Intermediate Japanese Short Stories


Book Description

Are you on your way towards learning Japanese and need a new challenge? We're constantly trying to improve and master new skills, and the Japanese language is no exception. We have created the next level of Japanese stories for the students who have already surpassed the beginner level: Intermediate Japanese Short Stories! In this book we have compiled 10 challenging, compelling and fun stories that will allow you to expand your vocabulary and give you the tools to boost your grasp of the wonderful Japanese tongue.How Intermediate Japanese Short Stories works:?Each chapter possesses a funny, interesting and/or thought-provoking story based on real-life situations, allowing you to learn about the Japanese culture.?Having trouble understanding Japanese characters? No problem - despite being Intermediate Japanese, we have still included a romanization to help guide you through your learning process, just like in the beginner stories!?The summaries follow the story: a synopsis in Japanese and in English of what you just read, both to review the lesson and for you to see if you understood what the tale was about. Use them if you're having trouble.?At the end of those summaries, you'll be provided with a list of the most relevant vocabulary involved in the lesson, as well as slang and sayings that you may not have understood at first glance! Don't get lost trying to understand or pronounce it all, either, as all of the vocabulary words are Romanized for your ease of learning!?Finally, you'll be provided with a set of tricky questions in Japanese, allowing you the chance to prove that you learned something in the story. Don't worry if you don't know the answer to any - we will provide them immediately after, but no cheating!We want you to feel comfortable while mastering the Japanese tongue; after all, no language should be a barrier for you to travel around the world and expand your social circles!So look no further! Pick up your copy of Intermediate Japanese Short Stories and level up your Japanese language learning right now!




Why You Need a Foreign Language & how to Learn One


Book Description

"The first half of this book examines the commercial, social, and political implications of American monolingualism. The second half of the book explores the techniques and tools that a working professional can use to acqure functional skills in a new language."--Back cover.




Ruby Red


Book Description

Gwyneth Shepherd's sophisticated, beautiful cousin Charlotte has been prepared her entire life for traveling through time. But unexpectedly, it is Gwyneth who in the middle of class takes a sudden spin to a different era! Gwyneth must now unearth the mystery of why her mother would lie about her birth date to ward off suspicion about her ability, brush up on her history, and work with Gideon—the time traveler from a similarly gifted family that passes the gene through its male line, and whose presence becomes, in time, less insufferable and more essential. Together, Gwyneth and Gideon journey through time to discover who, in the 18th century and in contemporary London, they can trust. Kerstin Gier's Ruby Red is young adult novel full of fantasy and romance.




The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books


Book Description

This impeccably researched and “adventure-packed” (The Washington Post) account of the obsessive quest by Christopher Columbus’s son to create the greatest library in the world is “the stuff of Hollywood blockbusters” (NPR) and offers a vivid picture of Europe on the verge of becoming modern. At the peak of the Age of Exploration, Hernando Colón sailed with his father Christopher Columbus on his final voyage to the New World, a journey that ended in disaster, bloody mutiny, and shipwreck. After Columbus’s death in 1506, eighteen-year-old Hernando sought to continue—and surpass—his father’s campaign to explore the boundaries of the known world by building a library that would collect everything ever printed: a vast holding organized by summaries and catalogues; really, the first ever database for the exploding diversity of written matter as the printing press proliferated across Europe. Hernando traveled extensively and obsessively amassed his collection based on the groundbreaking conviction that a library of universal knowledge should include “all books, in all languages and on all subjects,” even material often dismissed: ballads, erotica, news pamphlets, almanacs, popular images, romances, fables. The loss of part of his collection to another maritime disaster in 1522, set off the final scramble to complete this sublime project, a race against time to realize a vision of near-impossible perfection. “Magnificent…a thrill on almost every page” (The New York Times Book Review), The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books is a window into sixteenth-century Europe’s information revolution, and a reflection of the passion and intrigues that lie beneath our own insatiable desires to bring order to the world today.




Fluent Forever


Book Description

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • For anyone who wants to learn a foreign language, this is the method that will finally make the words stick. “A brilliant and thoroughly modern guide to learning new languages.”—Gary Marcus, cognitive psychologist and author of the New York Times bestseller Guitar Zero At thirty years old, Gabriel Wyner speaks six languages fluently. He didn’t learn them in school—who does? Rather, he learned them in the past few years, working on his own and practicing on the subway, using simple techniques and free online resources—and here he wants to show others what he’s discovered. Starting with pronunciation, you’ll learn how to rewire your ears and turn foreign sounds into familiar sounds. You’ll retrain your tongue to produce those sounds accurately, using tricks from opera singers and actors. Next, you’ll begin to tackle words, and connect sounds and spellings to imagery rather than translations, which will enable you to think in a foreign language. And with the help of sophisticated spaced-repetition techniques, you’ll be able to memorize hundreds of words a month in minutes every day. This is brain hacking at its most exciting, taking what we know about neuroscience and linguistics and using it to create the most efficient and enjoyable way to learn a foreign language in the spare minutes of your day.