(Part 2) Best products from r/linguistics

I'm a language professor, my wife's focus is on bilingualism and we are raising two bilingual children (now 6 and 8) who are high functioning in both languages (90+ percentile in native verbal assessments in English and above average in Japanese). We are also surrounded by dual language families who are taking a variety of approaches.

The simple answer is that out of around 20 families all with fathers (the reality in Japan is that the English speaking parent is almost always the father) who are highly engaged with parenting, the families whose children have become bilingual are those whose mothers (native Japanese speakers) also speak to them in English. So, generally, One Parent One Language does not work here. The exception is with kids who are also going to English language schools.

Here's what we did. Our home language is English. That includes 90% media, which we intentionally included in their day (one hour). Since both of us work, we put them in Japanese daycare at two years old. Also, we have a network of friends with kids the same age who speak only Japanese and we got together occasionally. This was their early exposure to Japanese.

As they got closer to kindergarten age (Japanese kindergarten starts at year 3 and ends at year 5), we increased my wife's use of Japanese to about 20%. They entered kindergarten with weak Japanese and came out at age 5 pretty much the same as monolingual Japanese kids. Also, a policy that we adopted is that after coming home from kindergarten, the conversation about what they did that day was entirely in Japanese. Through kindergarten we kept the target of 20% Japanese with my wife, and increased and decreased that depending according to the individual kid's needs.

Once entering Japanese elementary school, our first kid was fully bilingual in both languages, so we kept up the 20% Japanese at home, but the second child appeared a bit weaker in expressing herself in English, so we dropped the 20% (aside from talking about school immediately after school) and speak only English with her at home. So how much Japanese my wife uses is our tool to tweak things if we think it's needed.

We read to our kids every day and make books available to them all the time. We do not watch broadcast television at all, so the only video that they have experienced is nearly all English. We do allow them one Japanese TV show they can watch regularly, so they share some culture with the kids at school, but after Pretty Cure and Yokai Watch, they pretty much lost interest in Japanese shows. They have decades worth of great shows in English that are more attractive than the popular show of the season in Japanese. It may be a Japanese thing, but Manga is the thing that they all read and talk about at school, so at home video is all in English.

We also taught them to read in English from a young age and they continue using Raz-Kids.com, reading about one book from there a day, which will take them to grade 5. They also usually spend at least an additional hour or more a day reading books we have around the house in either English or Japanese. We have a pretty extensive children's book and video collection.

I don't recommend Krashen. It is rather outdated and has not been shown to translate into the real world. Individual elements of his model are good, but production and interaction is far more important than he claims. If you are looking for a theoretical model I'd recommend looking at Vygotsky's Social Development Theory. Here is a simple introduction. It is not about bilingualism, but the ideas of scaffolding and and the zone of proximal development have guided most all of my interactions while teaching my kids.

A book my wife recommends to her friends is Raising a Bilingual Child, Barbara Zurer Pearson. It is written for non-linguists.

It would probably look nice but the effect could easily be replicated with a TEFL certificate and an hour or two a week of tutoring English.

Now, if you care a great deal about being an excellent teacher, then yes, it would definitely help. But the time expenditure isn't really worth the reward. I'd recommend just reading some books on English linguistics on your own time. I recommend this and this

I don't think it's necessary, no. But if you're the kind of person that benefits from this kind of thing, it can be beneficial. Sorry for being tautological =)

If you was about to learn new swimming styles, are you the kind of person who would go to the library and research on books about sports science as applied to swimming? If learning the guitar, do you brush up on music theory and try to understand the patterns of notes and chords in the fretboard? Before reading poetry, do you study about metrical forms and the history of styles? If you're that kind of person, you might have fun studying some linguistics and then trying to apply it to the languages you learn. Ocasionally it might even be useful!

As for book recommendations, I think one of the most useful areas you can investigate is phonetics and phonology, the study of linguistic sounds. Spoken languages are made of sounds that you hear, and you decode writing into sort-of "mental sounds" (assuming you're not congenitally deaf). Unfortunately these two processes have complications.

• Adult non-natives often fail to perceive and produce sounds in the new language (L2) that aren't present in their mother tongue (L1).
  
