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?
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.
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I am represented by David Patterson of Foundry Literary + Media.
Babel No More is a publication of Free Press, a division of Simon and Schuster.
Michael Erard is represented by Foundry Literary + Media.
He is also the author of Um: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean, a 2007 publication of Pantheon Books.