But nothing prepared her for the surprises of learning Mandarin, China's most common language, or the intensity of living in Shanghai and Beijing. Over time, she realized that her struggles and triumphs in studying the language of her adopted home provided small clues to deciphering the behavior and habits of its people,and its culture's conundrums. As her skill with Mandarin increased, bits of the language—a word, a phrase, an oddity of grammar—became windows into understanding romance, humor, protocol, relationships, and the overflowing humanity of modern China. Fallows learned, for example, that the abrupt, blunt way of speaking that Chinese people sometimes use isn't rudeness, but is, in fact, a way to acknowledge and honor the closeness between two friends. She learned that English speakers' trouble with hearing or saying tones—the variations in inflection that can change a word's meaning—is matched by Chinese speakers' inability not to hear tones, or to even take a guess at understanding what might have been meant when foreigners misuse them. In sharing what she discovered about Mandarin, and how those discoveries helped her understand a culture that had at first seemed impenetrable, Deborah Fallows's Dreaming in Chinese opens up China to Westerners more completely, perhaps, than it has ever been before.

    aIam reading the OED so you donat have to. If you are interested in vocabulary that is both spectacularly useful and beautifully useless, read on...a So reports Ammon Shea, the tireless, word-obsessed, and more than slightly masochistic author of Reading the OED, The word loveras Mount Everest, the OED has enthralled logophiles since its initial publication 80 years ago. Weighing in at 137 pounds, it is the dictionary to end all dictionaries. In 26 chapters filled with sharp wit, sheer delight, and a documentarianas keen eye, Shea shares his year inside the OED, delivering a hair-pulling, eye-crossing account of reading every word, and revealing the most obscure, hilarious, and wonderful gems he discovers along the way.

    With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution. The Language Instinct received the William James Book Prize from the American Psychological Association and the Public Interest Award from the Linguistics Society of America. This edition includes an update on advances in the science of language since The Language Instinct was first published.

    This new primer by N. Clayton Croy offers a succinct, single-volume introduction to Biblical Greek that has already been tested in classrooms around the country.Taking a primarily deductive approach to teaching Biblical Greek, this volume assumes that students will have no prior knowledge in Greek. Divided into 32 separate lessons, each containing a generous number of exercises, the text leads students from the Greek alphabet to a working understanding of the language of the Bible.

    Problem-sets build both foundational and advanced skills. Includes online access to simulated practice exams and bonus bank of Sentence Correction questions. Includes most up-to-date test information.

    Useful for those interested in understanding and utilizing American Sign Language (ASL), this phrase book serves as a reference tool and a study guide.

    Also includes new information on black and white photography techniques.

    Impress your boss with Occupational Latin (Lingua Latina Occupationi); sell your product with Sales Latin (Lingua Latina Mercatoria); flirt with your classics professor with Sensual Latin (Lingua Latina Libidinosa); look like the hipster you are with Pop-Cultural Latin (Lingua Latina Popularis); survive the holidays with Familial Latin (Lingua Latina Domestica) and Celebrational Latin (Lingua Latina Festiva). It's all here, whether you're a student of the language or just want to talk like one.From cocktail-party banter to climbing the corporate ladder to online dating, Latin for All Occasions features dozens of handy sections, including Las Vegas Latin, Latin for Golfers, Latin for Breakups, Latin for the Politically Correct, and much, much more. In one easy-to-use volume, National Lampoon founder Henry Beard presents hundreds of listings rendered in grammatically accurate classical Latin, with a foolproof pronunciation guide.Who says Latin is a dead language? From the comic genius who brought us X-Treme Latin comes Latin for All Occasions, guaranteed to help readers delight their friends, insult their enemies, and elevate the public discourse.

    It has been edited with the needs of English-speaking users in mind, whether students, teachers, business people, or casual linguists, and special care has been taken at each stage of its compilation including the selection of entry words and their equivalents, the wording of the detailed explanations of Japanese words, the choice of example sentences, and even its functional page design to maximize its usefulness. What is furigana and why is it so important? Furigana refers to the small kana that are printed above or alongside kanji to show their pronunciation. With furigana superscripts, the beginner who is familiar with hiragana and katakana is able to read even the most difficult and obscure kanji at a glance. Other dictionaries either provide little or no guide to kanji readings or romanize some or all of the Japanese words and sentences. In the past, romanized dictionaries were of some value to students using textbooks that contained no Japanese script. Now, however, an increasing number of influential curricula around the world are based on a rationale and methodology that demands the introduction of hiragana and katakana from the earliest stages. Learners and their teachers using such curricula will inevitably feel more comfortable with a dictionary such as Kodansha s Furigana Japanese Dictionary, one that shows the pronunciation of kanji with a familiar and authentic kana script. Combining Kodansha's Furigana Japanese-English Dictionary (1995) and Kodansha's Furigana English-Japanese Dictionary (1996) in one portable. affordable, and user-friendly volume, this dictionary has the following unique features: o A basic vocabulary of 30,000 entries covers the most frequently used English and Japanese words o Special treatment has been given to hundreds of words, names, and phrases of special relevance to English-speaking students of Japanese o Semantic and usage differences between Japanese words and expressions are explained in clear English o Thousands of example sentences and phrases illustrate how Japanese words are used in context o Special information is provided on verb conjugations, formality, and other aspects of Japanese grammar and usage

