Sipping a cafe au lait at a sidewalk bistro... Getting down at Paris's hottest club... Cheering on Les Bleus at the stadium... Drop the textbook formality and chat with the locals in France's everyday language. What's up? Ca va?; She's totally hot. Elle est bandante.; This party is lit! Cette bringue est enflammee!; That brie smells funky. Ce brie sent putain de drole.; Wanna French kiss? On se roule une pelle?; That ref is a moron. L'arbitre est un abruti.

Drinking a Hefeweizen at a Biergarten... Dancing at Berlin's hottest club... Cheering for the local soccer team at the Stadion... Drop the textbook formality and chat with the locals in Germany's everyday language. What's up? Wie geht's?; He/She is a real hottie. Er/Sie ist eine ganz hei±e Nummer.; What's on tap? Was gibt's vom Fass?; I ordered the Currywurst. Ich bin den Currywurst.; Do you wanna cuddle? Willst Du kuscheln?; Gooooooal! Toooooor!

Chilling with an ice-cold cerveza at a beach bar... Dancing at CDMX's hottest salsa club... Screaming your head off at the Copa America... Drop the textbook formality and chat with the locals in Latin America's everyday language. What's up? Que tal?; What a hottie! Que cuerazo!; Let's pound these shots. Traguemonos estos traguitos.; That ref sucks. Es una mierda ese arbitro/a.; I'm craving all-you-can-eat tacos. Me antoja un poco de taquiza libre.; Do you wanna hook up? Quieres ligar?

For the average person, most of the American history that he or she knows comes from facts taught to them in school to prepare them for their state mandated tests. That's not the fault of their teachers who were just carrying out the directives of their employers. But it's also a fact that a great deal of that content that they were teaching is dry and boring. However, as in every aspect of life, there is always another story behind each major event. The story of America is interesting and exciting, but it's those lesser known parts of our history that make it special. Even though in most cases, the names and events in the book will be recognizable, most of the stories about them will be new to the reader. If you're a young teacher, perhaps you'll find some material to help you get through those less-than-exciting areas of your textbook. If you hated history as a student, maybe you'll find some of these tales entertaining. For those of you who are history buffs, hopefully you'll come across a few things that are new to you.

Instant coffee was invented during the Civil War for use by Union troops, who hated it; holding races between lice was a popular pastime for both Johnny Reb and Billy Yank; 13% of the Confederate Army deserted during the conflict. These are three of the hundreds of bits of knowledge that Mike Wright makes available in his informative and entertaining What They Didn't Teach You About the Civil War, which focuses on the lives and ways of ordinary soldiers and of those they left behind.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • For anyone who wants to learn a foreign language, this is the method that will finally make the words stick. “A brilliant and thoroughly modern guide to learning new languages.”—Gary Marcus, cognitive psychologist and author of the New York Times bestseller Guitar Zero At thirty years old, Gabriel Wyner speaks six languages fluently. He didn’t learn them in school—who does? Rather, he learned them in the past few years, working on his own and practicing on the subway, using simple techniques and free online resources—and here he wants to show others what he’s discovered. Starting with pronunciation, you’ll learn how to rewire your ears and turn foreign sounds into familiar sounds. You’ll retrain your tongue to produce those sounds accurately, using tricks from opera singers and actors. Next, you’ll begin to tackle words, and connect sounds and spellings to imagery rather than translations, which will enable you to think in a foreign language. And with the help of sophisticated spaced-repetition techniques, you’ll be able to memorize hundreds of words a month in minutes every day. This is brain hacking at its most exciting, taking what we know about neuroscience and linguistics and using it to create the most efficient and enjoyable way to learn a foreign language in the spare minutes of your day.

"Méthode d'apprentissage du français pour anglophones.

Grubbing on pierogies at a a Russian deli... Pounding vodka shots at Moscow's hottest dance club... Cheering for the local hockey team at the stadium... Drop the textbook formality and chat with the locals in Russia's everyday language.

Sipping espresso at a sidewalk cafe... Toasting a pint of birra in the piazza... Cheering for Azzurri at lo Stadio Olimpico... Drop the textbook formality and chat with the locals in Italy's everyday language.; What's up? Che c'e?; I'm so plastered. Sono demolito/a.; Do you wanna cuddle? Vuoi coccolarci?; Nice body! Che corpo!; I'm friggin' starving. Ho una fame da morti.; Hey ref, you're a moron! Arbitro cretino!

“[A] cultural odyssey, a brave attempt to articulate the compulsions that drove [Kaplan] to embrace foreignness in order to become truly herself.” —The Washington Post Book World Brilliantly uniting the personal and the critical, French Lessons is a powerful autobiographical experiment. It tells the story of an American woman escaping into the French language and of a scholar and teacher coming to grips with her history of learning. In spare, midwestern prose, by turns intimate and wry, Kaplan describes how, as a student in a Swiss boarding school and later in a junior year abroad in Bordeaux, she passionately sought the French “r,” attentively honed her accent, and learned the idioms of her French lover. When, as a graduate student, her passion for French culture turned to the elegance and sophistication of its intellectual life, she found herself drawn to the language and style of the novelist Louis-Ferdinand Celine. At the same time, she was repulsed by his anti-Semitism. At Yale in the late 70s, during the heyday of deconstruction she chose to transgress its apolitical purity and work on a subject “that made history impossible to ignore”: French fascist intellectuals. Kaplan’s discussion of the “de Man affair” —the discovery that her brilliant and charismatic Yale professor had written compromising articles for the pro-Nazi Belgian press—and her personal account of the paradoxes of deconstruction are among the most compelling available on this subject. French Lessons belongs in the company of Sartre’s Words and the memoirs of Nathalie Sarraute, Annie Ernaux, and Eva Hoffman. No book so engrossingly conveys both the excitement of learning and the moral dilemmas of the intellectual life.