The Loom of Language: An Approach to the Mastery of Many Languages

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Some other reviews I've seen make a big deal out of the book being written in 1944, and using words like talkies and gramophone. for everyone who has the slightest curiosity or ambition in self expression, this is a book that contains months or years of pleasurable profit. Bodmer also encourages learners to “get a bird’s-eye view of the grammatical peculiarities of a language before trying to memorize anything” and to not waste time on memorizing case endings of nouns or adjectives until a reading knowledge of the language is achieved. Coincidently, I was reading the part on Romance verbs this am and I have been reading this book since at least when I bought my current copy, 1980´s.

The Loom of Language: An Approach to the Mastery of Many Languages by Frederick Bodmer has always been my favorite book about learning languages. With a little more work and practice I would think it would be possible but time consuming and a lot of time I probably do not have.

The only annoyance is that the huge tables in Part IV aren’t available online somewhere as spreadsheets (the book is almost a century old after all) so one could import them into a spaced repetition system like Anki for efficient learning. I disagree with both of these points deeply, but the writing itself was so fun (you don't often have someone use terms like gewgaws and folderals) and pushed me to several clarifications of my own thought that I continued reading to the end. so im adding this idc🥴) ive read MOST pages tho and the sections I was really interested in (ie its part 2 and the part 4 when needed) besides some ppl even treat this book like dictionary and not to be read from page to page. The sections of interest to me right now were written for a very specific audience: native English speakers intent on learning Romance and Teutonic languages. The Loom of Language helps learners avoid wasted time by explaining how things normally go for the various languages.

The second part focuses on learning vocabulary (from the given lists) taking advantage of similarities among languages and sound shifts that cause predictable changes from one language to another. limey75 Yellow Belt Posts: 76 Joined: Wed May 25, 2016 11:30 am Location: UK Languages: English (N); intermediate: German, Norwegian, Old English.

A dica mais importante, que perpassa o livro todo, é que, para aprender um idioma com menor esforço, é muito útil adquirir uma consciência linguística. If you want to challenge yourself to learn multiple Romance languages (French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian), you might want to browse the Romance language section of the Language Museum starting at page 589.

Some fascinating stuff about how languages evolved and separated, and I did pick up a few useful things about some of the less obvious connections between the Romance languages. More Hamburger icon An icon used to represent a menu that can be toggled by interacting with this icon. There is so much great information in here that it requires repeat readings over several years, especially Part II.UPDATE: Here are spreadsheets of the Romance Word List, Germanic Word List, and the Greek Roots List from the language museum.