September 24: 2 Books

84. Fluent Forever: How To Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It by Gabriel Wyner


I try to read every language learning book that comes out as soon as possible after its publication date. I was not aware of this one until I ran into it quite serendipitously at a small mom and pop bookshop in SoHo recently while waiting to meet my good friend Alan for dinner at a local Israeli food joint.

As a language teacher (beginning Cantonese Chinese to non-native speakers for 3 years now and beginning spoken Mandarin Chinese to non-native speakers as of this past week (this is my first semester teaching that dialect)), I am usually not particularly impressed by popular books on language learning techniques and resources. Case in point, my personal opinion about Rosetta Stone, which I view as an excellent resource for intermediate and advanced learners but just about the worst method ever for absolute beginners. However, I was VERY impressed with this book -- so impressed that I intend to reread it this fall and contact the author to hopefully interview him for my foreign language learning blog, which I also plan to develop into a fully-funtional internet learning portal in 2015.

Because of my need to keep these reviews short, due to the fact that my life recently exploded with unintended and unforeseen time-suckers and I "shouldn't" even be using this time right now to type this entry, I will summarize my impression of this book by saying this: if you are interested in learning how to mount a multi-pronged approach to learning your foreign language or languages of choice right now in 2014 / almost 2015, THIS would be one of the first books you should read, especially if you are a Youtube / Skye / social media-savvy so-and-so and would like to spend a good portion of your time using these resources, along with various apps and electronic flashcard resources in your studies. Feel free to comment on this entry and I will elaborate if there is any interest. For now, I need to move onto the next review.

 
85. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

Boy feels that the entire world is phony and that no one he knows except for his younger sister and at times his older brother (who has sold out, but is still loved) are "real" individuals, saying what they mean and living life as they intend to live it. Boy has a fist fight with an arrogant prep school classmate and is kicked out of his umpteenth high school. Boy has a couple of weeks before he is due home in New York City for semester break. Boy travels to NYC early, accidentally hires a prostitute who is younger than him, and gets into another fist fight with said hooker's pimp when boy refuses to pay an inflated price for a trick he didn't even take. Boy calls up several girls and guys that he knows from his past in the hopes that they might not be phony like everyone else. Boy sneaks into his house and runs into his kid sister, who sees right through his scam and wants to be a part of his adventure. Kid sister refuses to back down and threatens to run away with boy. Boy relents and waits for his parents' arrival, so he can have yet another confrontation about yet another failure in his young life.

I am blessed to have my dad's original copy of this book from the late 1950s / early 1960s (alas, not a first edition pb, though), and I have read this copy 4 times now, I believe. I decided to reread this book because I have always enjoyed the writing style as well as the narrator's attitude towards trying to find meaning in life and in social interactions. Living in New York City, albeit 50 years after the main character of this book, the story has continued to resonate with me through multiple readings throughout my teens, twenties, thirties, and now forties. My friend Alan had mentioned this book in the same moment when he suggested that Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby did not measure up to Dickens. I am not sure that I agree or disagree with that statement. Good writing must first and foremost resonate with the time and world of the contemporary reader. Great writing should continue to resonate with the lives of future generations. I think that this book accomplishes that, in its comparative simplicity of style and content. It has my vote of confidence as a part of the 21st century canon of American literature.

83 Books in 27 Days as of September 23 -- EITHER 4 or 6 more days left to The Challenge, depending on how you look at it...

So if we take my blog at face value and tally a total as of today, I have read 83 books so far. If you are rereading this entry (for whatever inane reason), you will note that I was off in my count, in my favor. I had thought I had read 79 books as of today. I am actually up to 83. No idea how that happened, but COOL!

27 total days / 83 books. 

This represents 25 actual days of reading, which means that I have either 4 days or 6 days to finish the remaining 17 books. Let's see what I can accomplish in the next 4 days.

Thanks for following this Challenge so far. Let's see what the rest of the journey brings...

