For anyone who has ever yearned to master a new language, Fifty Sounds is a visionary personal account and an indispensable resource for learning to think beyond your mother tongue.

“Witty, exuberant, also melancholy, and crowded with intelligence – Fifty Sounds is so much fun to read. Polly Barton has written an essay that is also an argument that is also a prose poem. Let’s call it an oblique adventure story, whose hero is equipped only with high spirits, and a ragtag band of phonemes.”
—Rivka Galchen, author of Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch

“It’s a vivid excavation of language and memory, a dizzying odyssey through the struggles of immersion and language learning, and a deeply humane love letter to a country that helped shape who she is today.”
—Florentyna Leow, Japan Times

“Both memoir and cultural study, Fifty Sounds is the record of Barton’s attempts to grapple with the Japanese language. . . . Like falling in love itself, the experience of learning Japanese . . . is intimate, humorous and painful.”
—Lamorna Ash, Times Literary Supplement

“Every adventure [Barton] has—culinary, sexual, or emotional—adds to the depth of her vocabulary. . . . Fifty Sounds is a delightful, granular account of communicating across languages, as Barton gradually becomes able to consider the world not in a new light, but with new words.”
—Laura Waddell, Scotsman