Topics include word order, time, nouns, verbs, adjectives, word choices with verbs and adverbs, and letter writing. The simple format has one goal: quick mastery and growing confidence.Qin Xue Herzberg, a graduate of Beijing Normal University, has taught Chinese for decades and has been an upper-level Chinese professor at Calvin College for ten years.Larry Herzberg did his PhD work in Chinese and founded the Chinese language programs at Albion College and Calvin College.Qin and Larry live in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and are co-authors of the popular China Survival Guide as well as the recently released Chinese Proverbs and Popular Sayings.

    The author covers the most important points of Portuguese grammar in the clearest possible way, concentrating upon the expressions that you would be most likely to use. All grammatical rules are illustrated with phrases and sentences that you can incorporate directly into your working vocabulary, and hints are generously sprinkled throughout, showing you how to replace difficult constructions with simpler ones.Constantly drawing comparisons with English construction, it presents in logical order all the major aspects of Portuguese grammar: word order, forming questions, nouns and articles, adjectives and adverbs, possessives, demonstrative adjectives and pronouns, how to form negatives, personal pronouns, conjunctions and prepositions, how to conjugate verbs in the major tenses, prepositions and infinitives, and so on.This grammar does not assume prior knowledge of either Portuguese grammar or of grammatical terms: one section is devoted to the definition of all grammatical terms used in the book.This is not a simplified study, but rather a selected grammar for adult use that points out many time-saving short cuts. It can be used alone either as a beginner or as a refresher course in Portuguese grammar or it can be an ideal supplement to a phrase book or record course for home study or class use. Contains four appendices covering regular conjugations, orthographic-changing verbs, and irregular verbs. Glossary of grammatical terms. Index.

    Reading is one of the most effective and pleasant ways to learn a Foreign Language. By reading, students can learn vocabulary and grammar structures as part of a story, in context, without memorising lists of isolated words or studying endless grammar rules. However, La profe de español is not just a book to learn Spanish. It is also a good story. It is a funny, witty, enjoyable and engaging story. A story that will capture your attention from the beginning and, hopefully, will make you smile. It tells the story of María, a Spanish teacher who works in a really peculiar language school, where bizarre things happen. If you have ever been to a Spanish class, you will enjoy reading this book.

    Web Development With Clojure shows you how to apply Clojure programming fundamentals to build real-world solutions. You'll develop all the pieces of a full web application in this powerful language. If you already have some familiarity with Clojure, you'll learn how to put it to serious practical use. If you're new to the language, the book provides just enough Clojure to get down to business.You'll learn the full process of web development using Clojure while getting hands-on experience with current tools, libraries, and best practices in the language. You'll develop Clojure apps with both the Light Table and Eclipse development environments. Rather than frameworks, Clojure development builds on rich libraries. You'll acquire expertise in the popular Ring/Compojure stack, and you'll learn to use the Liberator library to quickly develop RESTful services. Plus, you'll find out how to use ClojureScript to work in one language on the client and server sides.Throughout the book, you'll develop key components of web applications, including multiple approaches to database access. You'll create a simple guestbook app and an app to serve resources to users. By the end, you will have developed a rich Picture Gallery web application from conception to packaging and deployment.This book is for anyone interested in taking the next step in web development.Q&A with Dmitri SotnikovWhy did you write Web Development with Clojure?When I started using Clojure, I found that it took a lot of work to find all the pieces needed to put together a working application. There was very little documentation available on how to organize the code, what libraries to use, or how to package the application for deployment. Having gone through the process of figuring out what works, I thought that it would be nice to make it easier for others to get started.What are the advantages of using a functional language?Over the course of my career, I have developed a great appreciation for functional programming. I find that it addresses a number of shortcomings present in the imperative paradigm. For example, in a functional language any changes to the data are created via revisions to the existing data. So they only exist in the local scope. This fact allows us to safely reason about individual parts of the program in isolation, which is critical for writing and supporting large applications.Why use Clojure specifically?Clojure is a simple and pragmatic language that is designed for real-world usage. It combines the productivity of a high-level language with the excellent performance seen in languages like C# or Java. It's also very easy to learn because it allows you to use a small number of concepts to solve a large variety of problems.If I already have a preferred web development platform, what might I get out of this book?If you're using an imperative language, you'll get to see a very different approach to writing code. Even if you're not going to use Clojure as your primary language, the concepts you'll learn will provide you with new ways to approach problems.Is the material in the book accessible to somebody who is not familiar with Clojure?Absolutely. The book targets developers who are already familiar with the basics of web development and are interested in learning Clojure in this context. The book introduces just enough of the language to get you productive and allows you to learn by example.

