Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another Language

by Katherine Russell Rich

An eye-opening and courageous memoir that explores what learning a new language can teach us about distant worlds and, ultimately, ourselves.

 

After miraculously surviving a serious illness, Katherine Rich found herself at an impasse in her career as a magazine editor. She spontaneously accepted a freelance writing assignment to go to India, where she found herself thunderstruck by the place and the language, and before she knew it she was on her way to Udaipur, a city in the northwestern state of Rajasthan, in order to learn Hindi. Rich documents her experiences—ranging from the bizarre to the frightening to the unexpectedly exhilarating—using Hindi as the lens through which she is given a new perspective not only on India, but on the radical way the country and the language itself were changing her. Fascinated by the process, she went on to interview linguistics experts around the world, reporting back from the frontlines of the science wars on what happens in the brain when we learn a new language. She brings both of these experiences together seamlessly in Dreaming in Hindi, a remarkably unique and thoughtful account of self-discovery.

Genres: India, Memoir, Nonfiction, Travel, Language, Linguistics, Biography Memoir

360 pages, Hardcover

First published July 7, 2009

About the author

Katherine Russell Rich is an American autobiographical writer from New York City. Her first book, The Red Devil: To Hell with Cancer, and Back, told of a clash of cultures occurring when the author's breast cancer treatment caused her to lose her hair just when both romantic and professional difficulties came to a head.

Her latest book, Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another Language, details a year she spent in India on assignment for The New York Times. Having been sent there to interview the Dalai Lama's doctor, her assignment turned into a journey of linguistic awakening and of self-discovery. It was nominated for the 2011 Dolman Travel Book Award.

Rich's articles have been featured in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Oregonian, O: The Oprah Magazine, Vogue and Salon. She has received several grants and fellowships, including ones from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New York Public Library’s Center for Scholars and Writers, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2011). (from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Will Byrnes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Katherine Russell Rich - image from Oprah.com

Rich has written a fascinating book about language. Sure, the presenting activity has to do with the author heading to India to learn the language, maybe as a part of her cancer recovery process. And there is plenty of Katherine Rich’s personal story here, at least the part that occurs in India. We get a close view of what it is like to live with a host family while trying to learn a foreign tongue in an immersion process. We get to meet the many people with whom she interacted during her stay. But frankly, her tales of locals she met did not stir much interest here. However I did find her excursions into concepts of language and intelligence fascinating, and that alone made it well worth slogging through the rest.

Published - July 7th 2009


Rich died in 2010 at age 56 after a 25 year battle with cancer

[Kelli Marko · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had such high hopes for this book - a memoir of learning another culture via language immersion combined with information about second language acquisition and the brain. This is my kind of story. But, as one of the other reviewers so deftly put it, "I wanted to like this book, but it is fighting me all the way..."

There is plenty of fascinating information woven into the story about how we learn languages and I loved these parts. And it's been at times, painful, at times, boring, and at times very, very confusing, to make my way through the story. I am not one to put a book down mid-way on a topic so close to my heart, but I am. There is not enough seamless storyline of her time there, the characters are too plentiful and the "action" is so broken up that I cannot follow it well.

So why am I giving this 3 Stars? It's really a 2.5. I like it just enough to regret putting it down, but it's still way too much work to fight with it to the finish.

[Marie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I SO wanted to like this book!!

After surviving cancer, Katherine Russell Rich decides she would like to learn Hindi. Eventually, she takes off for India to study Hindi there. She lands in Udaipur in Rajastan...in the far northwest of India, very close to the border with Pakistan. (Very few people I know have been to Udaipur (or Rajastan), and the place is close to my heart because it's where my husband proposed.)

The week she arrives is September 11, 2001. Over the next several months, sectarian violence between Hindus and Muslims escalates in India. She can't ascertain whether she is safer in India or back in New York City.

Her book recounts her experiences in India, including her bizarre classmates (Asian countries seem to attract a lot of oddball expats) and host family, and shifts constantly between travelogue and nonfiction treatise on the difficulties and science of learning another language.

Sounds interesting, doesn't it? Sadly, I had to stop reading it. I'm giving it 2 stars, because I did enjoy parts of the book and found some pieces moving (such as when she meets an Indian woman with uterine cancer who doesn't have a hope in the world of surviving the disease--the doctor said, "if you get cancer here, you die"). I kept getting bogged down in inane details and names of people I couldn't keep straight. Sometimes she goes so deeply into her Hindi studies that non-Hindi speakers will end up completely missing the point. At other times, she surprises me with her naivete and ignorance (such as not knowing the word "papadum").

