Pimsleur Russian Level 1

Pimsleur Russian Level 1 Lessons 1-30 by Pimsleur

This is available for a 21 day checkout via Libby. Audible has the similar lessons in 5 lesson chunks. You can also purchase a CD from Amazon with 16 lessons. It looks like Libby is the best deal. However, you are supposed to do a lesson a day, and 30 spans more than the 21 day checkout. I started the lessons after it was checked out for a while. I did about a week's worth of lessons, then the loan expired. When the renewed one came, I had lost interest. I really need to listen at 1x speed to grasp it, and it feels like things take much too long at 1x.

As for the course, it seemed reasonable. It starts out with the very practle. A lot of "do you speak Russian?" conversation starters. Each lessons reviews the previous lessons and then builds on it some. It is specifically meant to be audio only. I felt I was learning some. When I didn't focus well, I did not make much progress. It is hard to listen to something for 30 minutes in a way you can stay focussed and speak things out loud.

The Life of Language

The Life of Language: The Fascinating Ways Words are Born, Live & Die by Sol Steinmetz and Barbara Ann Kipfer

Though this book is well structured, each chapter could easily be read independently. There are explorations of various ways that works enter the English language. Some words are formed by moving existing words to a new part of speech. Others are coined, come from foreign languages or come from proper names. There are many other sources for words. The book provides details on how words enter the language and provides abundant examples. English is especially flexible. While it has Anglo-Saxon roots, there have been various waves of strong influence, such as Viking and Norman French. The language does not have a governing body, and thus is very flexible in adding new words that are found useful. The global spread of the language helped to allow words get adopted from many sources. Words continue to be added from many sources, such as technology. Some words gradually lose popularity as they have "better" words for their use. (However, retronyms are common to refer to items such as "acoustic guitars" that need modern clarification.) 

Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It

Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It by Gabriel Wyner

Why can toddlers easily pick up a language, why adults struggle? Partially because we are doing it wrong. Toddlers are exposed to huge amounts of language. They are willing to try to make many mistakes. They try a lot. They learn the most common words and grammatical structures first. They don't have preconceived notions of sounds. As adults (or teens) we are often "too smart" for our own good and don't spend enough time practicing.

How can we resolve this? We have many tools available. Google image search and youtube videos can be helpful for informal exploration. RhinoSpike, Forvo and Foreign Service Institute are all useful free resources. The author also pitched his own Fluent Forever as a pay site. There is abundant media available in multiple languages. (Harry Potter was mentioned as a good example.) TV series are great because you get some familiarity. Music is not as good. (We often sing incorrect version of lyrics in our native language.)

Even with the best tools, we need to devote work and practice. It does take time. Full immersion is the best way to learn. Learning the most frequent vocabulary first is the best way to go. It lets us gradually build on that as we learn more. Speaking without an accent requires some "unlearning". Each language has its own phonemes that may differentiate in ways your mind is not used to. Practice and experience help. The author also encourages flash cards as well as some memory associations. Learning a language takes time and exposure.

Word Workout: Building a Muscular Vocabulary in 10 Easy Steps

Word Workout: Building a Muscular Vocabulary in 10 Easy Steps by Charles Harrington Elster

This book is built as a study guide to help you learn new vocabulary. You could use it that way. However, I found it worked great reading straight through. It presented a variety of words in context with proper pronunciation and a look at their history. Some of these are fairly common words. Others are rarities. The author is strongly opinionated as to the elimination of "redundancy" in speech. While it may be fine if everyone is "in" on the rare word, redundancy does help when you want to drop a rare word and still let those not in the know understand. Being concise can sometimes be the enemy of being understood.

In Other Words: An Illustrated Miscellany of the World's Most Intriguing Words and Phrases

In Other Words: An Illustrated Miscellany of the World's Most Intriguing Words and Phrases by Christopher J. Moore

No two languages are exactly alike. Each language has some words that cannot be directly translated to words in other languages. This short illustrated book explores explores "untranslatable" sayings from other languages. Some are individual words, while others are longer sayings. The words also provide some insight into the nature of the language and people. Some words (like "nirvana") have migrated into usage within English, while others remain obscure in English. 

Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture

Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture by Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Aiden

The Google book-scanning project gives us easy access to a great library of books and can help us understand the evolution of language. The authors were able to analyze how words changed and when they changed. Many irregular verbs have slowly gone out of style. The least used ones are the first to regularize, while the more common ones are slower to change. We can also see how words like babysitter gradually evolve.

