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.




Speaking of Love: The Love Dialogue in Italian and French Renaissance Literature


Book Description

Re-evaluating the dialogue’s place in the literary landscape of the Italian and French Renaissance, Speaking of Love presents the love dialogue at the intersection of a revival of the form and the period’s philosophies of love and desire. Between 1540 and 1580, authors such as Speroni, Tullia d’Aragona, the Venetian poligrafi, Tyard, Le Caron, Pasquier, Taillemont, Marguerite de Navarre, and Louise Labé, feature interlocutors not only deliberating on love but imitating the experience of love in their dynamics of speaking. These love dialogues allow early modern ideologies and discourses of love to be imitated by the reader and rival lyric poetry in conveying amorous experience, validating dialogue as an authentic literary form rather than a tool of philosophical thinking.




When in French


Book Description

A language barrier is no match for love. Lauren Collins discovered this firsthand when, in her early thirties, she moved to London and fell for a Frenchman named Olivier—a surprising turn of events for someone who didn’t have a passport until she was in college. But what does it mean to love someone in a second language? Collins wonders, as her relationship with Olivier continues to grow entirely in English. Are there things she doesn’t understand about Olivier, having never spoken to him in his native tongue? Does “I love you” even mean the same thing as “je t’aime”? When the couple, newly married, relocates to Francophone Geneva, Collins—fearful of one day becoming "a Borat of a mother" who doesn’t understand her own kids—decides to answer her questions for herself by learning French. When in French is a laugh-out-loud funny and surprising memoir about the lengths we go to for love, as well as an exploration across culture and history into how we learn languages—and what they say about who we are. Collins grapples with the complexities of the French language, enduring excruciating role-playing games with her classmates at a Swiss language school and accidently telling her mother-in-law that she’s given birth to a coffee machine. In learning French, Collins must wrestle with the very nature of French identity and society—which, it turns out, is a far cry from life back home in North Carolina. Plumbing the mysterious depths of humanity’s many forms of language, Collins describes with great style and wicked humor the frustrations, embarrassments, surprises, and, finally, joys of learning—and living in—French.




South of Somewhere


Book Description

Robert V. Camuto sets out across modern Southern Italy in search of the "South-ness" that defined his youthful experience and views the world through wine, food, and families.




Comparative Grammar of Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and French


Book Description

Nowadays thousands of grammar books, textbooks, outlines, references and language guides of Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and French are published year by year. However, all of them teach these languages separately. Here you will find a comparative grammar of the four major Romance languages together based on their grammatical and lexical similarities for you, lovers of foreign languages, to learn and compare Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and French simultaneously. It is an audacious endeavor to find or create a novel way of learning to speak several languages and becoming a multilingual person. It took me over 3 years to finish the book. It consists of over 800 pages, 10 chapters covering all the grammatical aspects of these 4 languages. It includes over 1000 examples, 500 easy-to-follow charts and tables. It contains 138 geographical, historical and cultural facts about Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and French countries.Below I will discuss several reasons why I decided to write this book and why you need it.1) First of all, this book is written for readers like you who are fond of or would like to learn Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and French simultaneously or just to get an all-round knowledge of all these four Romance languages. It is designed not only for beginners who do not have an extensive knowledge of grammar, yet need a guide through the grammatical concepts of all mentioned above languages, but also intermediate and advanced students who would like to have a reference book ofseveral Romance languages at once.2) Second of all I spent many years learning these languages separately, which was a complete waste of time before I realized it. This book will hopefully save you a great deal of time and allow you to study and compare at a glance the four main Neo-Latin languages.3) Knowledge of foreign languages is fast becoming a necessary requirement for those who are involved in international business, tourism, culture and education. This book offers you four languages to learn, which will make you feel at homewherever you go, whether as a tourist or businessman.4) Learning several languages simultaneously or one by one will train and strengthen your memory and can help stave off such terrible diseases as Alzheimer's.5) If you have never studied several languages at once before and you like challenges, then you should definitely try it. Because it is a really entertaining and challenging task to do.In conclusion, I would like to sincerely thank you for preordering the book and your interest in it. I hope it will help youimprove your languages and become multilingual.




Lexicon Tetraglotton, an English-French-Italian-Spanish Dictionary: Whereunto is Adjoined a Large Nomenclature of the Proper Terms (in All the Four) Belonging to Several Arts and Sciences ... Divided Into Fiftie Two Sections; with Another Volume of the Choicest Proverbs in All the Said Toungs, (consisting of Divers Compleat Tomes) and the English Translated Into the Other Three ... Moroever, There are Sundry Familiar Letters and Verses Running All in Proverbs ... By the Labours, and Lucubrations of James Hovvell


Book Description




Love, Sex, Death and Words


Book Description

Love, sex, death, boredom, ecstasy, existential angst, political upheaval - the history of literature offers a rich and varied exploration of the human condition across the centuries. In this absorbing companion to literature's rich past, arranged by days of the year, acclaimed critics and friends Stephen Fender and John Sutherland turn up the most inspiring, enlightening, surprising or curious artefacts that literature has to offer. Find out why 16 June 1904 mattered so much to Joyce, which great literary love affair was brought to a tragic end on 11 February 1963 and why Roy Campbell punched Stephen Spender on the nose on 14 April 1949 in this sumptuous voyage through the highs and lows of literature's bejewelled past.




Fluent in 3 Months


Book Description

Benny Lewis, who speaks over ten languages—all self-taught—runs the largest language-learning blog in the world, Fluent In 3 Months. Lewis is a full-time "language hacker," someone who devotes all of his time to finding better, faster, and more efficient ways to learn languages. Fluent in 3 Months: How Anyone at Any Age Can Learn to Speak Any Language from Anywhere in the World is a new blueprint for fast language learning. Lewis argues that you don't need a great memory or "the language gene" to learn a language quickly, and debunks a number of long-held beliefs, such as adults not being as good of language learners as children.




The Loom of Language


Book Description

Here is an informative introduction to language: its origins in the past, its growth through history, and its present use for communication between peoples. It is at the same time a history of language, a guide to foreign tongues, and a method for learning them. It shows, through basic vocabularies, family resemblances of languages -- Teutonic, Romance, Greek -- helpful tricks of translation, key combinations of roots and phonetic patterns. It presents by common-sense methods the most helpful approach to the mastery of many languages; it condenses vocabulary to a minimum of essential words; it simplifies grammar in an entirely new way; and it teaches a language as it is actually used in everyday life.