Ratings22
Average rating3.8
On the one hand, this seems like a pretty helpful book for language learning. The combination of the author's anecdotal evidence and research in memory and learning science supports the strategies presented. And being a bit of a language nerd myself (native or foreign), I found the concepts interesting. And might utilize some of them as I try, yet again, to remember how to speak French and learn other languages.
However, there is very little in this book that tackles motivation. I might get excited to try some of these tools. But I also have a host of other things I'm trying to tackle on the reg - reading, writing, pretty intense running/training - in addition to the whole 9-5 thing. And regardless of how fun the author claims language learning can be (and I don't doubt it!), it's still gonna take a long, long time to become fluent, and with tons of effort.
Not that I was supposing it would be easy, so I suppose that's not a genuine complaint. Mostly, I found the book repetitive, and though interesting and probably helpful, far more effort than I'll realistically be able to put into language-learning at this stage in my life. I got a bit bored just reading this, and ending up skimming the sections that I found unrealistic/unhelpful/about learning tools I'll never use.