September 23: 2 Books

82. The Whole World Guide to Language Learning by Terry Marshall

This book is also on my list of Top 5 Favorite Language Learning Books. I hope to read at least one of the other books from that list before the end of the current Challenge.

What I like most about this book is the same thing that I liked most about Nida's "missionary style" language learning field manual reviewed earlier in this blog: This book presents a wonderful method (though completely devoid of the pompous white man's burden ethos of earlier works in the genre, thank goodness!) for working with an "informer" or "mentor" in the field to learn the spoken version of a language from scratch without a textbook and without formal language classes or a dictionary. This method is not for the faint of heart and is most definitely only for dedicated, serious self-starters who really are determined to learn a new language on their own outside of the "traditional" classroom setting.

My copy of this book has so many dogeared pages at this point that I wouldn't know where to begin if I were to summarize the many excellent points in this short review. Perhaps I can simply say that I intend to suggest many of the methods from this book to my Cantonese and Mandarin students this fall, beginning next week, when I start volunteer-teaching beginning classes in each dialect in Manhattan's Chinatown.

83. In Other Words: The Science and Psychology of Second-Language Acquisition by Ellen Bialystok and Kenji Hakuta

Ostensibly an academic work on the subject, this book nevertheless maintains enough of a popular approach that it would certainly appeal to the average intermediate-level language learner looking for a broader understanding of the various research in recent years on language learning, and how that research might (or might not) help the language learner to acquire more of a given foreign language.

As with many of the books in my personal collection on linguistics and language learning, there needs to be some sort of distinction between books that aid in general language learning approaches and books that specifically further a knowledge about developments and prevailing theories within the field of linguistics as an academic social science discipline. This book falls into the second category.

This book does an excellent job of presenting multiple prevailing linguistic approaches or philosophies, and because this is a reread for me, my copy has many dogears and much underlining, ensuring that I will return to this book again at a later state when I want to delve deeper into an understanding of one or more concepts of the discipline of linguistics. In the short term, though, it doesn't lend much to an improvement in strategies that might increase my command of any of the languages that I am currently studying and attempting to speak.

September 22: ZERO BOOKS (no real time to read today)

Today was a weird day, alternately of productivity and procrastination as I again worked on my own purge of items from my bedroom and home office in an effort to clarify and refocus my life. Before I knew it, the entire day had gone by.

Today was the second day this month that I was not able to read a book for this Challenge.

September 21: 6 Books

76. How to Improve Your Foreign Language Immediately: Foreign Language Communication Tools by Boris Shekhtman

Ok -- so this is a super short book -- around 100 pages, and even that is stretching it, considering the font size and typset of the text. Still, in light of the 543 page book that I read the other day, my friend Amanda at Roots Cafe in South Park Slope, Brooklyn assures me that I should count this as a full book. It was indeed published as a "full book" with its own isbn and its own separate listing on Amazon.com, where I purchased it in 2013.

I love love love love LOVE this book. It is not a book for beginning language learners. Rather, it is a distillation of the author's main points from his much longer work, Developing Professional Level Language Proficiency, which I also read earlier this year. In How To Improve Your Foreign Language Immediately, Shekhtman provides multiple CONVERSATIONAL STRATEGIES to take whatever level the language learner has attained and maximize what he or she is able to show during conversational interactions with native speakers of that language.

The ISLAND STRATEGY is my absolute favorite point of this book, and is the main reason that I will continue to reread this short, crucial work on language learning as well as recommend it to every single intermediate learner of any foreign language that I meet for the rest of my life!!!

77. How To Learn a Foreign Language by Edwin T. Cornelius, Jr.

This book originally came with a dust jacket, which my copy is missing. Rather than post a copy of the plain blue front cover of the non-jacketed hardback, I am instead including a cover of the interior title page for those who are interested in ordering this book on Amazon or perhaps taking it out of your local public library.

