It shows, through basic vocabularies, family resemblances of languages—Teutonic, Romance, Greek—helpful tricks of translation, key combinations of roots and phonetic patterns. It presents by common-sense methods the most helpful approach to the mastery of many languages; it condenses vocabulary to a minimum of essential words; it simplifies grammar in an entirely new way; and it teaches a languages as it is actually used in everyday life.But this book is more than a guide to foreign languages; it goes deep into the roots of all knowledge as it explores the history of speech. It lights up the dim pathways of prehistory and unfolds the story of the slow growth of human expression from the most primitive signs and sounds to the elaborate variations of the highest cultures. Without language no knowledge would be possible; here we see how language is at once the source and the reservoir of all we know.

    What is it like to try to heal the body when the mind is under attack? In this book, Dr. Allan Ropper and Brian Burrell take the reader behind the scenes at Harvard Medical School's neurology unit to show how a seasoned diagnostician faces down bizarre, life-altering afflictions. Like Alice in Wonderland, Dr. Ropper inhabits a world where absurdities abound:• A figure skater whose body has become a ticking time-bomb • A salesman who drives around and around a traffic rotary, unable to get off • A college quarterback who can't stop calling the same play • A child molester who, after falling on the ice, is left with a brain that is very much dead inside a body that is very much alive • A mother of two young girls, diagnosed with ALS, who has to decide whether a life locked inside her own head is worth livingHow does one begin to treat such cases, to counsel people whose lives may be changed forever? How does one train the next generation of clinicians to deal with the moral and medical aspects of brain disease? Dr. Ropper and his colleague answer these questions by taking the reader into a rarified world where lives and minds hang in the balance.

    Now this gifted teacher's most popular audio sessions are available in one convenient resource, with The Eckhart Tolle Audio Collection. This special slip-cased edition includes three audio bestsellers with Eckhart Tolle:The Realization of Being—How meditation opens the entry point to stillness, our greatest spiritual teacher, allowing us to merge with this moment in time• Living the Liberated Life and Dealing with the Pain-Body—Points a way out of the conditioned mind that keeps us trapped and unhappy, to a deeper level of consciousness beyond thought• Even the Sun Will Die—Historic interview recorded on September 11, 2001, which shows that even in the face of disaster, a miracle happens when we say "yes" to living in this moment and no other.

    Take away the pedigreed and the prodigies—you know the people who are going to succeed no matter what—and the brown-nosers and right-time-right-place lottery winners and who do you have left? The people who succeeded on purpose. Study these folks carefully and you’ll find common themes around their path to the top. This book exposes the career strategies of the ultra-successful and analyzes them in detail. You’ll learn about personal strategies for identifying high-payoff activities and gain insight into being more effective as an individual contributor, manager and leader. You will learn how to identify and interact with the right set of career mentors and role models. Being successful doesn’t have to be an accident. Read this book and learn how to succeed on purpose.

    Most parents never forget the moment. But that first word is soon followed by a second and a third, and by the age of three, children are typically learning ten new words every day and speaking in complete sentences. The process seems effortless, and for children, it is. But how exactly does it happen? How do children learn language? And why is it so much harder to do later in life? Drawing on cutting-edge developments in biology, neurology, psychology, and linguistics, Charles Yang's "The Infinite Gift" takes us inside the astonishingly complex but largely subconscious process by which children learn to talk and to understand the spoken word.Yang illuminates the rich mysteries of language: why French newborns already prefer the sound of French to English; why baby-talk, though often unintelligible, makes perfect linguistic sense; why babies born deaf still babble -- but with their hands; why the grammars of some languages may be evolutionarily stronger than others; and why one of the brain's earliest achievements may in fact be its most complex.Yang also puts forth an exciting new theory. Building on Noam Chomsky's notion of a universal grammar -- the idea that every human being is born with an intuitive grasp of grammar -- Yang argues that we learn our native languages in part by unlearning the grammars of all the rest.This means that the next time you hear a child make a grammatical mistake, it may not be a mistake at all; his or her grammar may be perfectly correct in Chinese or Navajo or ancient Greek. This is the brain's way of testing its options as it searches for the local and thus correct grammar -- and then discards all the wrong ones.And we humans, Yang shows, are not the only creatures who learn this way. In fact, learning by unlearning may be an ancient evolutionary mechanism that runs throughout the animal kingdom. Thus, babies learn to talk in much the same way that birds learn to sing.Enlivened by Yang's experiences with his own young son, "The Infinite Gift" is as charming as it is challenging, as thoughtful as it is thought-provoking. An absorbing read for parents, educators, and anyone who has ever wondered about the origins of that uniquely human gift: our ability to speak and, just as miraculous, to understand one another.

