Goodbye Babylon

Author: Michael Erard Translation: Bandar Mohammed Al-Harbi Number of pages: 374 pages Publisher: Arab Scientific Publishers The author narrates within the pages of this book the details of his journey across the world and through history, contemplating, researching, and trying to understand the limits of human ability to learn and use many languages. For this purpose, he met many contemporary figures with exceptional talent in language learning, and searched for traces of their predecessors… those whom God Almighty endowed with a unique ability to learn and communicate in many of the world's languages, spoken and written, which may reach dozens of languages, starting from Giuseppe Mazzafoni, the Arabic language professor at the University of Bologna in Italy, to Johan Vandival, head of the Turkish language department at the University of Ghent in Belgium, and many others around the world. The book also includes an investigation into the movement of language learning worldwide, and the truth about such personalities and their abilities, using scientific standards and criteria, and a comprehensive view with different dimensions and angles—psychological, social, biological, and historical. It reveals the methods each of them used to learn this large spectrum of languages. "If you can ease the anxiety some people feel when they start learning a language, you will have found a solution to the core language problem in the twenty-first century. And true knowledge about language geniuses can reduce this anxiety." The author: "The best way to learn a language is to sit with a four-year-old child…" Zainab Bawa, multilingual from India.