here. The first one says that they are the same words, but pronounced (and spelled) differently in British and American English. Well, that atleast explains

• why I would lean towards using "learnt" instead of using "learned" almost every time (since I am Indian and learn British English. Actually what Indians use is our very own dialect of English, if I may call it that. But lets be content by saying that since India was ruled by the British for more than 150 years, what we use is British English)
• why my editor did not show "learnt" in its suggestions; because I am using the American (en-US) language pack for spelling check/correction

The second definition here mentioned "learned" as an adjective, like "he is a very learned man", whereas "learnt" as a verb, like "he has learnt many languages". Looking back, I remember having learnt something like this when I was in school. But I have never been very good with languages (and history and geography and ... (the list goes on, heh heh!)). But hey, I did manage to use the correct word in my previous sentence. Does that mean that I am a learned man now?

What do you think?