You are quickly introduced to grammatical rules and concepts in order of importance, which you can build on as you progress through the book. You will also learn more than 300 verbs, chosen by their frequency of use. Numerous exercises and engaging readings help you quickly build your speaking and comprehension prowess.

    Drawing on his breakthrough research in comparative neuroscience, Terrence Deacon offers a wealth of insights into the significance of symbolic thinking: from the co-evolutionary exchange between language and brains over two million years of hominid evolution to the ethical repercussions that followed man's newfound access to other people's thoughts and emotions.Informing these insights is a new understanding of how Darwinian processes underlie the brain's development and function as well as its evolution. In contrast to much contemporary neuroscience that treats the brain as no more or less than a computer, Deacon provides a new clarity of vision into the mechanism of mind. It injects a renewed sense of adventure into the experience of being human.

    Now with a built-in Resource Manual and Study Guide, Language, Culture, and Society is the teaching text for the linguistic anthropology course.

    It consists of seventy lessons in s'ix volumes, covering beginning to intermediate levels, for three years of instruction. It has been compiled under the guidance of the new NOTCFL Syllabus and in consultation with the HSK Guicleline. The objective of this series is to develop the student's ability to communicate using Chinese through the study of language structure, language function, and related cultural knowledge along with the training of listening, speaking, reading and writing skills. In order to make the study of Chinese easier and more interesting, this textbook has the following features: ?The student will be in the cultural setting of Chinese society with several international students, Ding Libo, Lin Na and Ma Dawei. Through many interesting experiences, the student will not only learn authentic Chinese but also understand Chinese society and culture. ?The instruction of functional items is emphasized. The student will learn to use Chinese from the very beginning of the learning process. ?Attention is paid to the instruction of pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary and discourse and a gradual increase in difficulty, orderly advances and multiple repeats are stessed along with the usage of four large cycles to help students understand the language structure of Chinese. ?A new method of teaching Chinese characters is utilized to help students read and write intriguing characters. ?Combined instruction of the four basic skills, listening, speaking, reading and writing, is emphasized. ?Offering tremendous flexibility, the instructional materials are suitable for users at different starting points and with different goals. ?Abundant practice materials are supplied for the student to use inside and outside the classroom. ?Each volume comes with a student's Workbook and an Instructor's Manual along with audio cassette and CD-ROM.

    His previous books, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Blank Slate, have catapulted him into the limelight as one of today's most important and popular science writers. Now, in The Stuff of Thought, Pinker marries two of the subjects he knows best: language and human nature. The result is a fascinating look at how our words explain our nature. What does swearing reveal about our emotions? Why does innuendo disclose something about relationships? Pinker reveals how our use of prepositions and tenses taps into peculiarly human concepts of space and time, and how our nouns and verbs speak to our notions of matter. Even the names we give our babies have important things to say about our relations to our children and to society. With his signature wit and style, Pinker takes on scientific questions like whether language affects thought, as well as forays into everyday life: why is bulk e-mail called spam and how do romantic comedies get such mileage out of the ambiguities of dating? The Stuff of Thought is a brilliantly crafted and highly readable work that will appeal to fans of readers of everything from The Selfish Gene and Blink to Eats, Shoots & Leaves.

    Egyptomania spread throughout Europe with their return, and the quest to decipher the hieroglyphs began in earnest, for it was understood that fame and fortune awaited the scholar who succeeded. In rural France, Jean-Francois Champollion, the brilliant son of an impoverished bookseller, became obsessed with breaking the code of the ancient Egyptians. At sixteen years of age he decided that he would dedicate his life to the decipherment of hieroglyphs. Amid political turmoil in France caused by Napoleon's meteoric rise and catastrophic fall, Champollion was hounded, exiled, and even charged with treason, yet he continued to strive for the key to the ancient texts. In 1812, Champollion made the decisive breakthrough, beating his closest rival, English physician Thomas Young, to the prize and becoming the first person to be able to read the ancient Egyptian language in well over a thousand years. The Keys of Egypt is a true story of adventure, obsession, and triumph over extreme adversity.

