A Language Learning Tale

Podcast on YouTube: Link for YouTube Podcast on Spotify: Link for Spotify Benvenuti, Bienvenue, Bienvenidos, Croeso and Welcome. Hi, I’m Juliet. Join me on my language learning journey and discover my thoughts on different aspects of language learning with the A Language Learning Tale Podcast. Today I’m talking about…   The Power of Language: Multilingualism, Self and Society This book is written by Viorica Marian and narrated by Cassandra Campbell. The author is Romanian and wrote this in their third language, English. The aim is to look at the mind through the lens of multilingualism. Before we start, there are quite a lot of things mentioned in this book that I have heard in other books, and I won’t go over previously discussed things too much, if I can avoid it, but all authors will go at things from a different perspective and bring up different points. And that kind of ties in with one of the themes of this book. Speaking multiple languages changes the way you think, both as ...

Podcast on YouTube: Link on YouTube Podcast on Spotify: Link on Spotify Benvenuti, Bienvenue, Bienvenidos, Croeso and Welcome. Hi, I’m Juliet. Join me on my language learning journey and discover my thoughts on different aspects of language learning with the A Language Learning Tale Podcast. Today I’m talking about… L’histoire des langues parlées Yes, that was in French and today I’m discussing a short French audiobook on Spotify which is about languages and seeing how much I’ve understood. L’histoire des langues parlées is by Anne-Marie Deraspe. It’s only an  hour and nine minutes long and I set it to read at 0.8x speed. This is a book aimed at teens and I believe is a teaching text. If you´re learning French, and you have access to this book in a subscription service, you might want to give it a go. A link to the book on Spotify will be in the description. So, I’m expecting this will be mainly headline facts rather than a deep dive on the history of languages, given the length of...

Listen on YouTube: YouTube Link Listen on Spotify: Spotify Link Benvenuti, Bienvenue, Bienvenidos, Croeso and Welcome. Hi, I’m Juliet. Join me on my language learning journey and discover my thoughts on different aspects of language learning with the A Language Learning Tale Podcast. Before we get started, I just wanted to give an update on how this podcast will be going forward. There will still be seasons of 3 months, but within those seasons, the episodes will only appear every other week. So, there will be most likely 7 episodes per season. This will allow me more time for research, where necessary, to tackle some more detailed topics. Okay, let’s get into it. Today I’m talking about… The Art of Language Invention: From Horse-Lords to Dark Elves, the Words Behind World-Building, written and narrated by David J Peterson The author of this book creates fictional languages (Game of Thrones, anyone?) and this book is an attempt to put down in writing all their knowledge on the subject....

Listen on YouTube: YouTube Link Listen on Spotify: Spotify Link Benvenuti, Bienvenue, Bienvenidos, Croeso and Welcome. Hi, I’m Juliet. Join me on my language learning journey and discover my thoughts on different aspects of language learning with the A Language Learning Tale Podcast. Today I’m talking about… The Language of Food Yes, this is another book. The full title is The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu. It’s by Dan Jurafsky and narrated by Steven Menasche. So, this is something a bit different. Eatomology, as the author suggests. Let’s get started. There are many chapters in this book dedicated to the movement of dishes and name changes as they go on their world excursions. I’m not going to concentrate on these, because they’re very specific. But they cover things like sikbaaj to fish and chips, fish sauce to ketchup and why turkey might be other countries, too. Many recipes are included in the book, if that’s your thing, but unfortunately many of them are on an accom...

Podcast on YouTube: YouTube Link Podcast on Spotify:  Spotify Link Benvenuti, Bienvenue, Croeso and Welcome.   Hi, I’m Juliet. Join me on my language learning journey and discover my thoughts on different aspects of language learning with the A Language Learning Tale Podcast. Today I’m talking about…   SO, LANGUAGE REALLY IS A GAME? No, I’m not talking about gamification again, not exactly. I’m talking about the book  The Language Game by Morten H Christiansen and Nick Chater, narrated by Peter Noble, which I recently listened to on Spotify. These are only brief discussions of a few of the points in the book, linking them to language learning. There’s a tonne more information in the audiobook. There will be a link to it in the description. The way language works has been explained in many different ways in the past as understanding changed. Was it created by ancient gods? Is it built into our genes? Is it scientific? Are our brains like computers? Or was it just tria...