The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of th Paperback – Illustrated, July 13, 2010

Book was in perfect condition & laminate by the Library to keep the book edges from falling apart.

This is a great book if you want to have an informed view while you watch your (grand)children learn their native language. It is fascinating to watch children do just what current theory says they will do!This book is mainly for people who are used to thinking about technical and abstract stuff. I already knew a little about the subject and found the book at just the right level -- the author communicates the basic ideas but does not get bogged down in excessive detail.

I really learned a lot from this book. I think this is the first bookthat I have read, which explains in layman terms all the revolutionarystuff that has been happening in linguistics for the last 50 years.A must read for anyone interested in understanding how languagesfunction inside our brains, and how children acquire their particularnative language.

Despite my own lack of linguistic training I did not find this dry. The writer has an engaging, conversational style, and makes the technical aspects accessible to all. (If you can make tree-diagrams seem compelling, you have achieved something special.) A good book for parents curious about language development, and amateur-linguists alike.

Charles Yang makes all the convolutions of Mentalism and Structuralist ideas understandable and clear in such a way that allows you to read other more convoluted books and articles with more ease. If you don't leave this book as a Generativist, you didn't read it right.

This was required for my Ling50D class and was a captivating read on the mind and language, i recommend to linguists everywhere!

Must read it.

This is indeed a fascinating topic: how children can learn within a very short time the language they hear around them, no matter how diificult it may be. Charles Yang demonstrates that Noam Chomsky was right in positing an inborn ability, i.e. an inborn garmmar in the child's brain. Children are born already knowing a universal grammar, all they have to do is to whittle it dow to the particular grammar of the language spoken in their country, or their group, and flesh it out with the corresponding vocabulary.The book is easy to read, pleasant, and has lots of humour in it.It also has its share of petty mistakes.Proof-reading is certainly very tedious work, but Charles Yang should have taken a few hours to check his examples, or have some undergraduate student do it for him.Speaking about the infinitive, C.Yang says that "to eat" is "comere" in Latin (page 119). No, this is just bad Spanish ("comer"). The Latin verb is "edere" or "comedere". In Spanish, intervocalic -d- tends to be disappear, "judex" became "juez", for instance.A Hungarian sentence given on page 120 is pure gibberish: *Balazs nem ltott semitt. Four mistakes in four words ! Correct is: "Balázs nem látott semmit".On page 60, C.Yang states that Germans speaking English will pronounce "this thing" as "zis sing". Wrong again, it's the French who do this. Germans will rather pronounce it as "Dis ding", because that's the way it is said in German: "dies(es) Ding". I often heard German students mispronounce the English -th- as a -d- in English language classes.If a linguist makes this kind of mistakes with well-known languages like Latin, Hungarian and German, how can we trust him when he writes about warlpiri, an Australian language ?On page 197, a few things are downward ludicrous. We have here a list of words imported into English from several foreign languages. The word "science" is cited as coming from the Greek ! (It's from Latin "scientia", from "scire", to know. The corresponding Greek is επιστήμη)"Ethnic" is said to come from Hebrew (it's a Greek adjective, "εθνικός", from the noun "εθνος", people, race).Well, this doesn't in any way detract from the worth of this book, which is still a fascinating read. The details are just a little sloppy at times.

My daughter uses this book to aid her with her studies at Uni. She informs me that so far it has been invaluable to her. Much cheaper than High Street Book Retailers very pleased with this purchase.

The Infinite Gift is a truly enlightening book for all who (still) doubt about the genetically-determined mechanisms of language acquisition, and the merits of Chomskyan 'Universal Grammar'. Yang's book is a source of nightmare for the so-called 'Cognitive' linguists.