I'm mixed on this book, I believe there's some extremely good five star concepts.

However it's very slow, for people who love words I'm sure it is amazing. For people who want the meat of the concepts it's probably too slow. I'd watch one of his videos on it instead.

Words and Rules is a real page turner. Who knew that irregular verbs could be so fascinating? But, like many Steven Pinker books, Words and Rules drags on a bit. Pinker wants to explain every facet from every angle until all the sing-sang-sungs start to blend into one big blob and I wished for the book to end.

My favourite bit of the book had me silently mouth "sing...sang...sung" to focus my attention on the 5 attributes of a vowel sound and how my mouth's shape changes to make each one. Did you know that the difference in mouth shape between sing and sang is that the hump of the tongue moves further back in your mouth as you say the past tense form. Did you know that your tongue performs the same trick when you say most irregular past tense forms? There are lots of delicious little nuggets like that one in Words and Rules.

I'm glad I read the book but I was relieved to come to the end.

Me ha costado bastante terminarlo, pero la verdad ha sido cosa de mi situación mental más que del libro, así que no tengáis en cuenta el período de lectura como referente.

Ha presentado una teoría sumamente interesante de la que no estaba muy segura de qué esperar. Creo que todos deberíamos leer libros de lingüística para entender mejor qué es o no hablar "bien" (spoiler: nadie habla mal) y por qué deberíamos acabar con el prescriptivismo lingüístico. Saber cómo funcionan las cosas ayuda mucho, aunque sea una teoría aún por demostrar 100% (como todo en este campo).

Since many reviewers describe Pinker's books as rather readable, I was pretty surprised by the fact I struggled quite a bit with this book. Although the topics of the individual chapters are definitely interesting (my favourite being The Horrors of the German language), Pinker's not an expert at keeping the reader's attention - at least that's the notion I got; mainly because of his borderline obsessive tendency to provide countless, absolutely exhaustive lists of examples, so it almost arouses the idea of a student desperately trying to reach the minimum word count in his thesis, or - which is more likely - an equally desperate attempt to prove his own proposition, which is not needed at all, as he manages to be quite persuasive even when listing just a few examples.

However, I'm at fault as well, as it probably wasn't the best idea to read this book in my native language (obviously not English). Though the translation was very well done and I'm sure it'd make the book interesting even for people without good command of the English language, it didn't felt exactly intuitive to constantly ''mind-switch'' between the two languages.

Ultimately, the theme (and sole focus just on verbs) of this book is a double-edged sword. It's almost equally fascinating and, unfortunately, quite often also tedious.

This is my first Steven Pinker book. It's written well in that it makes material that could be dry and incomprehensible instead both engaging and able to be understood by someone who is not yet as savvy as she'd like to be about some aspects of linguistics and how language functions in the brain. The book also is organized in a way that its subject matter builds understandably on itself throughout and then extends its fundamental premises about regular and irregular verbs to get at the way the brain works more generally and further at the way people work as agents of thought. The second to last chapter runs through the many different neuroimaging technologies now available for the study of how language functions in the brain, which cast a sort of epiphanic light back onto material introduced in the preceding chapters. The investigation doesn't stop here, though. I would like to look into the studies whose conclusions Pinker refutes in the book.

Great book for people like me who are interested in linguistics. Beautifully and humorously written, it considers how our brains might be wired to give us instant and instinctual knowledge of how to properly use grammar. Yes, sometimes we goof, but that is the exception rather than the rule although one would expect far more errors in such an extremely complicated endeavor.
Wild guess here, my opinion only: 3 year old kids have a far more sophisticated grasp on language than the most complex AI I know of.
Pinker discusses people with certain injuries, brain damage or genetic defects that cause specificlanguage problems. These studies have been very helpful in pinpointing certain areas of the brain responsible for different language functions. It's not just Broca and Wernicke. A lot of it is circuitry.

Tedious, boring, with a few good nuggets. Read about 100 pages before I gave up. Just too boring.

Lo último que hice fue leer este libro y me dormí, fue increíble

I'd recommend this audio book to anyone who wants to hear about verbs for 14 hours.

This man is a great writer. He explains familiar rules in a way that is not only more interesting and comprehensible than the standard expositions, but also gives you a completely new understanding of what the rule is about.
That said, the book is very repetitive.The first three chapters are a very entertaining presentation of the relevant phenomena and his argument about how the mind creates speech. In the following six chapters he presents all of the evidence he can find to support his theory: Same argument, over and over again, with evidence from different disciplines. If you love detail, want tons of examples, or are planning to write a paper about Pinker's "words and rules" theory, read them. Otherwise skip to the last chapter, in which he extrapolates on how the mind works in general.

[17 Feb 2024]
Read the first three chapters and found them tedious, so I haven't been able to manage any interest in continuing. However, I have enjoyed other books by Pinker and I have enjoyed other books about language. So I'm hopin that maybe I'm just not in the right reading mood right now. Maybe in a few months I'll be able to come back to it.

I really appreciate the (irregular) words and rules hypothesis presented in this book. The other day, a friend and I tried to come up with a word for "to admire and appreciate". We couldn't recall a good word, so we agreed to coin "apprire", in which I then consciously inflected in the sentence "I've always apprired your approach to life."

Once you understand the proposed inflection model presented in this book, it's so easy to recognize its applications in our everyday lives. It's also great that there's a chapter that hones in the neurological basis of our ability to learn/use words and rules, another that explains the frequency distribution that lets irregular words survive or not, and the commonality of this concept among several languages that help establish the words and rules concept in memory.

Some annoyances in the audiobook are how butchered the chinese was and how much the book drags when examples are being read. The latter is hard to solve; the former is unexcusable: I don't expect non-tonal language speakers to nail tones, but butchering vowel sounds that do exist in the their phonetic inventory is unjustifiable. (eg. 個，should use a schwa, not a mid-high front vowel.)