Babel No More: The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners b

Description: Babel No More by Michael Erard A "fascinating" (The Economist) dive into the world of linguistics that is "part travelogue, part science lesson, part intellectual investigation...an entertaining, informative survey of some of the most fascinating polyglots of our time" (The New York Times Book Review).In Babel No More, Michael Erard, "a monolingual with benefits," sets out on a quest to meet language superlearners and make sense of their mental powers. On the way he uncovers the secrets of historical figures like the nineteenth-century Italian cardinal Joseph Mezzofanti, who was said to speak seventy-two languages, as well as those of living language-superlearners such as Alexander Arguelles, a modern-day polyglot who knows dozens of languages and shows Erard the tricks of the trade to give him a dark glimpse into the life of obsessive language acquisition. With his ambitious examination of what language is, where it lives in the brain, and the cultural implications of polyglots pursuits, Erard explores the upper limits of our ability to learn and use languages and illuminates the intellectual potential in everyone. How do some people escape the curse of Babel--and what might the gods have demanded of them in return? FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Author Biography Michael Erard has graduate degrees in linguistics and rhetoric from the University of Texas at Austin. Hes written about language, linguists, and linguistics for Wired, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and many other publications and is a contributing writer for The Texas Observer and Design Observer. He is the author of Um... Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean. Review ""Babel No More" is a thorough delight. People always have questions for linguists about learning new languages and being bilingual, unaware of the peculiar fact that modern linguistics has nothing to do with learning how to speak new languages. This book finally gives an informed and even addictive guide to why some people pick up new languages so easily and how maybe you can too." - John McWhorter, Columbia University and "New Republic" Contributing Editor"A fascinating study of the unusual ability to learn multiple languages. This opens up a new area of research in the study of giftedness." - Ellen Winner, author of "Gifted Children, Myths and Realities""A fine addition to our favorite books about language...Captivating and illuminating, "Babel No More" is as much an absorbing piece of investigative voyeurism into superhuman feats as it is an intelligent invitation to visit the outer limits of our own cerebral potential." -"The Atlantic Monthly""Among the surprising qualities of "Babel No More, " Michael Erards globe-trekking adventure in search of the worlds virtuosos of language learning, is that a book dealing with language acquisition and polyglot linguistics can be so gripping. But indeed it is - part travelogue, part science lesson, part intellectual investigation, it is an entertaining, informative survey of some of the most fascinating polyglots of our time." -"The New York Times Book Review""An intrepid and savvy linguistic explorer, Michael Erard sets out to find the worlds masters of multiple languages. He discovers the best of them, and much more about their talents and brains, their motivation and habits, and their places in society. "Babel No More" brings the genius language learners to life. It will delight the enthusiasts who love the challenge of learning foreign languages, and will comfort the weary who dreaded facing Latin verb conjugations." - Deborah Fallows, author of "Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons in Life, Love, and Language""Erard gets beneath the surface of the hyperpolyglot, piercing the myth of perfect competence, to show the actual landscape of motives, obstacles and satisfactions that texture the world of the long-distance language-learner. [They] are revealed as a tantalizing tribe, individually reticent and even charming, as they offer their incomprehensible fluency to the world at large." - Nicholas Ostler, author of" The Last Lingua Franca" (2010)"In "Babel No More", Michael Erard has written the first serious book about the people who master vast numbers of languages... [Erard] approaches his topic with both wonder and a healthy dash of scepticism ... repeatedly pepper[ing] his text with such questions, feeling his way through his story as a thoughtful observer, rather than banging about like an academic with a theory to defend or a pitchman with a technique to sell...fascinating." - "The Economist""In this book, Michael Erard takes us on a captivating journey in search of hyperpolyglots- those rare and unique individuals who have mastered six or more languages. Part biography, part detective story, Erards spellbinding book offers us a window through which we may view the lives of these remarkable (and remarkably diverse) characters, telling their stories while trying to answer the fundamental question: "how did they do