Rich badly, badly needed a really strong editor. Life is too short to read a book that makes me keep looking to see how many pages I have left! I was disappointed, because I had such high hopes for this book.

[Kathryn · Rating 1 out of 5]

I so wanted to love this book, but sadly I found it disjointed, weirdly and obtusely written and just...lacking. As other reviewers have noted, the academic asides on language acquisition hang together oddly with Rich's memoir of her year studying Hindi in India, and the narrative never flows. I never warmed to her as a narrator and Udaipur and its inhabitants never came to life for me at all. I found most of the stories she told neither interesting nor insightful, there was far much about Rich's fellow American student the tedious (to me) Helaena and her tedious love affairs, and Rich seemed contemptuous of her other fellow students and of pretty well everyone she met in India. When reading some of Rich's anecdotes, I was puzzled why she'd bothered to include them - such as the time she and another student, the Whisperer (as Rich calls her) are taken by one of the men with whom they are staying (members of an extended Jain family) out for a ride in his car, and he leaves them by the side of the road and never picks them up again, so they have to take a rickshaw home. I didn't get the point of that story at all - it's not interesting, it doesn't go anywhere or reveal anything, it seems to be somehow significant as Rich says at the end of the story that the event 'had not been forgotten' at their language school, but it isn't (unless I missed it?) ever mentioned again. This is typical of the book; stories, frequently dull, are told but never contextualised or explained, and it all started to feel very episodic and pointless and random, and made me very impatient. Rich's writing is so unclear that I had to read the section where she is asked to leave the Jains' house where she has been staying for a few months five times, and I still don't know why she had to leave. I've given it two stars because I love the idea of the book, but I was very disappointed with its execution. Her use of English is frequently bizarre and some sentences simply make no sense; perhaps this is done deliberately, as translations from Hindi expressions or idioms, but it simply doesn't work and only left me annoyed, confused and impatient (again). Rich also tries to be too clever with her word choices, which doesn't work either - for example, at one point she says that her knowledge of Hindi is 'careening', as though it's a car out of control. Weird. The book could and should have been so much better, but it fails as a memoir, fails to tell me anything much at all about the Hindi language and fails extremely badly as a portrait of India and its people.

[Virginia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I got this book from the library after I saw it in the goodreads genres list. I had no idea what to expect - the reviews that I glanced at were not that great.

However - I LOVED this book. I REALLY enjoyed reading it. It is as though I and the negative reviewers were reading two different books.

I can see how folks would be disappointed if they were expecting a travel memoir about personal revelations along the lines of Eat, Pray, Love, because this book is MUCH more like something by Mary Roach. It's really more about SLA, Secondary Language Acquisition, and all the neurological & behavioral research that goes along with it. There are lots of interviews with experts in the field. It's also very very honest about the author's personal experiences in learning a second language. (Summary: It is not easy.)

One of the things that really struck me was the research involving bilingual stroke patients. The possibility to retain a second language after losing the first language in a stroke was such a revelation. (The theory is that native languages and second languages are stored in different areas of the brain.) There were several stories about people who had strokes and could thereafter only communicate in, say, the French they learned in high school. This was a little terrifying to me, as a monolingual person - what would I be able to say if I had a stroke like that? Donde esta la biblioteca? Terrifying.

Why isn't a second language recommended more strongly for persons at risk of stroke, based on this research??? I can't stop thinking about this.

I really liked that this was not a glowing, romantic account of learning a foreign tongue in a foreign land. There were good parts, obviously. But there were also bad parts. Just like life.

[Leanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is such a special book about a woman in mid-life, who is in remission from her third or fourth bout with breast cancer, takes a year to study Hindi in the romantic desert city of Udaipur. I was very moved imagining her taking this brief time of strength to leap into the unknown and savor life to the fullest. And what is a more stimulating and daring thing to do than to become a beginner in a second language--especially with one as different from English as Hindi.

Some reviewers complained about the randomness of the anecdotes. That might be a necessary condition for someone living as an expat the first year. She is not proficient in the language and culture enough to really see things as an insider and so she has random experiences with other expats as well as a few Indian people in her orbit. When I started the book, I wondered what could possibly be said about the beginning year of a second language? Especially when that is usually one filled with cultural shock issues.