Published in the 1950s, this book contains a solid method based on finding a native speaker "informer" or "mentor" in your target foreign language and then preparing lessons for yourself that you then have your mentor teach you, based on your specific needs. In this respect, though the book focuses entirely on the author's experiences learning to speak modern Greek, the book follows much the same "missionary linguistic" approach to language acquisition as several of the upcoming entries in this blog.

I have decided to keep this short work as a permanent part of my language learning book collection for two reasons:

1. I intend to study classical Greek at some point in the future and when I do, it will be good to have an example of a practical Craigslist-style language trade method for learning modern conversational Greek at the same time; and
2. There are some very sound "missionary" style language learning techniques in this book that I want to revisit in the future as I continue to re-evaluate my own language learning efforts in Chinese -- especially going forward as I begin to take my Chinese out "into the field" for personal fieldtrips to Cantonese and Mandarin speaking NYC Chinatowns and develop my own in-situ language "assignments."

78. Learning a Foreign Language: A Handbook Prepared Especially for Missionaries by Eugene A. Nida

From what I can tell from my cursory research on Amazon prior to ordering this book in 2012, this was THE book for the 1950s / 60s generation of "Travel to a Foreign Country and Learn the Local Language to Convert the Heathens to The Word of God" brand of Christian Missionary. If the reader is able to put aside the white man's conceit that that is even remotely an appropriate way to approach other non-Western cultures, there is much of value in this thin, pithy volume.

I have dogeared many pages in my copy, and my intention a few days ago was to write a bit about some of the more salient points in this book. However, in the interest of time, let me just end this review by saying that if you are interested in going to a foreign country or immersing yourself in a foreign language speaking community in the US, and you are a self-starter who is genuinely interested in becoming fluently conversational in another language via a method focusing on conversations with locals in which you use the language (once you learn it at a basic enough level) to learn about the culture from which the language springs, THIS is a great book to check out. If, on the other hand, you are the sort of learner who insists on sitting in a class and having some teacher or "person of authority" tell you what to do, what to learn, then this is definitely NOT the kind of book for your language learning approach.

79. The Principles of Language Study by H. E. Palmer

This is a reprint of a book on language learning from the 1920s, and if ever there was a book written from the pompous "I am a white man and I know much more than you uncivilized heathens" perspective on other languages and cultures, this would be a shining example. Still, there are some positive points and because my personal interest in language learning and teaching is much more than cursory, it is very worthwhile for me to read books like this every once in a while -- if only to make me angry about the previous generations' notions of white man's privilege...

Focusing mainly on French language examples, the author does a good job of contrasting the fors and againsts regarding spoken vs. written language study at the outset of the student's efforts to acquire a new language. Most of the book focuses on the author's 9-point action plan for learning a new language:

1. Initial preparation
2. Building proper habits
3. Accuracy, particularly of pronunciation
4. Gradation
5. Proportion
6. Concreteness of examples and language rules as the student acquires them
7. THE STUDENT'S INTEREST LEVEL
8. Order of progression of study materials and language aspects
9. MULTIPLE LINE OF APPROACH

I have capitalized 7 and 9 because they are the 2 take-aways for me from this particular book, and are very important to my own personal language learning philosophy as I have applied it to Chinese thus far.

80. Polyglot: How I Learn Languages by Kato Lomb

This is one of my Top 5 All Time Language Learning Books.

Written by one of the most accomplished interpreters of the latter half of the 20th Century, a Hungarian woman with a command of 16 languages who, most impressively AND MOST INSPIRING FOR ME, learned most of her spoken and written languages in her 30s and 40s, this book is both informative and specific in its prescription for language learning.

I have been a big believer in EXTENSIVE READING in a foreign language (my own Bombardment Theory of Language Learning, which I have promised to write more about either in this blog or at www.speakmanylanguages.com) for several years now -- before I was ever aware of Stephen Krashen's work on the topic or this book currently being reviewed here and now. It is always nice to be validated through one's reading on a given topic of passion that one's own thoughts and ideas happen to resonate with some of the current thinking in the field. Yay -- go me!

