Becoming Fluent How Cognitive Science can Help Adults Learn a Foreign Language by Richard Roberts and Roger Kreuz

I have chosen this book by MIT press Becoming Fluent How Cognitive Science can Help Adults Learn a Foreign Language by Richard Roberts and Roger Kreuz because I know a lot of people who learnt a foreign language once adults and with great success.

Learning a foreign language means a lot of motivation but with this book you won't fail for sure, because it unifies the best new informations that there are about learning and also how to do this with profit and without losing too much time.

All of this, thanks to cognitive science. This one is an interdisciplinary movement that began visible in the 1960s knowing affirmation in the 1970s. Cognitive science involves a lot of disciplines: psychology, linguistics, philosophy, neurosciences, artificial intelligence, anthropology, education.

Cognitive scientists promote inclusivity and new points of views.

But, first of all Becoming Fluent starts from an encouraging assumption: forget that if you are adult you can't learn another language if you put desire, hope, expectations, work and enthusiasm in this adventure.
The adult brain is more "flexible" (look at the chapter "meta") because more experienced than the one of the child so there are strategies that can be found and used for learning a language only in an adult brain.

Sure: the brain of the adult is not anymore a sponge in grade of absorb everything. The adult brain absorbed, elaborated and became what it became also thanks to experiences, facts, and life spent.

Less fresh than the one of a child positively let's add that a new language means a new start.

New enthusiasm for a new culture, new people, a different country, different traditions, new discoveries. Learning a language is not simply a story confined in a different tongue but it is also the adoption of an entire different way of living that maybe will always remain abstract and distant for you but that you wouldn't never have known or appreciated if you wouldn't have embarked yourself in this adventure.

Becoming Fluent will explore with you all that errors you shouldn't commit like learning words or phrases memorizing them and then, of course once the lesson is gone and you made good figure with your satisfied language teacher (eheheh), not remembering where to allocate them and more horribly discovering that you don't know anymore what they mean because you used them just for that lesson.

A common error this one.

I have known people like these ones. They have excellent scores in general. I remember a classmate in grade to learn an entire book as a parrot but if interrupted wasn't in grade to tell to teacher nothing of what previously said.

Where these people lack?

They memorize but they don't learn.

The important process when you want to start to learn a language is  setting some goals trying to imagine yourself and what you will learn in a month, two or three with realism, without putting you too down or in a stellar position.

If you do that and if you surround yourself with people more or less of your same learning-level you will see improvements because you won't be alone. A companion, a friend, is important during a course and being surrounded by a person at your same level will create a comfort-zone. You won't be surrounded by a person too prepared and in grade of putting you down or less prepared than you and in grade of not adding anything good to you.

In english there are levels of knowledge of language from 0 to 5 but did you know that in the USA there are people who couldn't pass a level 5 test for example? A language is tested by fluency and of course accent.

In the book various exercises for stimulating our memory.

There is to saying that many scientists think that knowing another language can exercise the brain in a very healthy way keeping it young.

Another interesting experiment proposed by the author will involve distant memory.

In the book is cited a book I love so badly and that I read when I was a teen-ager, Psycho-Cybernetics: A New Way to Get More Living Out of Life by Maxwell Maltz. Maltz was a plastic surgeon. He discovered that most of his patients wanted to change their faces or part of their bodies because of a profound interior sadness and that's why he wrote this motivational self-help book.
Maltz talking of  new houses said that it is necessary three weeks for perceiving a new house as home. At the moment scientists think that things can be different, it mustn't be precisely three weeks and same is for a language.

Try to incorporate your new language into your daily life because as previously said it will be a winning strategy.

Why reading this book?

Because it speaks of new languages, of our brain, of our habits, of errors  frequently committed when we learn a new language, because it will give the proper tricks for not failing thanks to innovative studies and because it is encouraging.

Highly suggested! to everyone good luck with your new language.


I thank MIT press for the physical copy of this beautiful book!

Anna Maria Polidori 

When I was a Photographer by Felix Nadar Translated by Eduard Cadava and Liana Teodoratou

When I was a Photographer by Felix Nadar Translated by Eduard Cadava and Liana Teodoratou is a book published by MIT Press.

The author was a french photographer, novelist, intellectual although in this book what you will "read" are his own words.
This one a wonderful according to my point of view translation of Nadar's book: "Quand J'étais photographe."

I adore photography because every picture is a little big history.

