For anyone who has ever yearned to master a new language, Fifty Sounds is a visionary personal account and an indispensable resource for learning to think beyond your mother tongue.

"The language learning I want to talk about is sensory bombardment. It is a possession, a bedevilment, a physical takeover," writes Polly Barton in her eloquent treatise on this profoundly humbling and gratifying act. Shortly before graduating with a degree in philosophy from the University of Cambridge, Barton on a whim accepted an English-teaching position in Japan. With the characteristic ambivalence of a twenty-one-year-old whose summer—and life—stretched out almost infinitely before her, she moved to a remote island in the Sea of Japan, unaware that this journey would come to define not only her career but her very understanding of her own identity.

Divided into fifty onomatopoeic Japanese phrases, Fifty Sounds recounts Barton's path to becoming a...]]> Sat, 15 Oct 2022 08:46:34 +0300