Lingo: Around Europe in Sixty Languages

Lingo has 60 short chapters exploring languages of Europe. Most languages also include some English loan words from the language as well as a "useful" word from that language that is not in English. The languages include many of the "big ones" (such as English and German) as well as many smaller ones, such as the extinct Dalmatian or the "back from the dead" Cornish.

The chapters are mostly fun explorations of unique aspects of a language, performed in a light-hearted manner. Chapters are grouped with subheadings such as "Intensive care" and "Werds, wirds, wurds". The language chapters are written in a variety of different styles with different goals. There is a lesson on learning cyrillic in the Russian chapter, while Hungarian is a treated as a counseling visit for language isolation. There is even a section on "identifying a language" entirely by the script. The entertaining book gave me the desire to explore little known languages, while also exposing the fuitlessless of trying to speak them fluently.