Some very interesting portions, many more too-long and tedious portions.

Steven Pinker is one of the most intelligently enthusiastic writers I have ever encountered. And I am happy to be infected by it.

I think I know how to tell if a book by Pinker is going to be a great read or an effort to get through - how thick it is. I've read most of his stuff, but this is my favourite - closely followed by The Language Instinct (which is also a great read). How the Mind Works is quite a difficult, though probably worth it in the end, and The Blank Slate - well, I barely remember any of it now.

This is magnificent, particularly on how children learn language and how they make predictable mistakes in whatever language they are learning.

He really does write beautifully in this book, always with a clarity that is as sharp as a spotlight. This is a wonderful introduction to Chomsky and his linguistics.

Chomsky’s view can be summed up like this: how do kids learn a language at all. When we try to teach them we say things like “Oh, coo, coo, coochims, who’s a boopsie, woopsie, darlin’ angel?” Now, clearly, this is not the most obvious sort of instruction for learning grammatically correct sentences we could offer our children. So, how do kids ever manage it – given how crap we adults would seem to be at language instruction. The only thing that seems to make sense is that we don’t learn, but are born already knowing the key things they need to know about languages. Just as walking is something we have to learn, but also have a genetic predisposition towards, so it is the same with language.

This sounds like some sort of mystic rubbish the first time you hear the argument, how could we possibly be born knowing a language – particularly given there are so many different languages – but that isn’t really the point. The point is that kids learn all of these languages in similar ways and that all languages have remarkably similar features. A universal grammar.

I have problems with some aspects of this theory – and Pinker points out elsewhere that it does not fit at all with Chomsky’s social and political theories – but the fact kids have ‘sensitive periods’ when learning particular aspects of grammar either happen or don’t happen does seem to be a very strong confirmation of the innateness of language learning structures in the brain.

For the maths nut in me - being a boy I do like numbers and odd little statistics - if we end up knowing 40,000 words by the age of twelve that means from they day we are born we have had to learn eight words per day. Doesn't that just amaze you?

This is a much more accessible book than this review is turning out – Pinker at his best.

I'm interested in this topic but this book was a slog for me.

This was an intense book. I liked it, but I like that I'm done with it, too. It was kind of everything I wanted it to be, but maybe I don't know what I want. Honestly, though, it was a really good book. But there were some parts where I was a little glazed over because he was so in the weeds of phonology, "words," "rules," etc.

This is a fine book, but doesn't really add anything new if you've already read The Language Instinct.

Boring if you do not have an interest in linguistics.

Too bad I read this book after retiring as an elementary schoolteacher. It turned my thinking upside down with regard to children learning to read. I would have approached reading instruction very differently in 1st and 2nd grades.

This guy knows way too much about language. Still, he did a good job of compacting complex linguistic ideas into understandable vignettes. His witticisms and use of comic strips helped lighten things up as well. I would definitely recommend Words and Rules for anyone looking for a comprehensive and comprehensible crash course in linguistics.

This is probably the heaviest book on linguistic theory I've ever read. In the past, I've enjoyed books that covered the history of the English language - usually in a generally informative and lighthearted way. This book would be good as a "Linguistics 101" university course. Definitely not light reading, but I did find it very interesting.

The author covers everything from patterns of how all children seem to acquire language to the labyrinth of rules dictating "regular" and "irregular" verb and noun forms.

This book was challenging, I couldn't even listen to music with lyrics (my usual) when reading it. I read it during breaks from my intensive language course that I'm on and it really helped me think about English and questions that I have for the language I'm learning, just a bit on the heavy side for me. Must read more linguistic books soon.

Yikes - I went back and forth between two stars and three stars for this but in the end the star ratings said it all. Two stars - it was OK. three stars - I liked it. It was OK and I didn't really like it. This looked like a slam dunk. I loved the Blank Slate, liked Pinker's writing style in that and I eat language books for breakfast but alas this one was not a marriage made anywhere heavenly. I just wanted it to END. Repetition, repeating yourself, which is like saying the same thing over and over, which takes you back to repetition and is also very similar to sameness. On and on and on. Rare for me to rate down in the one and two stars but this was tough to endure. It was packed full of information but the means of delivery was so repetitive (if you're sick of me repeating myself in this review don't go near the book) it was near impossible to focus on the content. There was very little to lift the book up and out of delivering screeds of information. It didn't help that I chose this in audiobook format. Normally language books are very digestible in audio form but I think that may have compounded the issue.