Language Shock: Understanding The Culture Of Conversation

The actual content of this book and its truly interesting parts are muddled by its author's self-righteous, self-important conversational style of writing.

The author frequently inserts snippets about himself (whom he has quite a high opinion of), unbearably awkward similes and off-the-cuff thoughts in an effort to be clever or interesting, and winds up being neither. Perhaps his excuse is that anthropological linguistics is a very personal study, one in which fieldwork cannot be done without factoring in the researcher's temperaments. In either case, this book quickly becomes tiresome due to the author's intrusive, egotistical ramblings.

There are plenty of interesting points that he makes; unfortunately, you will have to wade through plenty of self-indulgent blather to discover them.

The price of this book was so much lower than anywhere else and it arrived much more quickly than I expected. The condition was just perfect. I was so pleased.

I highly recommend this book to anybody with an interest in getting a rudimentary introduction to the ways in which language and culture intermesh. I read it as part of a class at the UMD, though I didn't take it with Agar, and it was one of my most favorite parts of the class. I think it deserves credit as a book that's enjoyable, not just educational. There's a very short list of the books I've read for classes that were hard to put down.

"Language Shock" helped me to understand my experience of living in a foreign land -- China, Hong Kong and the Philippines. Agar's inights drawn the fields of anthropology and linguistics gave me a way of processing the "rich points" of those cultures. Since first reading the book a few years ago I have studied linguistics in more depth, and I have to say that Agar's approach to langauge and culture is still one of the best I have encountered. I highly recommend it to anyone living in a foreign country, and anyone with an interest in language and culture.

Mr. Agar has written about an important and fascinating topic. He provides several examples of miscommunciations, and he teaches us some jargon such as "rich points", "languaculture", and "frames" in his field of linguistic anthropology. The book is worth reading, however, it is twice too long. In trying to personalize this interesting topic, he gets too familiar and too wordy. I would like to read a followup with more examples of mismatched communication (1) within American English, (2) within other lanuguages (his are German and Spanish), as well as (3) between languages and cultures. I suggest adding examples of manners and etiquette in various countries and cultures.