A fun ride through the world's biggest languages
4 stars
This book presents a handful of trivia and anecdotes for the world's 20 languages with the most speakers. It might be a showcase of Korean's onomatopoeia, Javanese's honorific system or - of course - Chinese's unique writing system. The trivia and anecdotes are something interesting, sometimes a bit boring.
This book is great if it's the first book you're reading about the world's languages, to get you interested for more language learning or linguistics. If you're already a passionate language lover, you're likely going to walk away from this book slightly disappointed that it didn't give you more thorough showcases of its languages. It's just an appetizer in that way.
I did roll my eyes a bit at describing specific language features as impossibly difficult to learn, and I hope this book doesn't encourage the kind of adversarial relationship many people have with foreign language learning. I'm glad, …
This book presents a handful of trivia and anecdotes for the world's 20 languages with the most speakers. It might be a showcase of Korean's onomatopoeia, Javanese's honorific system or - of course - Chinese's unique writing system. The trivia and anecdotes are something interesting, sometimes a bit boring.
This book is great if it's the first book you're reading about the world's languages, to get you interested for more language learning or linguistics. If you're already a passionate language lover, you're likely going to walk away from this book slightly disappointed that it didn't give you more thorough showcases of its languages. It's just an appetizer in that way.
I did roll my eyes a bit at describing specific language features as impossibly difficult to learn, and I hope this book doesn't encourage the kind of adversarial relationship many people have with foreign language learning. I'm glad, though, that the author took a clear stand against the myth that English is a lingua franca because of some intrinsic "easiness".