The describe their findings as well as the work they have gone through to be able to do the research. There are plenty of great nuggets in the book. However, the writing, while personable comes up lacking.

Louder Than Words: The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning

How does language work? Does the human brain always produce a real-world representation of what is being discussed? There are a few theories that have been used. They all seem to have their good and bad points. It is also interesting how our mind feels in details that are not present in the actual words. We are able to construct a more full understanding from a small number of words.

The mind is good at simulating activity. Athletes can "practice" just by envisioning in their mind what they need to do. (Though they need to do it right - if they practice striking out, it will just help them striking out.) The brain can do just about everything in "dry run" mode before hitting the actual movement.

Ghosts in the Machine: The Babel Trilogy, Book 2

How would a super advanced civilization manage themselves? Would they limit themselves to mere bodies, when they could have a better way of existence? Ghosts in the Machine explores a future earth. There is a religious cult associated with volcanoes. There is also something going on with language. Some people have this ability to communicate in different languages. The architects appear as somewhat godlike creatures. What do they have to do with languages and volcanoes? There are some interesting points to ponder in this book, but no real conclusions.

Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

Do languages influence the way people think and act? This is a controversial topic in linguistics. Past attempts to look at this have been riddled with "supremacist" tendencies to show that "inferior" languages were used by inferior minds. This lead to a dismissal of most of these arguments. 

Another problem with comparing languages is the similarity of most of the languages being compared. The commonly studied Western European language have many elements in common. Much larger differences are found in aboriginal languages (many of which are dying out.)

One example given in the book was that of positioning. Positions are typically given relative to the person (left, right) or absolute (east, west). In English, we will switch between the two based on the situation. However, there are some languages that exclusively use absolute positions. This results in changes in how they view the world. They tend to have better ability to know the positioning wherever they are.

Other examples of differences are with gender. Some languages have strong genders, while others do not. German has gender for everything, but the gender does not necessarily correspond to what we would think of as the sexual gender. This can lead to some rich understanding in poetry that is missed when translated to English. There have also been studies showing impacts in reaction time with gender matching the appropriate gender.

Color is another element that differs from language to language. Some languages have common words for more colors, while others have fewer unique colors. While people can distinguish between the different colors, those without language distinction are more likely to mentally group the colors together.

This book scratches the surface of the impacts of language in thought. While any language could theoretically express any thought, some can do it much easier than other. While this is controversial in the realm of spoken languages, it is a regular argument in computer programming languages. Different languages are better for accomplishing certain tasks. Programs written in languages have different reputations. Languages like C# and VisualBasic tend to attract immature programmers, while C and Assembly are written by masters. Perl is great and text processing, but horrible at reusing. Even though C, Java and JavaScript have a similar base level syntax built on curly braces, they are all very different and used for different programs. Are there significant differences in human languages?

Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

While there are plenty of books chronicallying the rise and fall of empires, this book focuses on the languages that often (but not always) rise and fall with them. Often the imperial power will impose its language on the conquered. However, there are cases where a different languages is adopted for convenience. The imperial language may come to be the common language spoken by everyone. Or, it may merely be used by the elite, while the local language continues to be used for everyday speech. Sometimes the language may spread by people using it as a "prestige" or a language of culture. A common tongue my splinter into local dialects, or a single dialect may rise up to become a common tongue. Religion may cause a certain language to maintain prestige.

The book is very long and full of examples throughout history. It follows a mostly chronological history of the world through languages. Languages like Sanskrit, Hebrew and Arabic have been tied to religions and have had long histories. Mandarin Chinese is tied to a large empire and has a long history. By using pictographs, many different dialects can easily communicate with each other. English has had a relative short history, yet has become an important language. It had barely come into being when the country was conquered by the Norman French. They attempted to put their language in place for administration, yet left the local language for the commoners. Eventually English came back, and became well used in the colonies. English supplanted the multitude of local indigenous American languages. (In part due to the people dying an due to the many different languages.) The greater number of colonists helped English dominate the other European languages. Spanish and Portuguese had similar fates in their empires (though for somewhat different reasons.) The Dutch had a vast empire, but very little language staying power. They did, however, help give birth to the Malay/Indonesian language. 

France became an important tongue in Europe and a large lengua franca. This was due in part to the early unification of France. The country had a standardized language and also had a more unified environment and power in their country. However, in the last century, French has lost the position of the "global language" to Islam. 

Arabic became extremely common due to the connection with Islam.

