A review by checkie
Fifty Sounds by Polly Barton

4.75

This is a great book for any lover of language or linguistics. The book acts as a memoir, focussing on Polly Barton's journey in moving to Japan and learning the language there, taking one of fifty Japanese words as stimuli for each section. Despite my lack of any knowledge of the Japanese language, or any second language for that matter, I found Barton's writing on language and translation fascinating, particularly the intricacies and nuances of the etiquette surrounding language and words. Barton has an unusual and fascinating perspective on the process of learning a language given the fact that she only began to learn the language as an adult, after graduating from university. It made me feel like there is hope for me yet!