books read 2010

[tabacoychanel]

January

(1)   James Luceno, Millennium Falcon (2008)

(2)   Judith R. Strozer, Language Acquisition After Puberty (1994)

(3)   Aaron Allston, Betrayal (2006)

February

(4)   Karen Traviss, Bloodlines (2006)

(5)   Troy Denning, Tempest* (2006)

(6)   Aaron Allston, Exile (2007)

(7)   Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of

Comments

[angerfish]

Heyyy.

We like ASoIaF, skating (iirc), The Hunger Games, and learning as many languages as possible. That's an awesome interests intersection and we should be frienddds. :D?

[tabacoychanel]

i was just coming over to ask you the same thing!!!

[angerfish]

Hahah seriously? :D! *friends*

[maruutsu]

Dude. You've read more books in a year than I have in three. I knew I wasn't reading much lately, but damn...

(2) Judith R. Strozer, Language Acquisition After Puberty

That sounds like an interesting read. Learned anything useful?

[tabacoychanel]

omgggg but did you notice how many of them were star wars. that's like, harlequin romance. they should only count for 0.24 of a book or something lol.

also i read ~100+ books every year for the past two years, and here i am almost november and only 50. i am not living up to my standards!

Learned anything useful?
tbh, no. basically there is definitely a cutoff for acquiring an L1 (puberty), and most probably a cutoff for speaking an L2 "natively," but there will always be geniuses/exceptions. this latter part of the critical period hypothesis is pretty much impossible to prove or disprove (how do you prove that someone is "native"?). so basically when i read this book i was like and this is news because ...? i mean there's interesting case studies and things but the theory behind it is not exactly groundbreaking. haha but full disclosure i've never taken a linguistics class in my life so i could be way off base.

[maruutsu]

50 books a year is still a pretty good number! (Better than mine, for sure)

I know plenty of people who acquired a second language after puberty, but I dunno if the study takes people who've lived in a foreign country and picked up the language into account? What I'd be interested in learning is whether you can acquire a THIRD language after puberty. (I need one if I wanna work for the UN, but speaking two languages is already a lot of work, particularly when you're a pseudo-writer.)

IDK if knowing linguistics would help with that. What I'm studying is mostly theories regarding language itself, with a focus on translating problems. So IRDK, TBH. :/

[tabacoychanel]

you want to work in the UN that's awesome! i know a girl from another comm who's interning there and it's tough/hard/fun. this is an interesting subject we should discuss more. are you on gchat/aim/skype rn?

i refuse to get an msn sorry :(