  Due to personal experience, I'm a supporter of the theory that this can be remedied by explicitly learning to notice the different sounds (Schmidt's Noticing Hypothesis). That means you need to understand how you yourself produce linguistic sounds, so that you can adapt your vocal gestures to those of other languages.
  
  To be able to do that, first of all, you have to learn the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). No, seriously, you need it. The Wikipedia articles are quite decent, and so is IPA's own handbook. Wikipedia also has recordings for all sounds—and so does this interactive table. Some beginners think of IPA as a writing system, and try to learn to "read" it as a whole. This is a mistake. Think of it as a table of possible sounds, classified on various dimensions (in the case of consonants, which are easier to introspect, there are three: place, manner, and voice). Once you understand how each dimension explains part of a gesture, the values of each symbol become a recipe of how to produce it: do this with my tongue here, turn on voice, and… voilà!
  
  If you're familiar with language X, look at the Wikipedia article "Phonology of X", and try to refer to the table and understand it by reproducing the sounds. (In the case of English, be sure to locate your own dialect/accent). Then try to understand the corresponding articles for the languages you're learning. You don't need to care about the rest of the table.
  
  As you get familiar with the IPA, try to learn the basics of articulatory phonetics and phonology. Online articles are probably good enough to help with language learning, but if you like technical books and want to dig deeper, I benefited a lot this and this and this one. If and only if you like physics, then this too.
  
  
• It's nontrivial to deduce the sounds from the writing (witness how much trouble computer people have with speech synthesis). All writing systems assume that you already know the language. Some assume just a little, like Finnish or Czech (and are therefore foreign-friendly); and some are basically unpredictable, like English and French; most are somewhere in-between.
  
  The best solution to this is to make sure you get lots and lots and lots of exposure to the spoken language. If you can learn the spoken language before writing, so much the better (it's how natives learn, after all). If you're curious about how writing systems work, I'd recommend Rogers as a first stop, but I think the Cree/Blackfoot sillabaries shouldn't give you any trouble.
  
  

Not so casual and perhaps not exactly what you're looking for, but definitely read the Linguistics Wars by Randy A Harris. It's enjoyable, extremely rigorous (it came out of Harris's PhD dissertation) and very, very insightful: it digs really deep into one of the most controversial period of linguistics in the United States. The author even went through underground notes. The best part about it is that it doesn't require you to be a linguist but it's even better if you are; a lot of things in there you simply can't get from modern textbooks and you get to learn how linguistic ideas originated and evolved. He has a second edition coming out so you might wanna wait for that.

For something perhaps surprising and illuminating: read Metaphors We Live By by Lakoff and Johnson. Most people I know were impressed at how pervasive metaphors actually are in language and cognition. It's very intuitive and sensible once you get the gist of it. This one is quite specific though.

Finally, although now I don't quite agree with it, Language Instinct is what lured me into linguistics so definitely check it out.

These books are quite old now and obviously linguists know much more (although not nearly enough) about language today than they did back then. Claims are also often exaggerated (with the exception of the first one, I think) but they're fun to read and will interest you for sure.

The NLTK book is a good hands-on free introduction that doesn't require you to understand a whole lot of math.

Other than that, the "big two" textbooks are:

• Speech and Language Processing by Jurafsky & Martin (there are some chapter drafts from the upcoming 3rd edition here!
  
• Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing by Manning & Schutze
  
  They're a lot more math-heavy than the NLTK book, but if you're interested in computational linguistics/NLP, then your math and statistics should be solid.
  
  Honorable mention:
  
  
• Linguistic Fundamentals for Natural Language Processing by Emily Bender aims to give an overview of stuff from pen-and-paper linguistics that are good to know in the computational linguistics world.
  
  Hope this helps!

