The Language Secret: How to Learn a Foreign Language: Or. How to Speak 10 Languages. Badly

by John Stedman

Overview

The author of this book spent many years in Africa and frequently met people who spoke eight, nine or ten languages. Most of them would not consider themselves remarkable in any way; some of them could not even read. But, unwittingly, all of them had stumbled upon The Language Secret. And it is our pleasure to reveal it to you in this book.

None of the information we are about to present is new or unknown in academia. It is, however, almost entirely absent from language teaching in classrooms, and lamentably under-used in self-help language books and apps. Some very simple, but powerful ideas and linguistic discoveries have remained a secret to non-specialists. But The Language Secret should be availableto everyone who wants to know it.

In the course of our quest we shall be meeting and learning from a varied cast of characters including Inspector Clouseau (he of Pink Panther fame), Harold Godwinson and his nemesis William the Conqueror, Lemy from Motörhead, Dick Van Dyke, Meryl Streep, Nimrod the Hunter and Jane Birkin. Seriously. One of the neglected tools in the language-acquisition toolbox is humour. And although we shall be employing that instrument to the full, do not be deceived: this is a serious book.

This modest tome will not make you a specialist in any one language, but waht we will do is show the principles that apply to learning all languages, any language.

And in case you don't want to plough through the next 200-odd pages to discover the secret, here it is in one sentence: If you want to communicate well in another language, you first have to learn to speak it badly.

Not as easy as it sounds. Let's go!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781668576854
Publisher:	Barnes & Noble Press
Publication date:	10/05/2021
Pages:	270
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.61(d)

About the Author

In 1993, John Stedman, a monolingual Englishman, volunteered for humanitarian work. Much to his surprise, he and his wife, Sharon, were assigned to Côte d’Ivoire, in West Africa, a country they had never heard of on a continent about which they knew almost nothing. What they learned there – and later in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Congo-Kinshasa) and the Republic of Congo (Congo-Brazzaville) – changed their lives forever, and sparked a lifelong love of the people, languages and culture of the continent.

Like most English schoolchildren, John never learned the grammar of his own language. In fact, he was not absolutely sure what grammar was. Even though he attended a grammar school. The concept of multilingualism was totally alien to him, but over the twenty-five years spent as a linguist and lexicographer in various African countries and among the African diaspora in Europe, he became fascinated with the relationships between language, culture, history and ethnicity.

His books explore some of the languages spoken in Congo, the interface between the colonial and vernacular languages, the dangerous concept of linguistic superiority and the connections between the languages we speak and our view of the world.

Now living in Germany, John and his wife, Sharon, specialise in teaching accelerated language-learning techniques.