Ms. Lomb's detailed description of how she initially learned to speak Russian via reading a novel over and over again over a period of months during the wartime occupation of her country is both inspired and inspiring. Recently, I have applied the exact same method to my own reading and rereading of Dav Pilkey's seminal work, Capitán Calzoncillos y El Terrorífico Retorno de Cacapipí (the Spanish language edition of Captain Underpants and the Terrifying Return of Tippy Tinkletrousers), from which I have literally much improved my own conversational Spanish (albeit to a 10 year-old level).

81. A Linguistic Guide to Language Learning by William G. Moulton

This is a very dry work, focused mainly on Chomsky-style language tree diagrams and a circa 1970 understanding of the state of linguistics as a social science and how that science might aid foreign language learning. In actuality, I would argue that the contents of this book certain aid linguistics as a field, and would aid a student who wants to read ABOUT and think ABOUT language, but this particular book would do very little to actually help a student acquire a new language or learn to speak it.

This seems to be a common misunderstanding throughout the linguistics literature up until recent years: one does NOT need to study ABOUT how a language works in order to learn how to speak and use that language. Even in order to learn the grammar of that particular language. The only people aided by a book such as this would be linguistics who want to understand more about how language AS A CONCEPT might function at a deeper "social science research" level. Taken with that particular grain of salt, a book like this might be interesting to a linguist doing research into why certain language teaching methods might be more or less effective for certain segments of the population. However, this book does little to help a student learn to speak, read or write any specific language.

September 20: 5 Books

71. What is History? by Edward Hallett Carr

I was all set to begin today with Kon-Tiki (see below), but when I was walking to my regular Saturday morning therapy session with my new social worker Joanne, I found this book on the street. What an amazing collection of lectures by the author on the philosophical implications of the concept of "history" and "historians," as these terms are understood from a European/American perspective! I had already read the first 2/3 of it by the time I walked the 30 blocks from my home to my appointment!

I was actually blown away by this book; it is not often that a book that I find in recycling rocks me to my core by laying bare the workings of Western education and exposing a fundamental truth that knowledge is as much a product of those who "create" it and tell us that it is important as it is of the things or events that are supposedly important in the first place.

Wow -- this is REALLY deep stuff. On the surface, this book is an exploration of the notion that history as we know it, as it is studied in school and written about by scholars, actually represents an almost equal participation from both the events and historical figures themselves AND the historians and writers commenting and creating insights on those people and events. Something about my mood this morning when I read this book, though, made me draw a much deeper connection regarding all "knowledge" in this world -- or at least the kind that I have learned so far in my limited time on this planet.

72. Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl

As readers will remember from my earlier entry on the book Columbus Was Last, I have long been fascinated with explorations into who were the first people to "discover" the Americas. Four of Thor Hyerdahl's books have been on my shelf for several years now, and I am finally getting around to reading them in chronological order of publication date.

Kon-Tiki is a very famous book, published in 1950, detailing the author's testing of his hypothesis (now a proven theory) that the various Polynesian islands (Samoa, Hawaii, Tahiti, etc.) were originally populated by early residents of the west coast of South America (now Peru), sailing west across many miles of ocean on balsa wood rafts. What an adventure story!

Reading like a novel, this true story is well-researched and detailed enough for even the most scientifically-minded to sit up and take notice of Hyerdahl's postulates regarding the initial peopling of Polynesia. I am really looking forward to reading his follow-up book, Aku Aku, on the building of the famous Easter Island statues.

73. The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People by E. E. Evans Pritchard

Everyone should read a famous social anthropologyical monograph written during the height of British Imperialism. The Nuer are an indigenous people of Sudan in Africa, and Pritchard was sent by the British government to chronicle their inner workings, presumable so that the British government might better and more efficiently subjugate these people to British Imperial rule.

The arrogance of the white man can be astounding at times.

Taken in stride as a reflection of the age from whence it came, this is a well-written book by one of the "fathers" of modern social and cultural anthropology, my undergraduate major at Duke University, from which I graduated a million and a half years ago.

Especially in light of today's earlier book, What is History?, I couldn't help but think the entire time that I read this book, how much of the author's experience and research represents "the truth" of The Nuer (i.e. the way these people really see and understand themselves and the significances of their own social, political, religious, etc. institutions as would be discussed between educated native speakers of their language), and how much are simply guesses on the part of Pritchard -- or worse yet, misinterpretations based on language mistranslation issues or possibly even purposeful misdirection on the part of the Nuer, who may not have wanted a white outsider to really know about their lifestyle and its meanings?

Hmm...

74. The Secret Power Within: Zen Solutions to Real Problems by Chuck Norris

Sometimes, I buy a book just for shits and giggles, and this particular book is an example of just such an impulse purchase.

However, I was very pleasantly surprised to find that Mr. Norris filled this book with some wonderfully insightful personal  and career stories and some very valuable life insights.

Carried throughout the book is an underlying tribute to the author's brother, who died as a soldier in Vietnam, and it is this source of motivation that informed much of the author's personal philosophical quest to find deeper meaning and ultimately happiness in martial arts, movies, life and love. I found this book VERY inspiring -- so much so that I will be keeping it and rereading certain dogeared pages going forward as I reconceive my own life and career over the coming months. Funny enough, I think that maybe Chuck Norris's insights into the deeper meaning of the human condition are just what I need at this moment in my own life.

In all seriousness.

This is a witty and well-written, inspiring self-help book

75. Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui by Karen Kingston

Ladies and Gentlemen, there is a new winner for "Most Inspiring Get Rid of Your Junk / Clean Your Home and Life Book..." and it's name is Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui!

As my readers will see from all of the orange price tags in my cover photos of today's books, this afternoon provided a very profitable browsing session at The Strand Bookstore. I dogeared SOOO many pages in this book that I don't even know where to begin. THIS will actually be my bible for cleaning up my home and my life, starting next week, during my October focus on eliminating clutter from my apartment and my mind so that I can clarify and refocus my life and career going forward. Sometimes, we are very lucky to find a method to guide us through our moments of madness; this book represents just such a solution for me...

Focusing on the underlying symbology of most, if not all, clutter, this book REALLY resonated with my own personal battle to get rid of extra crap from my life. So much so this will most likely be the first book that I [re]read as soon as my 100 Book Challenge is finished!

September 19: 5 Books

66. The Third Ear by Chris Lonsdale

 This is one of my favorite language learning "psych up" / motivational books. Written by a white New Zealander who initially came to China in the 80s on a college scholarship, hacking spoken Mandarin in a much shorter time than anyone at the university where he was studying could comprehend, The Third Ear is all about an innate ability of all humans to listen (really listen) to the spoken portion of another language that we do not yet understand and use our "inner ears" (in a metaphorical sense) to begin to process incoming information and eventually acquire a new language.

I am not explaining this well, and in the interest of time (many more reviews to type today), I most likely won't be able to, so I won't really try. Chris's exploration of the "audibol" (a sound syllable) and how the human brain processes language is both fascinating and empowering for language learners. This book is a third time re-read; each time, it keeps getting better. I can't recommend it highly enough, especially to students of tonal languages like Chinese -- my own current linguistic focus.

I remember that upon my initial reading of this book 4 years ago, I was most inspired by Lonsdale's suggestions for building an initial functional vocabulary in a new language. In fact, I used his guidelines to create my first major self-study "push" with Cantonese Chinese at the time, and with the help of 2 of my first Cantonese teachers, I was able to jump wayyyyy ahead of the other students in my classes at the time, all based on the suggestions from this particular book!

67. Fluent in 3 Months: How Anyone at Any Age Can Learn to Speak Any Language from Anywhere in the World by Benny Lewis

Though I haven't spent a lot of time watching every single Benny Lewis video online, I have watched a good 8 or 10 of his vlog entries and sales pitches for his "Fluent in 3 Months / Speak from Day One" language learning method. But for the relatively high price point compared to my current budget for individual language learning resources, I would have purchased his kit long ago.

