Lingo: A Language Spotter's Guide to Europe

Product Information

First, while looking at what’s out there, consider all types of books. Don’t limit yourself to just one “scholarly” source or even a language learning text. With bilingual e-books, all reading genres are represented. Choose something that piques your interest. Start slow

She touches on the general fascination that existed in the 18th and 19th centuries with criminals, and writes at length about the language they used. Why is that? You started your professional life writing for the underground press, and then books on the counterculture in the 1960s. How did you end up specialising in slang? All the titles are beautifully illustrated, many by artists who work very regularly with the publisher and have extensive experience in the teaching and caring professions. Japanese learners will be impressed with the stunning drawings in “Yuko-chan and the Daruma Doll: The Adventures of a Blind Japanese Girl Who Saves Her Village” because they beautifully portray the sweet story. The tale is told in English with the Japanese kanji directly below the corresponding text. French Bilingual E-books Doppeltext is an excellent resource for bilingual e-books—particularly if you enjoy works by famous authors or well-known pieces of literature. Books are available in French, German, Russian and Spanish, and translated text fragments appear in English.Are some languages worse than others? The question might sound silly, but in this entertaining exercise in “language tourism” (the book’s original Dutch title), the author isn’t frightened of making judgments. He thinks lenition – the habit in Welsh of “changing a word’s first letter for no apparent reason” – is just “mindboggling”, and generally that “Gaelic spelling is flawed … wasteful, arcane and outdated”. The “ludicrous” variety of cases in Slovak amounts to “chaos”, while Breton’s system of naming numbers makes mental arithmetic unnecessarily difficult. Alice Hoffman was right that “books may well be the only true magic.” They transport and transfix—and they teach.

Dual language books are useful in all kinds of situations, including learning both native and target languages, settling into a new location, helping children gain literacy skills, and simply encouraging readers to understand the joy of language. They’re useful in the classroom or other language learning arena; they’re useful as an addition to a child’s bookcase (or an adult’s collection, come to that); and they’re useful as an aide-memoire. They’re an excellent next step up from a simple dictionary or vocabulary chart, and a great stepping stone to reading longer texts in the target language.For me, of course, Partridge is the great mentor. I may not agree with everything he did, and as his successor I have naturally tried to improve on his foundations. But without his example I would have never even considered that slang was something to which I could enthusiastically devote my professional life. As a small educational publisher, we do have to charge for the new resources, but we will continue to offer the original six eBooks for free. We have used native Ukrainian translators and proofreaders to ensure that the text uses natural language and vocabulary along with utilising professional design and printing, so children have the best possible experience when reading them. Why Bilingual E-books Make Target Language Reading Practice a Snap They’re practical and convenient