it?" "- Claude Cartaginese, Editor, "The Polyglot Project""Youll be awed by the incredible characters in this eye-opening book." - Joshua Foer, author of "Moonwalking with Einstein" Review Quote "Youll be awed by the incredible characters in this eye-opening book." Joshua Foer, author of Moonwalking with Einstein Excerpt from Book Babel No More Chapter 1 typical midtown Manhattan lunch crowd was packed into the Japanese restaurant around me. Behind the counter were the cooks who had produced the fragrant bowl of noodles I was now eating. The boss, an older Japanese man, read from waiters slips and shouted orders to his crew in Japanese. Two heavy-set, young Hispanic men, with tattooed arms and baseball hats worn backward, moved from pot to pot through the steam-filled space, ladling this, mixing that, all so smoothly I couldnt tell when they had finished one order and started another. In the quieter moments, they filled containers with chopped herbs and wiped down counters, talking to one another in Spanish and addressing a third cook, another Japanese man, in the pidgin English of the restaurant kitchen. Three languages, two of which werent native to the people speaking them, and the rhythm of their immaculate noodle ballet never stuck or slowed. Its amazing that the world runs so well, given that people use languages that they didnt grow up using, havent studied in schools, and in which theyve never been tested or certified. Yet it does. The noodle scene was probably reflected that same day hundreds of millions of times all over the world, in markets, restaurants, taxis, airports, shops, docks, classrooms, and streets, where men, women, and children of all skin colors and nationalities met with, ate with, bought and sold with, flirted with, boarded with, worked next to, served, introduced, greeted, cursed at, and asked directions from others who didnt speak their language. They did all this successfully, even though they might have spoken with accents, used simple words, made mistakes, paraphrased, and done other things that marked them as linguistic outsiders. Such encounters between non-native speakers have always textured human experience. In our era, these encounters are peaking, as the ties between language and geography have been weakened by migration, global business, cheap travel, cell phones, satellite TV, and the Internet. You may be familiar with the stories of languages, such as English or French or Latin, that are (or were) valuable cultural capital. This book tells another story, about a kind of cognitive capital, the stuff you bring to learning a new language. We once lived in bubbles, disconnected from the hubbub of the world. But more of these bubbles, where one or only a few languages used to be spoken, are connected each day, and more and more of us are passing between them. It is clear that multilingual niches are proliferating, and that monolinguals (such as myself) need to live and act multilingually. But thats not what Im writing about. Something else is happening as well: weve begun to want to naturally move among these bubbles unimpeded. Maybe youre a Dagestani woman living in Sharjah, one of the United Arab Emirates, who speaks Russian to your husband while he speaks Arabic to you. Maybe youre an American project manager leading phone meetings, in English, with engineers from China, India, Vietnam, and Nigeria. Maybe youre a Japanese speaker working next to two Hondurans in a noodle shop. Maybe youre a Beijinger finally realizing your dream to see the Grand Canyon. Ideas, information, goods, and people are flowing more easily through space, and this is creating a sensibility about language learning thats rooted more in the trajectories of an individuals life than in ones citizenship or nationality. Its embedded in economic demands, not the standards of schools and governments. That means that our brains also have to flow, to remain plastic and open to new skills and information. One of these skills is learning new ways to communicate. If you could alleviate peoples anxieties about language learning, youd solve what has shaped up to be the core linguistic challenge of the twenty-first century: How can I learn a language quickly? How well do I have to speak or write it for it to be useful? Whose standards will I have to meet? Will I ever be taken as native? And are my economic status, my identity, and my brain going to be changed? How adults learn languages is central to the emergence of English as a global lingua franca. In fact, the spread of English is the signal example of the reconsideration of "native-like" abilities in a language. In the coming decades, as many as two billion people will learn English as a second language. Some large fraction of them will be adults who are attracted by the prestige and utility that has made it the most popular language to learn over the past five decades.15 In China, the size of the English market has been valued at $3.5 billion, with as many as thirty thousand companies offering English classes.16 Its said that on a daily basis, as many as 70 percent of all interactions in English around the world