Dreaming in Hindi : Life in Translation. Katherine Russell Rich (Paperback)

'I took up with Hindi at a time when it seemed my life had buckled out from under me - I no longer had the language to describe my own life. So I decided I'd borrow someone else's.' Having survived a serious illness and now at an impasse in her career Rich spontaneously accepts a freelance assignment to go to India where she finds herself utterly overwhelmed by the place and the language. Before she knows it she is on her way to Udaipur a city in Rajasthan to live with a local family and join a special language school offering 'total immersion'. What follows is a year of linguistic adventure and cultural surprises in which Rich gradually sheds her foreignness to discover a new country and a new way of communicating.Fascinated by the process she seeks out linguistic experts around world to understand what goes in the brain as we pick up a new vocabulary. Both a clever lucid and funny memoir and a unique investigation into the science of language acquisition Dreaming in Hindi offers an engrossing account of what learning a new language can teach us about distant worlds and ultimately ourselves.