    With hundreds of new examples pulled from everyday life, Junk English 2 shows how our language has become so pliable and flabby that the more we read and hear, the less we know.

      Inspired by Daniel Menaker’s tenure at the New Yorker, this collection of comical, revelatory errors foraged from the wilds of everyday English comes with commentary by the author, illustrations by Roz Chast, and a foreword from Billy Collins.   During his time at the renowned magazine, Menaker happened across a superb spelling mistake: “The zebras were grazing on the African svelte.” Fascinated by the idea of unintentionally meaningful spelling errors, he began to see that these gaffes—neither typos nor auto-corrects—are sometimes more interesting than their straight-laced counterparts. Through examples he has collected over the course of his decades-long career as an editor and writer, he brings us to a new understanding of language—how it’s used, what it means, and what fun it can be.   Illustrated by the inimitable Roz Chast, with a foreword by former poet laureate Billy Collins, The African Svelte offers thoughtful and intelligent exit Jesus. With both uniquely happy accidents and familiar fumbles like “for all intensive purposes” and “doggy-dog world,” readers delighted by language will find themselves turning the pages with baited breath to discover fresh howlers that have them laughing off their dairy airs.

    We think nothing of jumping on a plane to travel to another country or continent. The most exotic locations are now destinations for mass tourism. Small business people are dealing across frontiers and language barriers like never before. The Internet brings different languages and cultures to our finger-tips. English, the hybrid language of an island at the western extremity of Europe seems to have an unrivalled position as an international medium of communication. But historically periods of cultural and economic domination have never lasted forever. Do we not lose something by relying on the wide spread use of English rather than discovering other languages and cultures? As citizens of this shrunken world, would we not be better off if we were able to speak a few languages other than our own? The answer is obviously yes. Certainly Steve Kaufmann thinks so, and in his busy life as a diplomat and businessman he managed to learn to speak nine languages fluently and observe first hand some of the dominant cultures of Europe and Asia. Why do not more people do the same? In his book The Way of The Linguist, A language learning odyssey, Steve offers some answers. Steve feels anyone can learn a language if they want to. He points out some of the obstacles that hold people back. Drawing on his adventures in Europe and Asia, as a student and businessman, he describes the rewards that come from knowing languages. He relates his evolution as a language learner, abroad and back in his native Canada and explains the kind of attitude that will enable others to achieve second language fluency. Many people have taken on the challenge of language learning but have been frustrated by their lack of success. This book offers detailed advice on the kind of study practices that will achieve language breakthroughs. Steve has developed a language learning system available online at: www.thelinguist.com.

    Because of the different spellings and conventions of American English, it has been unavailable here--until now. The new book is thoroughly revised, updated, expanded, and Americanized. It maintains the attractions of the original--friendly, easy-to-understand rules for improved writing. It's a quick read, and an easy reference for anybody who wants to communicate clearly with American English. The book is non-technical in its approach. It doesn't cover grammatical terms such as present perfect progressive or correlative conjunctions. It boils grammar and style into a few simple rules that will serve you well whether you are a journalist, a student, a novelist, a business executive, a blogger, or anybody else who would like to make effective use of written language.

    If you’re struggling to learn English and speak it well in your work, business, teaching or daily life this is the book for you."Master English FAST – An Uncommon Guide to Speaking Extraordinary English", by Dr Julian Northbrook, will get you started on the right track by showing you step-by-step what to do as an intermediate or advanced English learner to speak English as a second language at a very high level.This is Julian's most complete and comprehensive guide on the topic and is the recommended starting point for all of his English improvement books.

    This title provides a colorful history of Italy, from the founding of Rome onwards. It contains readings from contemporary literature. It includes exercises that challenge language comprehension and build reading skills.

    Preserving the general structure of the author's important study Language, Meaning and Context (1981), this text has been expanded in scope to introduce several topics that were not previously discussed, and to take account of new developments in linguistic semantics over the past decade.

    A profound satire on all aspects of bureaucracy, a new and impossibly difficult language, 'Ptydepe', is introduced into the office with the alleged function of improving communications by standardisation.

    In this book, Alda Sigmundsdóttir looks at the Icelandic language with wit and humour, and how it reflects the heart and soul of the Icelandic people and their culture. Many of the Icelanders' idioms and proverbs, their meaning and origins, are discussed, as is the Icelanders' love for their language and their attempts to keep it pure through the ongoing construction of new words and terminology. There is a section on Icelandic curse words as well as Icelandic slang, which is mostly derived from English. Throughout, this book deconstructs Icelandic vocabulary, and the often-hilarious, almost naive, ways in which words are made. This is a must-read book for anyone interested in the Icelandic people, their culture - and of course their language.