The Language Secret: How to Learn a Language Or. How to Speak 10 Languages Badly

"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.