Barry M. Farber "How to Learn Any Language: Quickly, Easily, Inexpensively, Enjoyably and on Your Own"Citadel (2001-04-01) | ISBN 0806512717 | 184 Pages | PDF | ~1 Mb
This book belongs to a category of books that that tell you things that, if you thought about it for a few minutes, you could have figured out yourself. A type of book that is very popular in America. Much of the book chronicles Mr. Farber's exploits in learning to speak different languages. Some will find this interesting and inspiring. For others (judging by some posts here) it may seem like too much of an ego trip. I enjoyed it, but I was already doing virtually everything he talks about when it comes to learning languages.
This may be the most frequently told joke in the world – it’s repeated every day in almost every language:
“What do you call a person who speaks two languages?”
“Bilingual.”
“What do you call a person who speaks three languages?”
“Trilingual.”
“What do you call a person who speaks four languages?”
“Quadrilingual.”
“What do you call a person who speaks only one language?”
“An American!”
With your help this book can wipe that smile off the world’s face.
The reason Americans have been such notoriously poor language learners up to now is twofold:
1. We’ve never really had to learn other peoples’ languages before, and
2. Almost all foreign language instruction available to the average American has been until now (one hates to be cruel) worthless. “I took two years of high school French and four more years in college and I couldn’t even order orange juice in Marseilles” is more than a self effacing exaggeration. It’s a fact, a shameful, culturally impoverishing, economically dangerous, self defeating fact!
Modern commerce and communications have erased reason 1.
You and the method laid out in this book, working together, will erase reason 2.
It started for me when I learned that the Norwegian word for “squirrel” was acorn. It may have been spelled ekorn, but it was pronounced acorn. Then I learned that “Mickey Mouse” in Swedish is Mussie Pig. Again, the Swedish spelling varied, but so
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