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21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
A must-read, especially for any professional communicator.
20 years ago, I was toying with the idea of taking the linguistics option as part of my English degree at Oxford University. My course tutor recommended I read Fromkin & Rodman to "see if the subject suited me". F & R hooked me completely: All the major areas are covered, simply presented and introduced by a cleverly chosen cartoon which helps to...
Published on January 10, 2000 by artym
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24 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
Miserable to learn from, and miserable to teach from
Those other bad reviews are right on the mark. I have taught from this book a couple of times at the university level, and I found it a shameful piece of junk. There are many cartoons included in it,which make it appear user-friendly at first glance, but it is so poorly written, and it explains things so poorly, that even many of my brighter students had trouble...
Published on May 26, 2002
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21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
A must-read, especially for any professional communicator., January 10, 2000
20 years ago, I was toying with the idea of taking the linguistics option as part of my English degree at Oxford University. My course tutor recommended I read Fromkin & Rodman to "see if the subject suited me". F & R hooked me completely: All the major areas are covered, simply presented and introduced by a cleverly chosen cartoon which helps to breaks the ice. I must have recommended the book to more than 100 people since then and am ordering another copy now because a [former!] friend lost my (heavily thumbed and annotated) original. I now lecture on communications-related subjects and still find myself referring regularly to this seminal work. A must for any serious student of communications science; it draws you gently into a complicated subject and makes the process highly enjoyable.
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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
Great book for introductionary purposes, June 14, 2000
At the university I attend we have uses this book in an introduction course for linguistics. It is rather good for in introductionary purposes but it does not go in great depth with the subjects. Use it to figure out whether linguistics is something for you, but if you already are interested in linguistics this book will be to shallow.
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
This is the BEST INTRODUCTOR Book of Linguistics., March 11, 1998
This book uses lots of funny cartoons and its use of words is quite easy and udnerstandable. So it's good for non-English speakers as well as native speakers. This book gave me all the basic concepts of linguisitcs, and no matter you have lingusitics background or not, you will get much through careful reading.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
Fun is the theme, February 8, 2006
This book might be the most used introductory linguistics book in the world. I am very glad to have read its seventh edition. The number of editions might be proof of the quality and popularity of this book. How many textbooks can be in print for such a long time?
The theme of this book is to make linguistics fun, and accessible. The use of cartoons, the quotes from famous authors, paragraphs discussing everyday use of language, and many more, all make the reader enjoy reading and studying linguistics.
But on the other hand, the effort to make it fun will probably turn those serious students away. Anyways they are here for a university level course on the science of linguistics, where they expect to see compelling arguments, and serious discussions, rather than cartoons and funny word games.
Moreover since this book was first written in the 70's, there are still many outdated data in the seventh edition, although it has been updated.
The chapters on the core fields of linguistics, i.e. phonetics/phonology, syntax, semantics, and historical linguistics, seem to be a little too thin. While chapters on sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, and writing systems can be interesting, students still need to be solidly grounded in the core fields of linguistics before they can successfully tap into the more interdisciplinary fields.
Overall, this is one of the best introductory linguistics textbooks, although it tends to be not very serious, and in-depth, which could be excused for an intro textbook.
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19 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
Great book!, March 9, 2002
I was a little shocked to read some of the bad reviews other people gave this book. Although it's not my major, I took an introductory linguistics course using this book for a general education requirement. I have really enjoyed the book and the writing style, and find myself reading chapters for fun which weren't even assigned! Well done.
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24 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
Miserable to learn from, and miserable to teach from, May 26, 2002
By A Customer
Those other bad reviews are right on the mark. I have taught from this book a couple of times at the university level, and I found it a shameful piece of junk. There are many cartoons included in it,which make it appear user-friendly at first glance, but it is so poorly written, and it explains things so poorly, that even many of my brighter students had trouble understanding it. (One colleague of mine, who insists on using it, feels the need to hand out copious explanatory notes with each chapter.) The book is full of glaring errors -- not only in linguistic matters but even in general knowledge, such as in the meaning of certain common acronyms (just one example). Even though these errors are easily spotted and corrected, they remain in the book from one edition to the next. The section on Language and Gender (among others) is pitiful, consisting mainly of research from the 1970s on language phenomena that have probably not been common since the 19th century. (When is the last time you heard a prostitute called a "laundress" or a "needlewoman"? The book goes out of its way to explain how unjust such monikers are, even though they are dead. Besides, my grandfather could recount cases from the turn of the century of call girls claiming they had arrived at Mr. So-&So's apartment to "take the laundry.") Some portions of the book are so inaccurate and badly written that I suspected that they were written by textbook editors and not by linguists. My students found this book a torment to learn from, and I found it a torment to teach from. An instructor would be better off choosing Finegan's "Language: Its Structure and Use" or Yule's "The Study of Language". While these texts have their own problems, they are infinitely better than this one.
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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
Horses for courses, August 25, 2004
If you're looking for a college-level textbook - look elsewhere! As the 1-star reviews make clear, this is not aimed at you, despite the upmarket cover...
On the other hand, if you're looking for a 'Linguistics for Dummies' book without the gaudy yellow-and-black cover to give you away, this book should do the trick nicely :) It's a pleasant stroll through the main areas of linguistics, livened up with cartoons - just enough to give you a taste of the subject without bogging you down in erudition. I don't know enough about linguistics to comment on the criticisms of some readers (though rejecting an entire field of study on the basis of one book seems a little...childish to me!), but any book that can turn a dry academic subject into an entertaining read gets my vote.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Pretty solid, December 24, 2005
Given that it is designed for intro courses in linguistics, this is a good textbook. It's pretty readable for a textbook, too; after slogging through my dry, jargon-laden statistics and education texts, this book was a breath of fresh air.
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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
Sweet, Sweet linguisitcs, July 8, 2005
I find it odd that some people didn't like this book, for I thought the action thereof was exceedingly sweet. I guess different strokes for different folks. Anyway I took an Introductory linguistics course that used this textbook, and found myself enjoying the reading assignments. I even read chapters I wasn't assigned to and ended up reading the whole thing. The book was easy to follow, entertaining, and really taught me a lot about linguistics.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
The best basic level introduction, but overpriced, December 11, 2006
This is, hands down, the best book to take a rank beginner and introduce him or her to the science of linguistics. The price, however, has placed it out of reach of my introductory courses in linguistics. It's sad that such an important volume has become unavailable as a text in many courses.
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