ORIGINALLY POSTED ON LIBRARYTHING; RECEIVED AS LIBRARYTHING EARLY REVIEWERS PROOF

This was an interesting book for me to read, as a learner of many, many languages as well as one with a research interest in second language learning. I believe that a lot of the language-learning process is illuminated in this book, particularly the immersive process—it's absolutely exhausting, for one, which so many people don't take into consideration (because, well, an hour of a foreign language three times a week is doable), and it's a very emotional process as you learn to communicate and connect in different ways with people.

The writing style bothered me—very choppy and childish, to the point where I had to put the book down a few times. At times, I felt he was incredibly naive about how difficult it is to learn a language. But who knows—my gauge for language learning is all topsy-turvy.

Overall, I found this book very relatable and definitely worth the quick read. I've already recommended it to my boyfriend, who's doing his best to learn a whole lot of German.

This was a book I was really looking forward to - I have just started learning German (like the author) and before this had only learned languages to 'tourist' level, and no languages like German. So I thought this book would be useful either with tips on how to learn or as an exploration of the difficulties of learning another language. But I didn't really get either from this book. Part of that is the writing style - I found the writing was very simplistic, it didn't flow and in parts was arduous to read. I also found it was just not that interesting. It seemed to be very much an expansion on the journal the author kept and I kept finding myself reading passages and thinking 'yes, but why would the reader really care about that?'