The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners
Joshua Foer, author of Moonwalking With Einstein, says...
"You'll be awed by the incredible characters in this eye-opening book."
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John McWhorter, author of Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, says...
"...a thorough delight. An informed and even addictive guide to why
some people pick up new languages so easily and how maybe you can too."
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Nicholas Ostler, author of The Last Lingua Franca, says...
"Erard gets beneath the surface of the hyperpolyglot, piercing the myth of perfect competence, to show the actual landscape of motives, obstacles and satisfactions..."
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Maria Popova of Brainpickings says...
"Captivating and illuminating, Babel No More is as much an absorbing piece of investigative voyeurism...as it is an intelligent invitation to visit the outer limits of our own cerebral potential."
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Mark Peters, on Vocabulary.com, says...
"...Erard is an expert tour guide, weaving an enjoyable, enlightening tale in which he's the Indiana Jones of hyperpolyglots, braving snakepits of exaggeration and hoax."
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Martha Barnette, co-host of radio's A Way with Words, says...
"I blame the author for a couple of sleepless nights, because this is a guy who knows how to write a linguistic cliffhanger."
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Ellen Winner, author of Gifted Child, Myths and Realities, says...
"A fascinating look at the unusual ability to learn multiple languages. This opens up a new area of research in the study of giftedness."
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Claude Cartaginese, editor of The Polyglot Project, says...
"Part biography, part detective story, Erard's spell-binding book offers us a window through which we may view the lives of these remarkable (and remarkably diverse) characters..."
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Deborah Fallows, author of Dreaming in Chinese, says...
"An intrepid and savvy linguistic explorer, Michael Erard sets out to find the world's masters of multiple languages...Babel No More brings the genius language learners to life."
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Kirkus Review says...
"A mesmerizing voyage into the thickets of questions
about what it means to be human."
If you've ever tried to learn another language, you know how much time, energy, and brain power is required. Imagine a person who can pick up languages very easily. Someone who can navigate our world's multilingual hullaballoo. Who can leap language barriers with a single bound. Who can learn without effort and remember indelibly. Such people aren't parrots. They're not computers. They're language superlearners.
Michael Erard searched for these people, and when he found them -- in history books and living among us -- he tried to make sense of their linguistic feats and their mental powers. His book answers the age-old question, What are the upper limits of the human ability to learn, remember, and use languages?
Reviewed
Babel No More has been reviewed in The New York Times Book Review, The Economist, The Atlantic, the Times Literary Supplement, The Dallas Morning News, The Barnes & Noble review, the Asian Review of Books, Wilson Quarterly, Lapham's Quarterly, the New Scientist, Vocabulary.com, Visual Thesaurus, Science News, MacLean's, Multilingual Magazine, the Washington Independent Review of Books, and Language Hat, and garnered mentions in many other magazines, newspapers and blogs around the world, including Israel, Italy, Australia, Canada, Colombia, Mexico, Singapore, France, Denmark, Indonesia, China, Korea, and Japan.
