The Loom of Language: An Approach to the Mastery of Many Languages

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Sidenote: In linguistic circles people love to dig into exceptions and point out when rules break down, which can make learners abandon something incredibly useful for fear of making mistakes.

This last point really shows the assumptions made but not clarified in the first part, namely that learning a language is about memorizing a list of words and "redundancies" in language must be bad. Boards have moderate shelf wear with mild bumping and fraying to corners and crushing and fraying to spine ends. Some other reviews I've seen make a big deal out of the book being written in 1944, and using words like talkies and gramophone. The last third was grandpa going on a rant, mischaracterizing several international languages, and dreaming up an international auxiliary language that would be more efficient than any other invented before.If you want a book that goes into depth of how Teutonic (Germanic) and Romance languages are similar and different to English, this may be the book for you. Native English speakers have a head start learning a bunch of vocab if you only know This One Weird Trick of how your common ancestor language usually diverged. The only annoyance is that the huge tables in Part IV aren't available online somewhere as spreadsheets (the book was written in the '40s) so one could import them into a spaced repetition system like Anki for efficient learning. We learn how older languages like Old English forked into German and English, and that there are a few common changes to know. You are going to make mistakes and fall into traps no matter what, so don’t get discouraged by exceptions.

One of Hogben's most ambitious projects emerged rather accidentally; in 1940, he and his daughter were trapped in Oslo, Norway, by the German invasion.As such, the book covers Swedish, Danish, Dutch, and German in the Teutonic track and French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian in the Romance track, not to mention plenty of discussion of parent languages like Latin and Old English. Almost all of the practical language-learning material is still fresh, but the terminology used is a bit dated and a lot of the scholarship lacks details and revisions made more recently. The book explains why these shifts happen, why French and English have hundreds of common words like this, and how to learn them without any mental strain. Their results for Swedish, Danish, Dutch, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian are displayed in tabular form in the Language Museum which forms Part Four.

Taking advantage of the Latin and Teutonic roots would greatly aid learning the Romance and Germanic languages, respectively.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. WE HAVE MULTIPLE OPTIONS IN COLOR OF LEATHER RED, GREEN, BLUE, MAGENTA, TAN, DEEP BROWN, BLACK WITH DIFFERENT COLOR LABELS.

I come back to this book year after year to read new chapters and refresh myself on those I've already read.Hogben was educated at Cambridge as a biologist, but never limited himself to a single field of inquiry. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions.