Thanks to NetGalley and Harvard University Press, for the review copy!

"Memory Speaks - On Losing and Reclaiming Language and Self" by Julie Sedivy is a book about speaking, about language and about life. It is a book that shows just how important language is.

This book is very fact-based, which works perfectly. A book like this surely needs to be fact-based. We hear about the importance of language and learning a language in the country you live in or try to have a life in. Language is probably the most important thing to have the best possible life. In this book, we also learn about learning a new language. How easy is it to learn a new language? When is the most ideal time to learn a new language? What is the most ideal way to learn a new language? And just how important is it to learn a new language? All these questions are answered in this book.

This book will teach you so much about languages!

I picked this one up because I was intrigued by the idea of a memoir that blended linguistics into the narrative. However, this was more of a linguistics books that blended memoir into the narrative. 😅 Which isn’t a bad thing! It just turned out to be a bit of a slow read for me. I like linguistics, but the intense analysis of various (fascinating!) studies slowed me down.

Even though this took me awhile to read, it was constantly interesting and opened my eyes to so much about language and how we learn! Sedivy focuses a lot on being bilingual—how we learn languages, how languages are lost and rediscovered in our own mind, how you process two different languages in your head, etc. Towards the end, she also explores how people are working to save endangered languages, and it was all so fascinating! There are many stories—of people, and of languages—in this book besides Sedivy's own. Sedivy holds each language she talks about in such high esteem, and examines them with care—it's lovely.

I came to this book knowing very little about linguistics, and I found my reading experience to be quite helpful and easy enough. This is a great starter book to learn about linguistics, especially since there is the inclusion of the author’s own story about her language loss and rediscovery. I think many readers can empathize with that aspect of this book and will find this to be an absorbing and unique read.

Interesting book, however a bit too complex at times for me.

Living a country with different language than my native, I recognized myself in many of the struggles the author described. She is quite knowledgeable and clearly passionate about languages. Living in Canada, it was particularly intriguing as a number of examples were drawn from the country, also home of the author. My only issue is that, not being a linguist myself, parts of the book were too complex for me, making me lose interest, drop up, and pick it up again after a long time - took me quite a bit of time to ultimately finish the book.

I found it a very engaging read overall and learned a lot from it - would definitely recommend to anyone interesting on languages study.

In Memory Speaks, Julie Sedivy examines language learning, especially for those immigrants who learn a second language early, potentially forgetting their first language along the way. The book provides key context for teaching bilingual language learners, but also for fully supporting immigrant communities and meeting their needs. Sedivy’s book brings to mind a travelogue, not just because her own experiences with languages span multiple continents. Her style of writing seems to wander through a chapter, touching on a variety of academic studies, personal experiences and examinations of other people’s anecdotes, before tying all these disparate parts into conclusions that, in turn, weave together a deeper look at language learning than you might expect.

The topic of this book is fascinating but probably with a specific audience. The idea of linguistics and how we remember multiple languages we have been exposed to is truly an interesting premise. I love the historical nature of this idea, with lesser used languages being "pushed out" by the more commonly used languages. Some of the personal examples as well as the data behind the premise were useful. I think one could make the same argument about regional accents or dialects. A person may begin life with a strong regional accent and then move to a completely new region of the same country and by the time they are an adult the accent is closer to the new region (if moving at a younger age). I think the part that resonated the most with me was the description of Jews after WWII and how various experiences would influence how much of their native German language was retained. The psychological need to remove all aspects of one's native tongue when exposed to atrocities such as war and concentration camps is remarkable.
My critique of this is really more a question. Who is the intended audience for this book? The general reader or a more specific audience? It feels like the length of the book and the author's expertise in linguistics lead me to this being more of a source for university level study and discussion. If so, then it works. If it is intended to be a more general audience, then it feels too long and rambling.
#MemorySpeaks #NetGalley #HarvardUniversityPress #BelknapPress

Sometimes a book comes to you at the exact right moment. This was the case for me at least with Memory Speaks. I had been thinking a lot about language recently, about being bilingual, and why it has become difficult to me to express myself in my native German but easier to talk about my emotions, books, thoughts, in English, a language I have been exposed to only later in life.

The psycholinguist Julie Sedivy, herself a child of Czech immigrants to Canada, has spent a lot of time thinking about questions on language attrition, extinction of languages, multilingualism, and identity. In five chapters (Death, Dreams, Duality, Conflict, and Revival), she guides the reader through these complex issues while interspersing anecdotes from her own life.

Memory Speaks has helped me find words to describe my own process of learning and losing the ability to speak multiple languages fluently. I think anyone speaking two or more languages can take something valuable out of this book.

While academic in content, I found her tone more colloquial than some of the other reviews I've read make it seem. Yet, I struggled with the longform essay style she employs. I found it difficult to stay focused for 50+ pages of rather abstract concepts.

All in all, I found the content fascinating, in particular the first and third chapter, and Sedivy is clearly very knowledgable, I just wish the chapters had been further broken down into shorter segments for me to hold onto.

Memory Speaks is a combination memoir and research book that delves into the author's own experiences of language learning and retention and recent scholarship in the area. The result is an intriguing blend of information and ideas that got me thinking about my own language learning and memory, and generated a lot of conversations on the topic. The blend of autobiographical information and case studies makes for an enjoyable read, and while I personally want to see more citations and information on some of the studies referenced, this book should be a good fit for anyone interested in how we learn languages, retain them, and lose them, and how community, activities, and age factor into those aspects of communication.

Abandoned after 21% read.

I so wanted to like this book, but it just wasn't meant to be, I guess.

The author laments the loss of Czech, the language her parents spoke, and which she was exposed to exclusively until the age of 2, when her family emigrated to Canada. (She assumes she was "fluent" in Czech - she, of course, doesn't remember being two - though I would argue that a 2-year-old cannot be truly fluent in any language.)

Firstly, this book is very long for what it contains, and is only split into 6 chapters. I got through the first one before I finally gave up.

The writing is dense, which is fine; but the author takes on this victim mentality of sorts that I just didn't feel she was entitled to. Maybe this improves in the remainder of the book, but I'm not sticking around to find out. She seemed negative about everything in her life, never acknowledging the good things that came about from her move to Canada, or hope for the future.

The insights into language learning and loss weren't new to me, even though I don't feel I've read extensively about it. And much of it seemed repetitive.

I received temporary access to this e-book from the publisher via NetGalley.

I'm keen on languages and language, so it should be no surprise that this book ended up on my list of year-end picks. My experience as a heritage speaker of Tagalog mirrors that of Sedivy and Czech. Primarily a language from my childhood, my knowledge of Tagalog has decreased over time. Sedivy does a wonderful job of blending intimate family portraits with examples from research scholarship, sure to satisfy polyglots and amateur linguists like me.

Sometimes, even when I get an advance pre-publication copy of a book, you arrive at the Goodreads page and find that a thought on the book in question has already been stated by another person in a manner that I cannot improve on. In this case, it is the following characterization of this book, written by Jan: “A scholarly tome that reads like a doctoral thesis. This does not minimize its value, but does lessen its use by many who need it most.”

I asked to receive a free copy of this book after getting an email round-up of recently released memoirs for review. The book blurb on this page above calls it a “personal meditation”. Whether you call it a memoir or a personal meditation, this book is mischaracterized, because a lot of this book is dedicated to summarizing published academic articles about learning and remembering (or failing to learn and remember) foreign languages. I teach English to non-native speakers, so this sort of thing holds my interest more than it does for most people, but still there were times when I longed for fewer summaries. This occurs more at the beginning – after a while, the author starts talking about her personal experience learning languages, which had a human interest aspect that summaries of academic research fail to have.

Recommended for those with an interest in the topic. Others will probably find this book difficult to finish.

I received a free electronic advance review copy of this book from Harvard University Press via Netgalley. (less)

This book was very informative and educational about the structure, history, and culture of many language as well as personal with information about how a language ties to you a culture and becomes a part of who you are. Even though I don't have the exact experiences as the author, I still found myself relating to many aspects within the book and becoming inspired to be proud of who I am, even if I don't exactly fit into the mold that society tells us we have to be.

A scholarly tome that reads like a doctoral thesis. This does not minimize its value, but does lessen its use by many who need it most. Bottom line is that there are too many languages being lost globally, but the worst offenders are in North America and are generally government sanctioned. To those who point to the multiplicity of indigenous languages, let me point to Africa, SouthEast Asia, and also to Eastern Europe as having their own multiplicities.
I requested and received a free ebook copy from Harvard University Press/Belknap Press via NetGalley.

This is a beautiful story of language loss, the sacred nature of language, and the importance of working to preserve languages. It ties together language and identity, and is elegantly written.