A picture doesn't say anything the first second you take it, but after a minute or a day it starts to be part of your history and the history of your loved ones or a landscape or seascape you visited.
It's important to remember and this visual art gives us this precious gift.
I am a compulsive photographer so when I saw this book I fell immediately attracted by it.

Digital pictures revolutioned years ago under many aspects the "taking a picture" moment more "calm" meditative with the old common camera but at the same time digital cameras are keeping the process of taking pictures more "democratic" and accessible to everyone so that moments can be remembered massively.

With this book we descend at the beginning of the creation of photography.

Mr Nadar was born in 1820 probably in Paris.
Nadar wanted to become a reporter but later became an estimated writer and photographer and he was also known because of his passion for taking areal pictures thanks to a big baloon.

At that time it was more than clear that it was possible to use light for impressing something spectacularly interesting: it could have been possible to capture an instant and a touch of eternity for all men and the world thanks to a special instrument, fixing faces, places, giving a new sense to the world and leaving to the posterity a real trace of ourselves.

At that time a picture was a stratospheric experience, so unique that every place was taken in consideration with great surprise, enchantment and curiosity.
Nadar was very severe with his own work, as you will see and if not satisfied by his results he would have thrown away the proofs considered unacceptable.

I found beautiful the stories in his photographic studio, where you will see mr Nadar lived his own experiences.
He was a good expert of human souls. After all: how can you capture in a picture the soul of a man or a woman if you can't penetrate their mystery?
I think you will be delighted to read the differences that there are between a man or a woman's vanity, or the experience Nadar lived with a young guy one day.
But not only: Nadar's writing-style is beautiful. He speaks intellectually well of a certain topic, leaving you absorbed in the reading for then being back abruptly at the story that he started at first and immersing you in a fresh and intelligent dialogue often with a lot of interesting life-experiences, vivid, real and I am more than sure that you will fall in love for these stories so badly from the first line.

You will capture the sensation of freedom and distance from the common world and its problems while Nadar is flying in a balloon for taking pictures seeing wonderful fields colored like a big and natural quilt.

Very humorist man, plenty of wise anecdotes and profound connoisseur of life and what it is, I suggest this book to all that people who wants to read it as a sort of mirror of the times.

The past is our present, reading between the lines of Nadar's stories and you will discover a shocking relevance with our times seen through the lenses of common but special and precious stories of his daily-life as a photographer or just as a man.

I consider of great modernity the story of the pharmacist, "the other" and his wife but also the one of the Bee Tamer.

Nadar wasn't just in grade to take great pictures but to my own point of view to take a general photography of the society where he was living in, the one of 1800, with lucidity, humor and some touch of melancholy for the good past times as for example in this passage of the book where he says:

"We are far from the days when, as children, we would hold our caps low even in the most humble shop, where we were told to take them off in order to give a penny to a poor man, and when mom would refuse our pleas to replace our hold hat, the whole thing being superfluous, because a hat "is held in he hand."

Always in the same page:

"Some old families still try to keep and transmit received traditions; but everything wears out, and very soon we will wonder what could well be the nature of that politeness whose evocation would find nothing to respond to it in the new order of things. What a pity! Courtesy, amiability, affability, were not, in fact, other than delicate means, dilutions of sensitivity, of goodness- and this politeness which seems to be lost forever was not one of the least charms of our France race..."


This book speaks of change of times, habits, and also new opportunities and discoveries. A moment of ferment for the world, exciting and an opportunity for discovering places in different cases that no one would have visited for sure with new, incredible instruments.

Nadar portrayed dead people as part of his works, and I guess you will find interesting a story of a picture taken at a young dead man and the persecution the photographer felt upon him for the rest of his life because of a woman relative of this man...

Nadar visited Paris's catacombs, he was the man who portrayed also, let's also add this curiosity Honoré de Balzac, Baudelaire and many other well-known people of that times although I would want to remember him as the "Flying Photographer!"

What a freedom!

Highly recommended to all pictures-lovers but also to all that people fascinated by story-telling. Nadar was a great story-teller.

I thank  MIT Press for the physical copy of this beautiful book!



Anna Maria Polidori

Uitgeverij Huis Clos publishing house thumbs up the latest book by Jasia Reichardt and Nick Wadley

Uitgeverij Huis Clos publishing house let know that Biografie van een uitgeverij | Biography of a Publishing House. Stefan & Franciszka Themerson & Gaberbocchus by Walter van der Star, Jasia Reichardt and Nick Wadley has been chosen as one of the best designed books of 2017.

The book designed by Piet Gerards and Stephan de Smet.

