ISBN 9783982661025
Pages 268
Dimensions 229x152 mm
Published 2024
Publisher The Language Secret,
Format Paperback

The Language Secret

How to Learn a Language Or. How to Speak 10 Languages Badly

by John Stedman

“What do you call someone who speaks three languages?”

“Trilingual”

“What do you call someone who speaks two languages?”

“Bilingual”

“What do you call someone who speaks one language?”

“English“

 The author first heard this joke in Africa, where he frequently met people who spoke eight, nine or ten languages. Most of these people 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. Seemingly abstract concepts such as language families, phonetics and etymology are explained in an accessible way to the non-specialist reader – and the immediate application of these ideas to the practical difficulties of learning another language are shown.

 None of the information we 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. Some very simple, but powerful ideas and linguistic discoveries have remained a secret to non-specialists. But The Language Secret should be available to everyone who wants to know it. 

This modest tome will not make you a specialist in any one language. There are plenty of self-help books and exhaustive grammars available if you want to master any particular tongue. But what we will do is show the principles that apply to learning all languages, any language, The Language Secret.

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About the Author

John Stedman

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.