But Rich does something wonderful by bringing in the latest scientific research in bilingualism and later life language acquisition. Her deep dives into this subject--which she does in conversation with scientific experts-- is absolutely fascinating. And she writes so beautifully about it.

Reading the book, you don't get such a clear understanding of the language itself or what it feels like to speak or write in Hindi. But you do gain a great understanding of the influences from both Sanskrit and Persian and how this is reflecting in cultural conflict in the region.

Living in Udaipur during 9-11 and then during the very sad violence in Gujarat in 2002, she has much to say. As a former journalist, she is excellent at writing on current events. Leaning that she has since passed away so young made this book all the most poignant. I cherish this one.

[Sarah Sammis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Both of my children are in a dual immersion Mandarin program at their school. I'm not sure if that is what inspired me to read Dreaming in Hindi by Katherine Russell Rich but I will forever link the two as I read most of the book while waiting to pick up my youngest from school.

The author decided to take a year to learn Hindi as an adult exchange student. She had lost her job and had been diagnosed with cancer. So she thought a complete change is what she needed.

The book covers her time in India, her progress with learning the language, what was happening in the world at the time and some broader thoughts on language, culture and the like. My favorite parts were her insights into learning the language as well as the more academic discussions of language learning.

The weakest part for me was her lengthy passages about being abroad during and after the September 11th, 2001 attacks. Although this was part of her experience, thematically it didn't fit with anything else in the book.

[The Tick · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book, but it had some major problems. It wasn't always well-organized; there was a lot of topic-switching within the middle of a chapter without any warning at all. She also introduced so many other people and then never really gave the reader a chance to get to know them, so when they showed up again I often didn't remember the first introduction these people may have gotten. I also had an issue with how negative her attitude seemed to be at times. Memoirs usually seem to have some kind of positive feel for them, but given the way she described some things I found myself wondering why she even bothered to try to remember these events at all.

[Georg'ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shifting back and forth between her experiences studying Hindi and what she learned about neurolinguistics, Rich is keeping me engaged and amused. I've had enough experiences with trying to learn languages and living in other countries to appreciate her writing. And there are some wonderful passages. I am surprised by the book as well - I knew little about it when I picked it up, and I've been delighted with it.

[Gabby · Rating 2 out of 5]

While this book could have been enjoyable, it was lacking in many respects.

The author sometimes delved too deep into other published studies about language, and while some were interesting (like how humans are pre-programmed for language, but writing and reading are something that have to be learned), other times it was either not interesting, or she continued explaining past the point of interest.

Then, at other times, she would mention interesting things about the culture or people, just to merely brush it off, or be a mere anecdote. How I wish she would have talked or found out more about the way women with cancer were treated, or maybe grown closer to the deaf children she met at the deaf school where she volunteered. But no. These were merely passing stories.

Also, the way she wrote was awkward at best, leaving me to believe that she was still writing in English with a Hindu syntax. (I can understand this, being a bilingual speaker myself, but with English being my stronger language, having had Spanish professors comment on my syntax in handing in papers in Spanish. However, on the other hand, I'm a proofreader now, and why her editor or proofreader never pointed out the awkwardness, makes me question why they didn't question.)

As we discussed in my book club, it was more of an account of things, and just something we, as the reader, were observers in. We never really felt connected to her story or her journey. And that, in a memoir, is pretty sad.

[Donna Craig · Rating 3 out of 5]

Whew! This book is difficult to review, because it took me three months to read. I thought I would never get through it! I had to keep putting it aside to read my book club books. On the other hand, the book was very interesting. I loved the way the author would interrupt her narrative to insert a brief section on linguistics theory, and it’s history. It was such nerdy fun! Her story of acquiring a second language did interest me all the way through. However, this book was one of those books where you read and read, for what feels like a while, only to see that you have only turned one page. I was frustrated by the amount of time (3 months in all!) I spent reading a 350-page book. That’s so abnormal for me! Anyhow, if you enjoy studying language and culture, I recommend this book.

[Mary K · Rating 4 out of 5]

A tough review for me. I wish Goodreads allowed a half star because this is a solid 3-1/2. The author’s story in and of itself could be tedious but the writing was very good and I absolutely love learning about language. It’s also refreshing for an author not to glorify Eastern culture but rather to recognize that we take the most liberal aspect of all Eastern religions and think that represents Eastern spirituality. In reality India can be as full of bigotry and hatred as it is Gandhi-ism. Still, it was impossible to give such a thoughtful book 3 stars so there you go.