The book focuses only on some of the larger languages. There are occasional generations on reasons for the rise and fall of languages, with analysis of a few common reasons. However, the main focus is on exploring the history.

The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention

Tape recorders did not exist in the time of cavemen, making it difficult to know how language started. We can piece together some clues from written texts. However, by the time these texts came into being, language had already been around for some time. We can, however, look at how language has changed.

Often words start out with nouns used to represent a certain thing. Later, these may be adapted to refer to a property of the things. (For instance "orange" refers to both the fruit and the color orange.) Verbs come out of actions related to things. Grammatical constructs arise from different words. These are often simplified as they become more common. ("gonna" is an example today.)

In the past, people would often refer to a rise or decline of language. However, language often changes in more of a loop. Commonly used words may see the sound collapse. Later emphasis may be added bringing back a greater sound. A words may be combined and added, and then later separated. Sounds may change based on patterns of similarity or ease of pronunciation.

This book has an interesting exploration of how language is changing, has changed and may have changed in the past.

Every Word Is a Bird We Teach to Sing: Encounters with the Mysteries and Meanings of Language

Daniel Tammet has had interesting experiences with languages. In this book he meanders around to provide various language anecdotes.

He starts with his experience teaching English. He was not a fun of the "boring" way that language is taught as a second language and seeks to make it more interesting. Some of this interesting language is grammatically correct nonsense, but it helps those to learn langauges.

He goes on to look at different languages. There is different meaning that comes out of different languages. There are also languages like Manx that are barely surviving.

There were many interesting bits, but the book seemed to lack a cohesive story.

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.

Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages

 Sometimes, you can just judge a book by the cover. I saw this book on the shelf at the library and was immediately intrigued. The book did not disappoint.

You only need to know 20 of the thousands of world languages to be able to converse with half the earth's population. Alas, learning to speak that many fluently is beyond the skills of mere mortals. However, understanding a bit about the languages spoken can help to understand the people.

The author explores each of these top 20 languages. For each, there is a brief summary of the grammar, sounds, loanwords, exports, sounds, scripts and number of speakers. Then there is a discussion of the language. Or more accurately, a discussion of some topic that is in some way related to the language. 

The author's feeble attempts to learn Vietnamese consume most of that chapter. The various tones and sounds are only the first challenges of learning the language. (It is also a language with very few second language learners.) For German, we learn about a study of the "weirdness" of languages. German does score very high on the weirdness scale - but so do English and Spanish. Perhaps there are other reasons the language is difficult.

Japanese gets two chapters, one in the order where it ranks, and then a bonus one after Chinese. The initial one discusses the rules for "women's Spanish". The bonus one goes into explanation of why the Japanese writing system is so difficult. The Japanese chose to adapt the Chinese characters for their language. However, the Japanese language was so different, that they needed additional indicators to help make it intelligible. Thus hiragana (and katakana and romaji.) Using the Latin alphabet alone could make things a lot easier, but the writing system is already deeply ingrained in society and thus remains.

Some languages have experienced revolutionary change. Turkish suddenly switch to the latin alphabet. And that was only the begging. There were multiple attempts to "purify" the language to use just Turkish words. This resulted in massive changes to the vocabulary. (And included a number of "fake etymologies" to justify various words.)

For Javanese, the complexity was its downfall. It includes multiple degrees of formality, with some words being totally different depending on the formality. This may have become a strong part of the language during colonial rule. (The higher-status locals may have encouraged it as a way of keeping their higher position.) When it came time to choose a national language, the simpler Malay (Indonesian) was chosen instead of the the more dominant Javanese. 

Indian languages occupy multiple positions in the top 20 and have had much more language-related contemporary conflicts. Most Indian languages have their own script. To the uninitiated, they look like similar "hanging letters", but they are about as similar as Latin, Greek and Cyrillic scripts. There is strong identity associated with local language, and having a unique script is often seen as an important part of this. In the case of Urdu and Hindi, it is essentially the same language, with the Muslim Urdu written in Arabic script, while Hindi uses the Indian Devanagari script. In Sri Lanka, a large scale civil war took place between speakers of different languages.

The languages of European colonialists make up a large number of the to 20. The book explores the reasons why small Portuguese ended up sticking around in many of the colonies, while similarly small Dutch was mostly superseded by other languages. English and Spanish also hold huge roles in the former colonies. French still has some usage in former colonial holdings. However, the use of French as a lingua franca has faded.