I think the question is not how many languages you can speak to the child, but how many languages child will be able to speak when it's say 18 years old.
All depends on the goal. I suspect you actually want your child to speak few languages decently and not just be exposed to many languages to flex mind and that's it.
Also, I assume active command of language, not just passive one (reading, listening). Research says child needs to spent min 10% of its time to be exposed to a language to obtain passive knowledge. Min 20% for active command of a language. Research source is in the book mentioned below.
I'm glad you mentioned OPOL, as from what I noticed not many people talk about it here - I also might be wrong as I'm new to this subreddit tbh 😜. Coming to the pointb, I fell you try to apply OPOL only to you, whereas what's important is family context ie how many languages you speak, your partner and child's grandparents. What's more, it's crucial to know your native language and country where you live atm. Perhaps ML@H (minority language at home) might be a better option for you. There is not enough data to judge at this point. However, what you can do is to read below book. It contains pretty much an outcome of 20+ years of research of a PhD lady, who focused exclusively on children language acquisition.
I read it 2 times before my first child was born. I did family capability analysis and have chosen languages most useful in my geocultural context, which was separate challenge. Then I planned a hybrid strategy to teach chosen languages. It's not trivial, but with a bit of inclination everything is feasible. Also it's not too difficult once your go through that process.

Book I was referring to:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1400023343/ref=dbs_a_w_dp_1400023343

I recommend How to Learn Any Language by Barry Farber. He is so passionate about language learning that you can't help but get excited about getting better after even only one or two paragraphs. Plus, he has some really great tips for effective learning. =)

If you're interested (especially) in why people "do the things they do," I recommend Ray Jackendoff - Patterns in the Mind, as well as pretty much any Steven Pinker book you can get your hands on -- The Blank Slate was an excellent read that goes well beyond basic linguistics as well. These two are some of my favorite "layman" authors for psycholinguistics. Enjoy!

I would have to strongly caution against both Bill Bryson and Bragg's The Adventure of English. I like Bryson as much as the next guy--he's super easy to read--but PumpkinCrook's on the money with this one. As for Bragg... oof, what can I say? I read it before I had ever taken a Linguistics course and even then it bothered the hell out of me. The style is unscholarly to a fault and it's also mind-numbingly anglocentric (didn't you know that English is the most versatile and resilient language?!). It's fine, I guess, but you could do so much better.

I'd recommend The Origins and Development of the English Language or The Stories of English. The former is more of a textbook; and the latter is daunting in its size, I know, but it's so lovingly done that you can't fault him--with both books, you can more or less hop around according to your fancies.

As for general background, I'd second Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct. It's over 15 years old by now and assuredly outdated, but it reads so easily and you learn so much (without devolving into the sloppiness of Bryson or Blagg!) that I must recommend it almost with affection.

I can only speak for hist ling, but I've loved Trask's - detailed and the exercises can be challenging. I used Crowley/Bowern's in a class and found it a bit slower with not all the information you might want, though there are tons of examples from non-IE languages which is nice. Judging by Amazon another favorite seems to be Campbell's, though I don't have experience with it. I think all of these books would require some prior work in phonology/phonetics, though nothing you couldn't pick soon enough (they might even have a refresher sections, I can't recall).

I don't think that one can really start learning about linguistics without broaching open some texts because of the importance that visual aids like morphemic glossing and phonetic transcription play in explaining many important concepts. To that end, I always recommend Pavey's The Structure of Language: An Introduction to Grammatical Analysis. It has easy to analyze and follow samples and data that illustrate those important ideas and basic terminology. If you're really against doing anything like this, then maybe you might get something out of this podcast, which is mostly by a number of linguistics grad students. Almost every cast is about some linguistics topic and you could follow along by looking up new terms and reading the recommended literature that they have on what they are discussing. I don't recommend this approach but it's as interesting as it gets for a non-text based approach. I learned a ton through these podcasts, but I already had a strong grasp on the basics before I heard them.

From what I understand, programs like the University of Arizona's Master of Science in Human Language Technology have pretty good job placement records, and a lot of NLP industry jobs seem to bring in good money, so I don't think it would be a bad idea if it's something you're interested in.

As for books, one of the canonical texts in NLP seems to be Jurafsky and Martin's Speech and Language Processing. It's written in such a way as to serve as an intro to computer science for linguists and as an intro to linguistics for computer scientists.

It's nearing being 10 years old, so some more modern approaches, especially neural networks, aren't really covered, iirc (I don't have my copy with me here to check).

Really, it's a pretty nice textbook, and I think it can be had fairly cheap if you can find an international version.

Recommended these a while back, great, assessable reads.