[Rachel B · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.25 stars

I quite enjoyed this book, but it definitely isn't for everyone. Kathy Rich, the author, writes about a year she spent in Udaipur, India, learning Hindi and being immersed in the local culture. Because she shares a lot about her friends and interactions, this is part memoir; but she also did a lot of research into second language acquisition (SLA), and shares insights from her research, as well. These bits were my favorite.

There are a lot of problems with the book, however, which is why it's not for everyone. First and foremost, the writing is incredibly strange; I don't know if the author was perhaps using Hindi syntax, with English words, on purpose, to illustrate some of the points she makes about SLA; if this happened on accident because of her immersion (I can testify that losing your grip on your first language while being immersed in a second is common); or if this is simply the way she writes. Regardless, it's very difficult and confusing to read at times and an editor should have addressed that.

Rich also mentions so many different people and situations, often without depth, that it was difficult to keep everyone straight. The book is too long, in general; again, a good editor could have helped to tighten (and shorten) the story.

I personally connected with the book because I'm living abroad, learning a second language and adjusting to this other culture and language that will never be completely mine. I was able to push past the frustrating parts because of this personal motivation. I wouldn't recommend this book to someone who isn't very interested/invested in learning about second language acquisition by way of immersion; there just wouldn't be enough reason to read all the way through.

Note: There is some profanity and sexual references.

[Ria · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dreaming in Hindi was the first book selected for my newly formed book group and I wanted to love it. The book boasted an interesting premise, was well outside my reading comfort zone and the timing of our selection was all the more poignant with the recent passing of Katherine Russell Rich, so my expectations were quite high as I started.

Sadly, I did not love the book and I'm struggling to fully articulate why. The book roughly covers the space of a year in which Ms. Rich was in India, with stories from her time there leading into discussion of how one studies and retains a second language as an adult. In terms of format, this was clever but perhaps a little too clever, as the frequent segues into the science of language learning often led to my attention drifting.

In terms of the 'story', it's fairly incredible that a woman survived cancer, lost her job and then decided to up sticks and live on the other side of the world for a year. Yet I never fully connected with the story and the characters. It ultimately felt like being told anecdotes by a friend, full of people you have never met and that you don't especially care about. Perhaps that sounds unfair, but in the many great books I have read, I have always felt like an observer, almost a participant in the action, rather than the recipient of a second hand account of an event.

In some ways, I wonder if my own limited life experience led to my not being able to fully immerse myself in this world. Will be interesting to hear what the rest of the book group think next week.

[Susan · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are two broad motivations for people to learn languages: make a living or slip into another community. When Katherine Rich is diagnosed with cancer, she travels to India to rediscover herself and escape to another culture. Along the way,she is enthralled with the idea of learning an entirely different language: Hindi.

The book is an engaging, at times frustrating, account of her enrollment in a Hindi language school in Udaipur, Rajasthan and her experience with the Indian culture, customs and especially, the manner of communication.

Rich tends to criticize India and its lack of privacy and conservative, masochistic characteristics and yet at the same time, she takes great pride in mastering the country's official language.

Rich also underlines the neurological aspects of grasping a new language such as the ability to be dyslexic in one language and not another, interference from external interests when pursuing a new one and the novelty of mastering a new language.

Overall, I related a great deal with Rich's experience in India as a traveller and as an avid learner of French and Spanish, I connected with her transformation and enjoyment in a new language and culture.

[Arminzerella · Rating 4 out of 5]

Katie Rich went to India and fell in love with the country. When she returned to the states, she began studying Hindi. And then she got terribly ill with a bone cancer. During her illness, she applied to a Hindi-learning program in India and her acceptance into the program coincided with the unexpected remission of her cancer. She had her health all of a sudden and a chance to follow her dream. Her experiences in India, and in learning this new language changed her profoundly – Hindi began to shape her thoughts, her opinions, her life, and it made her into someone new. This memoir describes Katie’s transformation as well as the country that became her home for a year (one that continues to draw her back), and it explores some of the oddities of how we, as human beings, learn and process language. Fascinating read – to be enjoyed languorously – for those who are fascinated by language and travel.

[Kathy · Rating 1 out of 5]

I don't know if I can say I truly read this book. I started skipping parts of chapters and then I ended up skipping entire chapters just to get to the epilogue. I wanted to like this book. I was looking for the humbling experience of immersing oneself in another language and culture mixed with humour and revelations. Instead I felt the author was whining most of the time. At times I even felt she was looking down on the people of Udaipur. I didn't like the writing style. In every chapter, Ms. Rich would start with a personal anectode, then segue into studies on linguistics for pages, then go back to the same anectode. Or not. It was so confusing.

[Patricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

The information on language learning was fascinating, a little overwhelming since it was mostly new to me. However, her approach of linking this information with anecdotes worked fairly well, and it was hard to put the book down even when I was on information overload. Sadly, like many travel memoirs, this one gave a slim account of the family she lived with and her fellow students that seemed more like caricature in some instances. The reflections on the mix of joy, bafflement, rejection that one goes through in meeting another culture came through memorably. I didn't find the limitations disappointing, more an honest reflections of how a fallible, mere human being tries to come to terms.

[Louise Chambers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Skillfully weaving her personal memoir with the facts and theories of Second Language Aquistion science, Rich takes us on her journey deep into both a language and a culture, along with her journey into the depths of brain science on the search for where languages are born, live, sometimes meet, and sometimes die.

[Tracey · Rating 1 out of 5]

Adult nonfiction/memoir. This book got decent reviews and sounds promising, but when I tried to read it the author's poor writing style/grammar/punctuation got in the way. The prose doesn't flow at all, and having to stop and re-read sentences or paragraphs on every page was ridiculous. I have trouble believing she is in fact a real writer, it's that bad.

[Michael Norwitz · Rating 1 out of 5]

The author travels to India to learn Hindi. I'm sure there are some interesting observations therein about the current political climate in India, but I could not finish the book. It felt like I was reading a memoir written by a vanilla milkshake about how they experimented with having chocolate chips as a topping.

[Sophia Adams · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. This was a good mix of personal anecdotes and research about languages and language acquisition. Sometimes I felt like Katherine Rich was me: learning Hindi and sign language, passionate about moving to another country and trying something new. I feel a kinship with her and I was sorry to hear she passed away. The linguistics aspect of the memoir was interesting. I liked how she presented different research and theories and connected them to her time in India.

[Jon Stout · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dreaming in Hindi recounts the author’s experience of living for a year in Udaipur, in the state of Rajasthan, in India, in order to learn Hindi. Interspersed with her day-to-day adventures are reflections on the process of learning a second language, which are partly the product of research after she returned to the states. Her interactions with her language informants, friends and fellow students are entertainingly erratic, and give unguarded glimpses both of her own foibles and also of an unfamiliar (to her) but ancient and beautiful culture.

The author shows her gutsiness in being willing to participate in a sort of cultural talent contest, complete with speech and Rajasthani dress, as well as her tenacity in sticking with her learning process through to the point of heart-to-heart talks with people totally inaccessible in English. Her account reminds me of my own Peace Corps experience on the subcontinent, although she was in a more urban, upscale environment. What is similar is the slow dawning of awareness in a new language, and the poignant feelings of experiencing the world from a fresh and unfamiliar point of view.

I like her reflectivity on the process of learning a second language, including detours into the process of learning to read a new script, Devanagri, and the process of learning sign language, which, as it turns out, is continuously being invented by deaf children, Indian in this case. Though I wasn’t sure what her purpose was initially in undertaking to learn Hindi, it was clear by the end that she had broken out of the cocoon of her previous self by recreating her existence in a new language. That she had the constancy of purpose to see it through and the curiosity to continue to figure out the process after she returned home, are impressive.

