| Vendor | |
|---|---|
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Foundry
Claire Harris |
| Original language | |
| English | |
| Weblink | |
| http://www.babelnomore.com/ | |
BABEL NO MORE
The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners
Over the centuries, random individuals have experimented on themselves in order to answer the question, How many languages is it possible to learn? Those experiments have mostly been ignored, those individuals mocked as eccentrics with nothing to teach us about the brain, language, or our linguistic future. Until now.
BABEL NO MORE has sparked a global multilingual conversation about what it means to be multilingual in the contemporary world and about the emerging shapes of multilingualism. That conversation was not happening before the book was published. In the book, Erard acknowledges that speaking multiple languages is ordinary world-wide. But to really push the limits of the human brain, those who know 11 or more languages (also known as "hyperpolyglots") have to do, or be, something extraordinary. But what? And how to define it? How do we look for it? How to evaluate it when we find it? Whether one is learning English or some other language, the book describes the condition of language learning in the modern world, why the hard is hard and why the easy is easy, and about those who find it easier then most.
No matter how many languages one knows, there's always someone around the corner with more of them. Knowing more about those individuals can sharpen one's sense of the skills one does possess; it can also spark an inspiration to do more.
In the four months since the book's publication in January 2012, media outlets in the UK, China, India, Korea, Germany, Israel, Italy, Mexico, Colombia, Canada, Singapore, Brazil, and many other countries have all devoted stories in English, Chinese, German, Hebrew, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese to the English-language version of the book, or used its publication to talk about the multilingualism and language learning in their communities. These stories have appeared in influential media and publications from the BBC to Corriere della Sera to Semana, to two (!) newsletters of the European Parliament, from a piece written by Erard for Publishing Perspectives that was translated into half a dozen languages, and an excerpt from the book that is running soon in Courrier International, and beyond. In Babel No More, Erard explained this interest: "The hyperpolyglot makes visible the myriad strands of our linguistic destinies, whether we speak only one language or many."
No matter how many languages one knows, there's always someone around the corner with more of them. Knowing more about those individuals can sharpen one's sense of the skills one does possess; it can also spark an inspiration to do more.
In the four months since the book's publication in January 2012, media outlets in the UK, China, India, Korea, Germany, Israel, Italy, Mexico, Colombia, Canada, Singapore, Brazil, and many other countries have all devoted stories in English, Chinese, German, Hebrew, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese to the English-language version of the book, or used its publication to talk about the multilingualism and language learning in their communities. These stories have appeared in influential media and publications from the BBC to Corriere della Sera to Semana, to two (!) newsletters of the European Parliament, from a piece written by Erard for Publishing Perspectives that was translated into half a dozen languages, and an excerpt from the book that is running soon in Courrier International, and beyond. In Babel No More, Erard explained this interest: "The hyperpolyglot makes visible the myriad strands of our linguistic destinies, whether we speak only one language or many."
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Book
Published 2012-01-01 by Free Press |
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Book
Published 2012-01-01 by Free Press |