The Language Instinct by Stephen Pinker
http://www.amazon.com/The-Language-Instinct-Mind-Creates/dp/0061336467/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1343383543&sr=8-1&keywords=the+language+instinct

Patterns in the Mind by Ray Jackendoff
http://www.amazon.com/Patterns-Mind-Language-Human-Nature/dp/0465054625/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1343383561&sr=1-1&keywords=patterns+in+the+mind

And if you are into etymology, check out

The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way, by Bill Bryson
http://www.amazon.com/Mother-Tongue-English-How-That/dp/0380715430/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1343383614&sr=1-1&keywords=the+mother+tongue

The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour Through Mankind's Greatest Invention, by Guy Deutscher
http://www.amazon.com/The-Unfolding-Language-Evolutionary-Invention/dp/0805080120/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1343383676&sr=1-2-fkmr0&keywords=guy+deucher+language

Again, all superb books.

If you're looking at the media, I'd recommend looking at discursive news values analysis. Monika Bednarek and Helen Caple have not long released a book outlining how to analyse how journalists make news texts seem important or 'newsworthy' to us. They have a few papers as well applying this framework to reports on natural disasters, which might be useful for you.


Their book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Discourse-News-Values-Organizations-Newsworthiness/dp/0190653949/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=news+values&qid=1574769121&sr=8-1

​

I've used the framework myself and it's quite straightforward to us. It threw up some really interesting findings for my own research.

​

I'm happy to chat more if you need any more pointers on literature about this area :)

No problem, it was fun. :D

If you're interested in IE Historical Linguistics, you might want to check out Ben Fortson's awesome Introduction, though this is much more focused on the reconstructed language itself and the development of the individual daughter languages than in the history and culture of the original Indo-Europeans.

For more of a broad cultural history, you might want to check out Mallory's book, which is written in a very easy to read style.

/u/NOT_AN_ALLCAPS_ACCT summed it up well.

If you want to get a decent crash course in the topic, track down this book.

To give an example: In Chinese the way to make a plural form of a pronoun is to add "men". So "ta" is "he", then "ta men" is "they". But in Old Chinese this "men" word didn't exist, so where did it come from? The most widely accepted proposal is that it itself is a contraction or "mei ren" meaning "every person". ta mei ren => ta meiren => ta men. In the modern language "Men" is a plural marker, but one that can only be applied to a handful of words referring to people (e.g. pronouns, "student", "comrade"). mei ren can still exist and be grammatical, but it's separate from men.

There are a billion great examples from IE languages as well, but I lack the ability to give good examples.

I'm also a big fan of Michel Thomas, but I would actually suggest you and your group start by reading this book: How to Learn Any Language. The author (who speaks 18 languages) has developed a FANTASTIC universal method for language learning. I highly recommend it.

You'd probably be better off giving them the Handbook for the IPA. IPA flashcards would be cool, but the IPA is pretty straightforward, and I would fear that the IPA flashcards would become obsolete a week in. The Handbook basically includes phonologies for every language and is wonderfully useful in the future for ESL classes since you can look up the phonology of an ESL student's native tongue and get some more perspective.

I also recommend the MIT textbook...can't recall the title, but it's fairly ubiquitous, comes with a workbook and is full of examples. It also goes over most of the common fields of linguistics: morphology, semantics, syntax, as well as phonology. It's blue and gold in color.
Actually, here's a link to the text on Amazon. I've been drinking so don't pay attention to my proclaimed origins of said book, but I am a big fan of the book and its method. Make sure to get the workbook, too.
http://www.amazon.com/Linguistics-4th-Adrian-Akmajian/dp/0262510863/ref=cm_lmf_tit_11
(promised link above.)

About Bilingual Dictionaries

Why are some bilingual dictionaries mono-directional and some are bi-directional?

Refer to English-Esperanto-English Dictionary (2010 Edition) by John Christopher Wells (Author). Why is title of this bilingual dictionary only in English instead of English and Esperanto? Does the language of the title mean anything or is it arbitrary?

Refer to English-Esperanto-English Dictionary (2010 Edition) by John Christopher Wells (Author) and Esperanto-English Dictionary: Esperanta-Angla Vortaro (Esperanto Edition) by Paul Denisowski.

Notice that there are parts, which explain the rules of Esperanto. Notice that there are no parts, which explain the rules of English. So it explains Esperanto but does not explain English. It seems that the dictionaries are for learners of the Esperanto language instead of the English language. Is that correct? The pages even mention Esperanto learners and not English learners.