The languages dominant in the world today are in different stages of their usage and dominance. Persian and Turkish both had periods of imperial dominance in the distant past. In Asia, there are many languages spoken by a large nation state. In Africa, there are a large number of languages spoken in close proximity. Often a "very important language" is used for official or external communication purposes. (This language is often English or Swahili.) The relationship of people with their language differs significantly across the world. English is dominant as a lingua franca today despite many quirks. What impact will AI have on languages? There are plenty of interesting things to explore.

The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

The pool in "Gene Pool", "Pooling resource" and similar usages is not related to a "Swimming pool" at all, but instead comes from the French word for chicken. Etymologicon has an exploitative, stream of conscious style that works perfectly for the subject matter. The author takes some words and gradually moves through their evolution, and in the process runs into some other interesting words. These are explored and then related to something else. Each individual group of words is an interesting read on its own. The masterwork, however, is being able to relate them all together. He also takes time to delve into some linguistic influenced history. (The Anglo-Saxon takeover of the Celt lands seemed to be an all-out attack - or peaceful coexistence. Indo-Europeans spread out in many directions with their language.) The history leaves some interesting names that sometimes are merely multiple versions of the same word in different languages. (Some placenames would be translated "Hill Hill Hill".) Neverland comes from Peter Pan by way of a part of Australia where the blacks and whites never had contact. The Starbucks name came from Moby Dick. Melville adopted a common name that came about from the Viking invasion before undergoing a number of spelling changes. Some words have changed their meaning over time. Gymnastics comes from the Greek meaning "to exercise naked" It has evolved into a specific type of athletic activity that is now done with clothes on.
There are many other great etymologies in this well written book. I would love for the author to write further follow ups.

The Pun Also Rises

There is actually a "punning" contest where contestants battle each other to make the most (and best) puns in a given topic. Some puns may be reaching, but the ability to continue the wordplay must take a lot of work. Puns have an interesting history. Even the definition of "pun" is clouded uncertainty, with many possible origins, but none fully convincing. Puns today are often degraded as lower forms of humor. However, they were not always thought of as funny. Creating and understanding puns requires a significant understand of the nuances of language. Some puns rely on homophones, while others rely on similar sounds or different meanings of different words. Understanding of the subject matter may be required for an understanding.

The Pun Also Rises would be best described as a language history. It delves into the history of the pun (dating back to ancient times), as well as its common use today. Even as it is degraded in comedy circles, it is still extensively used elsewhere. (From songs, to newspaper headlines to boat names, puns are everywhere.) The author also has a masterstroke for using puns, filling the book with subtle wordplay that does not get in the way of the story. I found myself with new appreciating for the pun as well as the "art" of punning.

Alphabet Juice

[October 2009] The audiobook is performed quite well. However, the content is merely ho-hum. The author goes through the alphabet, meandering on word meanings, sounds and other random tidbits. A few bits are interesting. Some may be interesting to a certain audience. Others, are just plain boring. As a printed book, this would probably go over better as something sitting in the bathroom. Every section small word discussion stands on its own. However, even in print, the content is rather pedestrian, being neither very scholarly, nor very accessible to anyone but grammar nerds.

Memrise

I have been using the Memrise website for foreign language learning. It allows you to "plant" words and grow vocabulary. For chinese it allows you to practice both characters and pronunciation. It is currently in beta, but it works pretty well. (I actually like the beta version better than the "preview" 1.0 version.)

It is best for learning new words. When trying to review words that you learned outside of memrise, you have to go through a slow learning process. (However, this does work well for words that you learned a while ago and have forgotten.)

The History of the English Language

These lectures spend a long time covering the origins and evolution of the English language. The emphasis is on the various dialects and languages that "compete" to become standard English usage.  The attention paid to "pre-English" history is well done, and makes this one of the better histories of the language. There is also interesting discussion on some of the various dialects of English and how they grew in to being. There is, surprisingly, very little coverage of the British empire and English as a global language. However, this is somewhat of a relief, since it allows the focus to be on the language itself.

Ancestral voices: Decoding Ancient languages

This book goes through some of the major "decipherments" of ancient language. It covers them in the large historical basis, with stories starting centuries ago with the first hints of the "lost language". (And it is good that they start a while back, since the book itself is a few decades old.)

The author can be verbose, with a chatty, flowery language (even though it is a rather short book.) I have read better books that cover most of the same basic matter. However, this one does go in to more detail of the "long-range" history of identifying and then cracking ancient languages.