The jury composed by designers Yolanda Huntelaar, Michaël Snitker, Freek Kuin, Creative Director drukker robstolk, Marije Saeed Director Uitgeverij Loopvis and Suzanne Baker Head Publications Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam choose in a selection of 342 entries the best designed books, counting their distinctiveness in content, design, image treatment, typography, choice of materials, printing and binding method.

Like every year there will be the Best Dutch Book Design exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam and at the publishing house they specify that we will know the dates pretty soon. So, stay tuned!

Congratulations to Jasia Reichardt and Nick Wadley.

Whoever would want to read the book: Biografie van een uitgeverij | Biography of a Publishing House. Stefan & Franciszka Themerson & Gaberbocchus can order by e-mail to info@uitgeverijhuisclos.nl




Anna Maria Polidori

Sunflowers in February Life, Death and Everything in Between by Phyllida Shrimpton

Sunflowers in February   Life, Death and Everything in Between by Phyllida Shrimpton reached me during the Siberian Burian  . In the envelope, thanks I did appreciated the gesture so badly considering the cold and ice felt that days also some chocolate ...

Sunflowers in February is a book for believers to me written very well and with great lightness, vivacity and hope by ms.Shrimpton although the thematic treated not the simplest one and nothing will be missed of the atmosphere immediately after the departure of a dear one.

A book that can be read with simplicity from people who knows that the death of a person doesn't mean the end of everything but that there will always exist a profound and invisible wire in grade to connect us all forever and that people not anymore visible in this dimension are helping us to realize what we must become in this world.
It can be a book in grade to give new hope to parents who lost their children.

Said that life and death dances together in great harmony in this book.

In this case to disappearing pretty tragically is a teenager Lily, twin with Ben. She is badly injured by a car and left alone at her destiny. It was a common day the one of her death, one of that common days that in a way or in another can make the difference.

It's strange to dying and seeing from the limbo of the afterlife what it is going on in the various situations that her family will experience. Lily was healthy so this news unexpected and terrible.

Plus, the driver left her alone rushing away. And Lily knows the name of her killer.

Lily felt a strong connection with her twin Ben. Ben was her apposite in many ways. He is a boy, he loves things that Lily couldn't never appreciate and vice-versa.
But Lily dreams. She dreams to find a connection with him, she dreams of being listened although she is not physically there anymore and ops! all her dreams are realized when she will become Ben! Or better, she will enter in Ben's body.

The rest of the book are the adventures lived by Lily-Ben at school  with her/his  friends, sport, love, moments shared with his/her parents. One of Lily/Ben's main purpose to trying to let know to everyone who committed the crime, and saying a proper arrivederci.

I loved the conclusion, so badly! because it is so true.

Honoring cemeteries very important because there we find the graves where they're buried the corpses of our beloved ones as we have known them physically and a place where to remember them but it is true that spirits of our passed loved ones are everywhere and they're close to us. This is pretty comforting.


I hope that they will make a movie with this book. It would be interesting!

I thank Bonnier Zaffre for the physical copy of this book!

Anna Maria Polidori

The Origins of Happiness The Science of Well-Being over the Life Course by Andrew E.Clark, Sarah Flèche, Richard Layard, Nattavudh Powdthavee and George Ward

What is happiness and what kind of factors determine the happiness of an individual or a family?
In this new book by Princeton University Press The Origins of Happiness The Science of Well-Being over the Life Course by Andrew E.Clark, Sarah Flèche, Richard Layard, Nattavudh Powdthavee and George Ward an analysis of the factors that make us happy.
Angela Merkel two years ago  asked: "What Matters to Us?"

It is true that from a certain time at this part the sensation that there is less less happiness in the population is more than real.

What make us happy?

"Our progress is given by how much people are enjoying their lives" add the authors re-thinking at the saying of Anglo-Saxon Enlightenment of the 18th century.

Are we living in a moment of regress?

A lot of indicators are taken in consideration, from individual income, education, schools, mental and physical health, advanced age, work, unemployment, children, taking in consideration the status of the individual married, separated, single for giving a proper answer.

Some examples of what you will find?

The unhappiest factor of an individual is being unemployed.
And it happens something strange, singular:  this unhappiness won't go away when a new work will be found at first. I guess because of the broken dreams and expectations and delusions experienced before and the time lost.


How much the family income will tell something about the future studies of their children?. More a couple can shares with children culture giving  to them the possibility of learning and more children will love in general, to studying and to reading, appreciating arts,  museums and theaters,  cinema and writing, because after all culture is this one and much more. In opposite case it will be more difficult, and not because there are not abilities but because no one encouraged these children at making the difference in that existential field.