    

    It will help them speak standard American English with clarity, confidence, and accuracy. Specific exercises concentrate on vowel sounds, problematic consonants such as V, W, B, TH, and the American R, employ correct syllable stress, link words for smoother speech flow, use common word contractions such as won't instead of will not, and more. Additional topics that often confuse ESL students are also discussed and explained. They include distinguishing between casual and formal speech, homophones (for instance, they're and there), recognizing words with silent letters (comb, receipt, and others), and avoiding embarrassing pronunciation mistakes, such as mixing up party and potty. Students are familiarized with many irregular English spelling rules and exceptions, and are shown how such irregularities can contribute to pronunciation errors. A native language guide references problematic accent issues of 13 different language backgrounds. Correct lip and tongue positions for all sounds are discussed in detail. Enclosed with the book are four compact discs that use male and female voices to coach correct American-style pronunciation.

    Using translation as his lens, David Bellos shows how much we can learn about ourselves by exploring the ways we use translation, from the historical roots of written language to the stylistic choices of Ingmar Bergman, from the United Nations General Assembly to the significance of James Cameron's Avatar.Is That a Fish in Your Ear? ranges across human experience to describe why translation sits deep within us all, and why we need it in so many situations, from the spread of religion to our appreciation of literature; indeed, Bellos claims that all writers are by definition translators. Written with joie de vivre, reveling both in misunderstanding and communication, littered with wonderful asides, it promises any reader new eyes through which to understand the world. In the words of Bellos: "The practice of translation rests on two presuppositions. The first is that we are all different: we speak different tongues, and see the world in ways that are deeply influenced by the particular features of the tongue that we speak. The second is that we are all the same—that we can share the same broad and narrow kinds of feelings, information, understandings, and so forth. Without both of these suppositions, translation could not exist. Nor could anything we would like to call social life. Translation is another name for the human condition."

    Teaching Pronunciation offers current and prospective teachers of English a comprehensive treatment of pronunciation pedagogy, drawing on current theory and practice. An overview of teaching issues from the perspective of different methodologies and second language acquisition research is provided. It has a thorough grounding in the sound system of North American English, and contains insights into how this sound system intersects with listening, morphology, and spelling. It also contains diagnostic tools, assessment measures, and suggestions for syllabus design. Follow-up exercises guide teachers in developing a range of classroom activities within a communicative framework.

    Driver, and Charles Briggs--spent over twenty years researching, writing, and preparing "The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon." Since it first appeared in the early part of the twentieth century, BDB has been considered the finest and most comprehensive Hebrew lexicon available to the English-speaking student. Based upon the classic work of Wilhelm Gesenius, the "father of modern Hebrew lexicography," BDB gives not only dictionary definitions for each word, but relates each word to its Old Testament usage and categorizes its nuances of meaning. BDB's exhaustive coverage of Old Testament Hebrew words, as well as its unparalleled usage of cognate languages and the wealth of background sources consulted and quoted, render BDB and invaluable resource for all students of the Bible.

    This book provides a brief yet comprehensive introduction to the field. It explores how sociolinguistics is linked to other disciplines such as history, politics and gender studies.

    Self-taught, his appetite for knowledge--history, science, mankind--formed the basis of his insight to human nature. The Temper of Our Time examines the influence of the juvenile mentality, the rise of automation, the black revolution, the regression of the back-to-nature movement, the intellectual vs. learning, and other relevent issues.

    At every stage of civilization, people have relied on symbolic expression, and advances in science and technology have only increased our dependence on symbols. The language of symbols is considered a science, and this informative volume offers an indispensable tool in the study of symbology. It can be used as a reference or simply browsed for pleasure. Many of its entries — those on architecture, mandala, numbers, serpent, water, and zodiac, for example — can be read as independent essays. The vitality of symbology has never been greater: An essential part of the ancient arts of the Orient and of the Western medieval traditions, symbolism underwent a 20th-century revival with the study of the unconscious, both directly in the field of dreams, visions, and psychoanalysis, and indirectly in art and poetry. A wide audience awaits the assistance of this dictionary in elucidating the symbolic worlds encountered in both the arts and the history of ideas.

    GET D!RTYNext time you’re traveling or just chattin’ in German with your friends, drop the textbook formality and bust out with expressions they never teach you in school, including:•Cool slang•Funny insults•Explicit sex terms•Raw swear wordsDirty German teaches the casual expressions heard every day on the streets of Germany:•What's up?Wie geht's?•I'm smashed.Ich bin total angeschickert.•Fuckin' Munich fans.Scheiß München Fans.•That shit reeks.Das riecht aber übel.•I wanna shag ass.Ich will abhauen.•What a complete asshole.Was für ein Arschloch.•Dude, you're built like Arnold!Mensch, du bist der Arnie!