Fifty Sounds

A Memoir of Language, Learning, and Longing

No cover

Fifty Sounds (2023, Liveright Publishing Corporation)

English language

Published March 19, 2023 by Liveright Publishing Corporation.

ISBN:
9781324092896

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5 stars (1 review)

4 editions

Adventures in language and personal demons

5 stars

The book is an essay charting the author's personal odyssey to master Japanese. She starts with a daring jump into the deep end, learning on the job as an English teacher in a remote corner of the country. Witty, insightful and sometimes painfully frank, this becomes a story of an imperfect heroine finding her place in the abyss between the two cultures she originally expected to bridge as a translator.

Beautifully written and not overbearing on the technical, the book uses a clever hook to theme each bite-size chapter on a specific memetic formed of two syllables in Japanese. These titular 50 Sounds enable deeply nuanced understanding between native speakers, but rather than simply being a dictionary of terms, the book's chapters spin the definitions for each sound as a cipher for understanding the many escapades our hero has crashed through on her quest.

The author's bravery in cataloging her …