This book is plenty of graphics, statistics. Every chapter is opened by a cute, sweet, hilarious cartoons, for a healthy smile.

Divided in three parts, the first one will treat what makes an individual happy, the second what makes a successful child, ending with the conclusions in the third part.

Highly suggested! to everyone.

I thank so much Princeton University Press for the physical copy of this beautiful book.



Anna Maria Polidori

A Blessing in Disguise Love is often found in the most unexpected places by Pamela Fudge

What happens when a lady of 45 years old remains pregnant and her husband with an affair going on doesn't want to have anything to do with that baby?

It's this one the main thematic of A Blessing in Disguise Love is often found in the most unexpected  places by Pamela Fudge.

No one can tell at first the frustration of Alexandria, when communicated the news at her husband Phil she doesn't see fireworks but a strong opposition. Phil doesn't want any baby at all.

This novel analyzes the various steps and considerations of the protagonist regarding the arrival of this baby with the conclusion, after all, once discovered the affair of Phil that, who cares?

Alexandria will grow up with tranquility the baby alone without the support of her ex-husband but with a lot of other help along her way and new more sincere support from other people.

I also appreciated the name given at the baby because the reflection of the months spent before not a nice walk but the re-organization of the life.

Highly recommended.

I thank Endeavour Media Limited for the ebook.

Anna Maria Polidori

The Little Queen by Meia Geddes illustrated by Sara Zieve Miller

I am enthusiastic by this second book written by Meia Geddes graduated student from Brown University in Rhode Island and now a  graduate student at Simmons School of Library and  Information Science in Massachusetts and writer. I liked her first book Love Letters to the World but this one makes a big difference.

Meia was very worried when we talked a month ago.
"I don't know Anna if it's the case that you read this book now. This story starts with important losses for the protagonist, her parents, you lost your dad recently..."
Considering that death plays an important role in my life I said her that I could cope with gravestones, sad thoughts and all the rest.

It's a big, wonderful and poetic metaphor of life this delicate, dreaming romantic and at the same time felt vintage book The Little Queen illustrated by Sara Zieve Miller with main thematic death and re-born thanks to travel and new meetings.

First of all the most important thematic the one of travel as interior and exterior research of the self when the person is lost without forgetting encounters that  we make along our life, pretty important when we don't know anymore what we are searching and what can make us happy and who we are.

As adds the author in a passage of the book: "Asking what one did was like asking who they were and that was a  too simple a question for a very complex answer."

Who can make the difference in our existence if not "the others?"

But who are "the others?"

Sure: people close to us, but when we want to go in profundity, researching for the essence of our life and our real self, in general people who we meet along our own and unique journey on this Earth and the ones more apparently "disconnected" with us and our world.

The Little Queen is so sad at first when both of her parents are dead. She also puts her tears in a jar, a truly beauty romantic vision of sufferance. It is not possible to give away that tears when parents disappear because they rest with us, with our history. It's a sufferance that will become melancholy with the time but that can't be thrown away, because there is a sensation of possession. Parents mean the history of a person and her roots. Tears included. I want to read in this way this passage of the book.

Having lost her coordinates  although it is clear that she is The Little Queen, The Little Queen starts a journey for meeting new people, diversified from her.
They are unusual. eccentric, sometimes weird.
They are creative, readers, poets, special souls all there for exchanging some chats with her along her journey.

Every situation The Little Queen meets is good for growing up and becoming a better person, for discovering who she is. Let's remember that the protagonist of this tale is in search of her place in this world.

Her meetings?

In an immense library mr.Book Sniffer and  Wall Sawyer.
There is  then Lady Tree a lady who wanted to be a tree but also in the market the window builder.

Each of these people treated philosophically by Meia. What is a window if not an open space for seeing this world and a part of a house and figuratively our interior windows where there is clarity and where there is vision?

But our little protagonist will also sleeps in a coffin for then being back to searching for other friends, like the Digital Director of Sounds.
The sound of the lost of her parents is devastating...
This one is a very important character because at the end The Little Princess will marry her.

This apparently light book, this fairy-tale, or this personal research will reserve to all of your a lot of surprises.
I appreciated the delicate touch, the poetry and the vision of a world that, if looked with the eyes of Meia Geddes would be not only pacific but immersed in art, books, poetry, roses, enchantment.

What a great reading and relaxation for the heart and mind!

Highly suggested to everyone.

Anna Maria Polidori