[James Hutchinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is really two books in one. On one level it is the story of the author's adventurous year in Udaipur learning Hindi. On another it is about the years she spent researching the way that learning a second language affects the brain. Here's a few interesting tidbits:

--Second languages use different circuits than native languages. You can be dyslexic in one language and not in another. Stroke and accident victims can lose one language but retain full function in another.
--Imaging studies show that Chinese lights up different parts of the brain than English. Chinese utilizes both sides of the brain; English is mainly processed in the left hemishere.
--Patterns in your second language start to affect the way you speak your first language.
--Two-thirds of people surveyed felt they had a different personality in their other tongues.
--Language recognition starts early. Four-day-old French babies respond more strongly when they hear recordings of spoken French than recordings of Russian.
--A lot of language recognition is guesswork. In conversation, people miss up to 20% of their native language, because words come at a speed of 5 per second. We figure out what's going on in terms of probabilities.
--Research shows that intelligence isn't the most important factor in language learning. Many very intelligent people fail. What is most important? Motivation.
--The language you speak affects your facial appearance.
--Rats pushing levers for pellets can be taught to distinguish Dutch and Japanese in weeks.
--"Mastering a language will take about 5 years; the emails that promise 'Learn a language in your car!' notwithstanding. At 60 miles per hour, consider, you'd have to drive for around 2,904,000 miles before you could pull over to the multiplex and skip the subtitles."

[Emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was drawn to this book as I have had an interest in languages since early in my childhood.I started teaching myself German around the age of 9 and at school I studied French, German and Latin. Also as a recent self-taught Hindi learner, married to an Indian with a daughter we are raising as bi-lingual I thought this book would be something I would really like and on the whole I did. At times I became really absorbed the book and at other times, I became quite disengaged. I really enjoyed the author's description of her experiences during different stages of her language learning. As a language learner, these really resonated with me. I was also fascinated by the various research she detailed on language learning. However, the parts about the people she met in India felt rather rambling and disconnected and I felt myself zoning out not really knowing or caring what was going on. Aside from this, for the research and insights into the science of language learning and the practical experience, I think the book deserves 4 stars and is definitely worth a read for anyone interested in this field. I suggest skimming over the stories of the various people she met though!

[Nicole · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved the parts of this book that dealt specifically with language, both Rich's descriptions of how her perceptions changed as she learned and used Hindi and her more academic reporting on neurolinguistics and second language acquisition. Several of the books in her bibliography look like they might be worth reading.

Unfortunately, I was less impressed with other aspects of this book. Memoirs are often self-centred, but this one seemed especially so and it was hard to see the humour Rich seemed to in the events she described with only minimal descriptions of the other participants (a listing of their educational background and where they work doesn't give me a lot of information about their personality). Also, the political thread of the book, which seemed like it could have turned into an interesting comparison of responses to terrorism in India and the USA, devolved by the end into a condemnation of India's xenophobic responses without much comparison or self-reflection.

[Clare · Rating 3 out of 5]

Everything about this book should appeal to me. Exploring bilingualism and second language acquisition in adults is a topic close to my heart. Add to that the element of a travel memoir and you've got the base ingredients for a feast.
Unfortunately the final product didn't put the strands to the best use. It was, to my mind, like reading something in draft form. The various strands of the novel weren't pulled together in a coherent fashion and at times I found the writing style distracted from the story telling. Another frustrating aspect was the number of incidents mentioned which seemed important but were never mentioned again or explored further.
I did enjoy the various discussions on how language shapes our view of the world but even here I felt there was room for improvement in how these fitted into the make-up of the book.

[Rachel Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rich spent a year in Rajasthan studying Hindi; the book combines anecdotes from her stay with tons of information on the science of learning a second language.

It starts out strong, but the parts become increasingly less integrated and the memoir sections become increasingly disorganized. There were a number of points where she referenced something as if she'd already told that story, only to explain it 50 pages later. The information was good and her prose, as in individual sentences, was good, but it probably would have worked better as nonfiction about second language acquisition with a few relevant anecdotes than as the awkward chimera it was.

[Marcy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although this book has a dopey title, there are aspects of it that I quite like. The narrative is a sort of memoir of a woman from New York who comes to India to study Hindi. The part I didn't enjoy very much was the part that chronicled her escapades here. But what was quite interesting and would have made an excellent book in its own right was the way that she connected her adult second language acquisition with various neurological studies that illustrate the logic behind language acquisition throughout one's life. Had she limited the book to sharing her stories of studying Hindi with those scientific studies this would have been a much more interesting read.

[Danna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved the idea of this book, but in actuality, it was quite difficult to read. Rich fails on organization. The flip-flop between her time in India and the research she did is confusing. I was very excited by the prologue, couldn't wait to curl up with the book, but ended up giving up a little more than halfway through. I definitely think anyone who has immersed herself in a culture in attempt to learn another language can relate and enjoy. I just think someone should have gotten her to get the flow going a little more naturally!