    Where the fathers imbibed the doctrine of Confucius and learned the classics and revolted against them, these young people have been battered by many forces of the new times. They have been taught something of science, something of Christianity, something of atheism, something of free love, something of communism, something of Western philosophy, something of modern militarism, something, in fact, of everything. In the midst of the sturdy medievalism of the masses of their countrymen the young intellectuals have been taught the most extreme of every culture. Intellectually they have been forced to the same great omissions that China has made physically. They have skipped, figuratively speaking, from the period of the unimproved country road to the aero plane era. The omission was too great. The mind could not compensate for it. The spirit was lost in the conflict. The first result, therefore, of the hiatus was undoubtedly to produce a class of young Chinese, both men and women, but chiefly men, who frankly did not know how to live in their own country or in the age in which their country still was. They were for the most part educated abroad, where they forgot the realities of their own race. It was easy enough for various revolutionary leaders to persuade these alienated minds that China's so-called backwardness was due primarily to political and material interference by foreign powers. The world was made the scapegoat for Chinas medievalism. Instead of realizing that China was in her own way making her own steps, slowly, it is true, and somewhatponderously, toward modernity, it was easy hue and cry to say that if it had not been for foreigners she would have been already on an equality, in material terms, with other nations. The result of this was a fresh revolution of a sort. China practically rid herself of her two great grievances outside of Japan, extraterritoriality and the tariff. No great visible change appeared as a consequence. It became apparent that what had been weaknesses were still weaknesses, and that these were inherent in the ideology of the people. It was found, for instance, that when a revolutionary leader became secure and entrenched he became conservative and as corrupt, too often, as an old style official. The same has been true in other histories. There were too many honest and intelligent young minds in China not to observe and accept the truth, that the outside world had very little to do with Chinas condition, and what she had to do with it could have been prevented if China had been earlier less sluggish and her leaders less blind and selfish. Then followed a period of despair and frenzy and increased idealistic worship of the West. The evident prosperity of foreign countries was felt to be a direct fruit of Western scientific development.

    It provides a comprehensive, accessible, and jargon-free guide to the forms and structures of Spanish as it is currently spoken and written in Spain and Latin America. Extensive examples are used to illustrate grammatical points, many from contemporary sources in both Spain and the Americas that highlight, where appropriate, differences in regional usage. Levels of usage (formal, colloquial, familiar, and popular) are specified, so that the importance of context in the use of language is recognized. This new edition has been updated throughout; it is the first grammar in English that incorporates the findings of the exhaustive new descriptive grammar of the Royal Spanish Academy (Gramatica descriptive de la lengua espanola, 5300pp). The 4th edition is also more accessible to students; complex explanations have been simplified and clarified, and a glossary of grammatical terms has been added to aid students.

    This book can be cut, drawn in, folded into shapes and will even take you to the fourth dimension. So join stand-up mathematician Matt Parker on a journey through narcissistic numbers, optimal dating algorithms, at least two different kinds of infinity and more.

    Covering thinkers from Aristotle to Saussure and Chomsky, "Introducing Linguistics" reveals the rules and beauty that underlie language, our most human skill.