occur between non-native speakers. This means that native English speakers have less control over determining the "proper" pronunciation and grammar of English. Some experts in China and Europe now advocate teaching standardized foreign Englishes that wouldnt fly in the languages home countries. English may be the only global language with more non-native speakers than native ones. However, it isnt the only additional language that people are learning in the $83 billion worldwide language-learning market--a figure that doesnt include spending on schools, teachers, and textbooks in educational systems.17 In the United States, 70 percent of college students in foreign-language classes study Spanish, French, and German, though Arabic, Chinese, and Korean are increasing in popularity.18 If you live in Brazil, youll learn Spanish, now compulsory in schools. If you live in East Asia, its Mandarin Chinese. In Europe, thanks to the European Union, its French and German. Hindi in India. Swahili in East Africa. Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea. But speaking like a native, at a moment when people need extra languages to make a living, is a standard to which adult speakers literally cannot afford to be held. Also, pumping new life into endangered or extinct languages depends on teaching them to people who have lost the moldable brains of youth. And when ancestral tongues die out, their communities dont become mute--children and adults learn to speak something else, often a language connected to the demise of their ancestral one. I say this not to glibly dismiss the issue but to point out the full scope of the problem. Also, exciting new technologies for translating speech and text between languages dont eliminate the need for people to learn languages. But they might enable multilingual transactions--for instance, by using free machine translation tools, I can get a rough gist of a web page in a language I dont know. The fragmentary, improvised, simultaneous use of several languages all at once that I witnessed in the noodle kitchen doesnt occur only in New York City, London (named in 1999 as the most multilingual city in the world), Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro, and other major world cities.19 No longer are borders, universities, and transportation hubs the only linguistic crossroads: this morning, my Twitter feed featured updates in French, Spanish, Korean, Mandarin, Italian, and English. That same feed reported fraudulent email scams, called 419s, that have begun to circulate in Welsh, German, and Swedish. Anyplace on the globe, you can surf through television channels in many languages; on the news channels, youll see political protesters half a world away carrying signs written in English. Pop stars learn other languages in which to sing songs, to win ears in more markets. And its not just in the flow of digital information that were encountering more languages. Signs on the streets in your city are appearing in more languages than they used to, and on any given day, your local hotel might be home to a trade delegation from Kazakhstan, Brazil, or Bulgaria. With so many languages to learn and so many reasons to learn them, its easy to miss the sheer humanity of the undertaking, which is evident in the biological equipment--brains, eyes, tongues, and hands--that every adult brings to the task. And if youve ever tried to learn a language, you already know that adult brains have limits (though not absolute ones) that constrain their efforts. As a result, people will speak their new languages with a lot of variety. They wont sound like native speakers. And yet they may need to speak new languages and dialects in order to survive in this economy. What should they do? Imagine a person who can learn languages very easily--someone who can navigate the multilingual hullabaloo by leaping language barriers with a single bound. Someone for whom learning a language is easier than relying on a translation. A role model, in other words, for these globalized times--someone who, like Mezzofanti, learns without effort, remembers huge amounts, and has amazing powers of recognition and recombination. Not a parrot. Not a computer. A human superlearner. One of Mezzofantis gifts was an ability to learn a new language in a remarkably short time, using neither dictionaries nor grammars. Even without a shared language to help him translate, Mezzofanti would ask a speaker to repeat the Lords Prayer until he grasped t Details ISBN1451628269 Author Michael Erard Short Title BABEL NO MORE Language English ISBN-10 1451628269 ISBN-13 9781451628265 Media Book Format Paperback DEWEY 401.93 Year 2012 Publication Date 2012-10-02 Subtitle The Search for the Worlds Most Extraordinary Language Learners Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2012-10-02 NZ Release Date 2012-10-02 US Release Date 2012-10-02 UK Release Date 2012-10-02 Pages 320 Publisher Simon & Schuster Imprint Simon & Schuster Illustrations Illustrations, black and white Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:45351900;

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