    Featuring topics from the Copernican Revolution to the mind-boggling theories of recent science, The Astronomy Book uses flowcharts, graphics, and illustrations to help clarify hard-to-grasp concepts and explain almost 100 big astronomical ideas. Covering the biographies of key astronomers through the ages such as Ptolemy, Galileo, Newton, Hubble, and Hawking, The Astronomy Book details their theories and discoveries in a user-friendly format to make the information accessible and easy to follow.Series Overview: Big Ideas Simply Explained series uses creative design and innovative graphics along with straightforward and engaging writing to make complex subjects easier to understand. With over 7 million copies worldwide sold to date, these award-winning books provide just the information needed for students, families, or anyone interested in concise, thought-provoking refreshers on a single subject.

    TOBIRA promotes language learning through the use of multimedia materials and establishes a support system via the Internet so that learners outside Japan have access to a Japanese language environment.Chapter 1: The Geography of JapanChapter 2: Speech Styles in JapaneseChapter 3: Japanese TechnologyChapter 4: Sports in JapantChapter 5: Japanese FoodChapter 6: The Japanese and ReligionChapter 7: Japanese Pop CultureChapter 8: Japanese Traditional Performing ArtsChapter 9: Education in JapanChapter 10: Japan's Convenience StoresChapter 11: The History of JapanChapter 12: Traditional Japanese CraftsChapter 13: The Japanese and NatureChapter 14: Japanese PoliticsChapter 15: The Future of Your Country and the World

    And The Lively Art of Writing is the perfect guide to the mastery of this essential skill. It will answer all of your questions, provide you with the best techniques, and offer important information about:- Choosing a subject- Working with words- The sound of sentences- The power of paragraphs- Essentials of style- Essays, theses, and term papers- And much, much more...

    This delightful anthology demonstrates just how rewarding the aphorism can be and how brilliantly the aphorist can illuminate a hidden truth or reveal the ironies of life. Whatever the situation, whatever the mood, the reader will find in this international array of aphorisms just the right words to give his or her feeling pungent expression. The classic aphorists--La Bruy�re, Nietzsche, both Samuel Butlers, La Rochefoucault, Emerson--are here in abundance, as are the philosophers from the Greeks of Paul Val�ry, the social commentators from Edmund Burke to Walter Benjamin. Statesmen and scientists, Olympians and gadflies, mystics and boulevardiers--this collection brings together the most diverse figures, drawing freely on ancients and moderns, on the widsom of East and West, juxtaposing viewpoints as different as those of Jean Cocteau and George Orwell, Ambrose Bierce and Marcus Aurelius, Lord Chesterfield and Elias Canetti. Profound, provocative, and vastly entertaining, The Oxford Book of Aphorisms will lure the reader back to its pages time and again. The book is fully indexed, and wherever possible, sources, dates, and complete names are supplied.

    What do an Italian cardinal, a Connecticut blacksmith, and a German diplomat have in common with an MIT linguist, a Hungarian translator, and a Scottish church organist? They were all "hyperpolyglots," "language superlearners," or "massive multilinguals." In Babel No More, Michael Erard delves into the lives and minds of these intriguing individuals both past and present and discovers the upper limit of the human ability to learn, speak, and remember languages. Hyperpolyglots - people who, by one definition, can use six or more languages - are fascinating not simply because what they do is out of the ordinary. Rather, their accomplishments serve as a point of reference for the rest of us; in some ways they are what the author calls a gifted neural tribe, absorbing language for reasons, and with methods, that few people would emulate. But they are also marked by simple, if dogged, methods: the most prolific multilingual in history, Cardinal Mezzofanti, used flashcards. Taken together, their pursuits present a natural experiment into the limits and the nature of memory and language. Part scientific detective story, part travelogue, part valentine to anyone who's ever hoped to sprechen or parler something other than a mother tongue, Babel No More takes us all over the world to look at language learning in an entirely new way.

    Now more visual and even easier to use and understand, EasyWriter offers practical help with research and documentation and expanded coverage of academic writing for students in all disciplines.