Because of this, I was super 'thused to find his recently published book at The Strand in NYC in their basement foreign language section earlier this year. I have read this book 2 or 3 times now, and my current reread has been very empowering. There are SO many positive points to this book that I can only mention a few:

• Aspiring to and testing for internationally, academically recognized achievement levels in certain languages (mainly European languages and Chinese)
• Memorizing short speeches in each language you are studying as vehicles to communicate and improve spoken language ability
• Shortcut hints for new learners of languages that conjugate verbs, involving the use of helping verbs such as "want to," "can," etc.
• Studying, speaking, AND MAINTAINING ability in multiple languages
• Various internet and in-person resources to aid language learning in today's multimedia world

68. How to Learn Any Language Quickly, Easily, Inexpensively, Enjoyably, and On Your Own by Barry Farber

I actually met Barry Farber maybe 12 or so years ago when I was working for The Learning Annex in NYC, recording many of their Manhattan seminars for website streaming. During this phase of my resume, Mr. Farber gave a 2-hour presentation on the exact method described in this book. I am sure that he took the opportunity to plug this book as well that evening, but I had not yet caught the language learning bug, so at the time, this was just another evening of freelance income. Skip forward quite a few years...when I saw this book at The Strand Bookstore, I immediately made the connection, and when I got home that same evening, I raided my Learning Annex data archives in my basement, eventually locating the original .WAV files for Farber's lecture.

I have since read this book twice (including this time) and listened to the audio presentation of this material many times on my mp3 player. This is really good stuff!

Farber shows how, armed with a dictionary; a basic grammar textbook; at least one audio resource with accurate pronunciation of the new language; a recorder / listening device to capture and playback real-life audio examples of the target language; some highlighters; and a magazine or newspaper article written in the new language (assuming a script that the learner knows how to phonetically read and pronounce), the serious self-directed language learner can systematically take apart and then acquire an understanding of a foreign language. Great stuff for self-starters!

69. How to Learn a Foreign Language by Paul Pimsleur, PhD

This is a book that I kept seeing on Amazon listed for outrageously high prices -- until it was recently reissued in honor of the 50th anniversary of Pimseur Language Programs' all-audio language courses, the first of which was Greek in 1963.

I recently came across this brand new printing while browsing in a bookstore, waiting to have dinner with a friend in Manhattan's SOHO 2 weeks ago. I immediately ordered it from Amazon that evening, and read it the same day that it arrived.

I am a HUGE fan of the Pimsleur method. It's greatest strength (exclusive focus on pronunciation and listening comprehension) is also its greatest weakness, if the language learner is expecting a "complete" language acquisition process from a single resource. Used in its "proper" and most ideal manner, though, I am firmly of the opinion that for many languages, in particular those without immediately readable scripts or characters for the learner, an all-audio introduction to the language is ideal. In fact, this exact resource -- Pimsleur Cantonese -- is one of 2 main reasons why my pronunciation of my main foreign language that I am currently studying is so accurate 99% of the time! Go Pimsleur!!!

70.The Polyglot Project, ed. Claude Cartaginese

This huge 524 page book is actually a compilation of emails from various members of the Youtube language learning community as of 2011.

Consisting of essays of varying qualities and varying levels of inspiration, this is a really great resource for the language learning for multiple reasons:

• It contains stories and advice about language learning from many, but not most, of the most "important" and visible amateur and professional linguists on Youtube in recent years
• Some of the essays mention key resources that really will help the reader with any of a number of language learning processes and sticking points
• Some of the advice and methods are really well-conceived and work very well, depending on the target language
• Most of the resources mentioned by the various authors are completely free and available anywhere in the world with an internet connection and the ability to stream audio and video from Youtube.

This book is also available for free as an eBook, which I am considering downloading and viewing on my tablet. This would allow me to click on various links mentioned throughout the text, which would then take me to the Youtube channels of each contributor, as well as to other web resources mentioned throughout.