Edit 1: If you can only answer few or some questions, that is better than nothing is.

Edit 2: Links and formatting.

Edit 3: Here is the link for the same question but in /r/languagelearning. It has better answers and more answers.

The English "better" is more likely a cognate with the German "besser". They follow similar morphologies:

English: good < better < best
German: gut < besser < besten

As to a deeper link between the Germanic languages of English and German and Farsi that might be a question for J.P. Malloy (http://www.amazon.com/In-Search-Indo-Europeans-J-Mallory/dp/0500276161).

I studied French and Anthropology at LSU and think this is a fantastic idea. Louisiana Creole is a mixture of French, Spanish, and several African languages. It would be interesting if you showed how the language mirrors other parts of the culture - the food, the religion, etc... It's hard to study creole in the New Orleans area without adding some jambalaya and voodoo into the mix.

Furthermore, you can expand your research to include the West Indies (Martinique, Guadeloupe, etc...). There are some fantastic books written in French with quite a bit of Creole in them from those areas: Pluie et Vent Sur Telume Miracle and Chronique des Sept Miseres are two of my favorite. You can also get English versions of each of these, but the French version of Chronique... has a Creole glossary and some cultural footnotes you might find useful.

Hi! The FAQ on the sidebar has links to some previous threads on this question. There's a good post here breaking down the different subfields so you can decide if you want to do more specific reading about one specific area. For a general overview of the field written for a popular audience, I always recommend Pinker's The Language Instinct.

Good call on both those books. I'd also recommend Phonetic Data Analysis and Elements of Acoustic Phonetics, both by Ladefoged. The first is a really good introduction to phonetic analysis specifically geared towards fieldwork. The second is a fairly simple introduction to acoustics, but you might be better off going with the Johnson book.

This one is pretty good: https://www.amazon.com/Story-Spanish-Jean-Benoit-Nadeau/dp/1250049040

So is this new one: https://www.amazon.com/History-Spanish-Students-Introduction/dp/1107144728

and: https://www.amazon.com/lengua-española-ESTUDIOS-LITERARIOS-Spanish-ebook/dp/B00ECJLV3U

and: https://www.amazon.com/maravillosa-historia-del-español-Spanish-ebook/dp/B014TNGHZ0

and: https://www.amazon.com/andadura-del-español-por-mundo/dp/8430608044

and https://www.amazon.com/Breve-historia-lengua-española-revisada/dp/022613377X

Going off of what others have said regarding finding syllabi, I don't think you'll find an online Introduction to Hispanic/Spanish Linguistics course. As a doctoral student, wouldn't you be comfortable with some introductory texts on the subject?

While I think the materials /u/patricks12345 are good, I don't think they are actually introductory. There are some good (or at least, often used) texts that I've seen/used:

https://www.amazon.com/Introducción-sociolingüística-hispánica-Manuel-Diaz-Campos/dp/0470658029/

https://www.amazon.com/Spanish-English-Contrasts-Course-Linguistics/dp/0878403817/

https://www.amazon.com/Introducción-Lingüística-Hispánica-Ignacio-Hualde/dp/0521513987/

https://www.amazon.com/Introducción-lingüística-española-Milton-Azevedo/dp/0134840313/

https://www.amazon.com/Introduccion-Linguistica-Espanola-3rd-Spanish/dp/0205647049/

There are also books on specific subfields that can follow up to these, just as normal textbooks do for "basic/general" linguistics.

https://www.amazon.com/Fonetica-Fonologia-Espanolas-Teoria-Practica/dp/047130946X/

https://www.amazon.com/fonología-españolas-Routledge-Introductions-Linguistics/dp/1138684007/

https://www.amazon.com/Fonética-fonología-espanolas-Armin-Schwegler/dp/0471466492/

https://www.amazon.com/Los-sonidos-del-espanol-Language/dp/0521168236/

https://www.amazon.com/Sintaxis-y-morfología-lengua-española/dp/0131899198/

https://www.amazon.com/Fundamentos-teóricos-prácticos-historia-española/dp/030017098X/

https://www.amazon.com/Breve-historia-lengua-española-revisada/dp/022613377X/

For historical linguistics, I'd say the best text is Historical Linguistics by Lyle Campbell. Just his explanation of the Comparative Method alone is reason enough to read the book.