    Although widely popular in its time, the work in its entirety has been out of print since the early twentieth century. This volume returns Sesame and Lilies to easy availability and reunites the two halves of the work: Of Kings’ Treasuries, in which Ruskin critiques Victorian manhood, and Of Queens’ Gardens, in which he counsels women to take their places as the moral guides of men and urges the parents of girls to educate them to this end. Feminist critics of the 1960s and 1970s regarded Of Queens’ Gardens as an exemplary expression of repressive Victorian ideas about femininity, and they paired it with John Stuart Mill’s more progressive Subjection of Women. This volume, by including the often ignored Of Kings’ Treasuries, offers readers full access to Ruskin’s complex and sometimes contradictory views on men and women. The accompanying essays place Sesame and Lilies within historical debates on men, women, culture, and the family. Elizabeth Helsinger examines the text as a meditation on the pleasures of reading, Seth Koven gives a wide-ranging account of how Victorians read Sesame and Lilies, and Jan Marsh situates the work within controversies over educational reform. Deborah Epstein Nord is professor of English and director of the Program in the Study of Women and Gender at Princeton University.

    It now has 600,000 to a million page hits daily. Every now and then, Munroe would get emails asking him to arbitrate a science debate. 'My friend and I were arguing about what would happen if a bullet got struck by lightning, and we agreed that you should resolve it . . . ' He liked these questions so much that he started up What If. If your cells suddenly lost the power to divide, how long would you survive? How dangerous is it, really, to be in a swimming pool in a thunderstorm? If we hooked turbines to people exercising in gyms, how much power could we produce? What if everyone only had one soulmate?When (if ever) did the sun go down on the British empire? How fast can you hit a speed bump while driving and live?What would happen if the moon went away?In pursuit of answers, Munroe runs computer simulations, pores over stacks of declassified military research memos, solves differential equations, and consults with nuclear reactor operators. His responses are masterpieces of clarity and hilarity, studded with memorable cartoons and infographics. They often predict the complete annihilation of humankind, or at least a really big explosion. Far more than a book for geeks, WHAT IF: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions explains the laws of science in operation in a way that every intelligent reader will enjoy and feel much the smarter for having read.

    Original.

    This booklet contains the prophetic and epochal lectures delivered by Swami Vivekananda at the Parliament of Religions, Chicago, in 1893

    . . [together] why media audiences have fled and why new technology and megacorporate ownership are putting good journalism at risk.” —Rasmi Simhan, Boston Globe“Kovach and Rosenstiel’s essays on each [element] are concise gems, filled with insights worthy of becoming axiomatic. . . . The book should become essential reading for journalism professionals and students and for the citizens they aim to serve.” —Carl Sessions Stepp, American Journalism Review“If you think journalists have no idea what you want . . . here is a book that agrees with you. Better—it has solutions. The Elements of Journalism is written for journalists, but any citizen who wonders why the news seems trivial or uninspiring should read it.” —Marta Salij, Detroit Free PressThe elements of journalism are:* Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth.* Its first loyalty is to citizens.* Its essence is a discipline of verification.* Its practitioners must maintain an independence from those they cover.* It must serve as an independent monitor of power.* It must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise.* It must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant.* It must keep the news comprehensive and proportional.* Its practitioners must be allowed to exercise their personal conscience.

    It provides clear, simple explanations and concrete examples of complex concepts, making a wide variety of commonly used critical theories accessible to novices without sacrificing any theoretical rigor or thoroughness.This new edition provides in-depth coverage of the most common approaches to literary analysis today: feminism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, reader-response theory, new criticism, structuralism and semiotics, deconstruction, new historicism, cultural criticism, lesbian/gay/queer theory, African American criticism, and postcolonial criticism. The chapters provide an extended explanation of each theory, using examples from everyday life, popular culture, and literary texts; a list of specific questions critics who use that theory ask about literary texts; an interpretation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby through the lens of each theory; a list of questions for further practice to guide readers in applying each theory to different literary works; and a bibliography of primary and secondary works for further reading.