|
 |
Your Local Bookstores | ||
Tags: Bookshop | Multilingual | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Language Bookstores |  | |
| Frisco Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6650 days ago 380 posts - 398 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Italian, Turkish, Mandarin | Message 17 of 50 22 July 2006 at 2:15pm | IP Logged | ||
|
I live in Las Cruces, New Mexico--a city of about 80,000. The only places I know of that have decent selections of foreign language books are Barnes & Noble and Hastings. Hastings (I believe this chain is mostly found in the western states) is the better of the two with more offerings in less common languages. The only problem is that I rarely see new books come in.
There are certainly more bookstores in the bigger city south of here El Paso, Texas but I don't do too much shopping there. I generally buy my language learning materials online because it's cheaper, but I'll occasionally grab a book from the bookstore just to keep the foreign language section alive. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sir Nigel Senior Member United States Joined 6898 days ago 1126 posts - 1102 votes 2 sounds | Message 18 of 50 22 July 2006 at 6:47pm | IP Logged | ||
|
Check out a Borders bookstore as I feel they're better for foreign languages than B&N. At Barnes & Noble a lot of their space is devoted to a few overpriced Barron's FSI courses, a whole shelf for Pimsleur and the 501 Verbs books. Not that those are bad or Borders doesn't sell some of those, but I picked up a really handy Collins Russian dictionary recently and I doubt I would've found it at B&N. Edited by Sir Nigel on 22 July 2006 at 6:48pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6737 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 19 of 50 24 July 2006 at 12:28pm | IP Logged | ||
|
Those who live in Texas may know Half-Price Books, a used bookstore chain with stores in several larger Texas cities. What I like about their Foreign Language section is that one finds there both the used books, tapes/CD's and software, and the overstocks of new ones that they must get from various distributors/publishers.
Over the years, I bought quite a few languge-learning materials and foreign language novels (and movies) from them. My latest trip, which included a visit to Half-Price books in San Antonio and Houston, netted an older (~1993) edition of Unabridged Collins French-English dictionary (without those entries in blue in a horrible font found in the latest edition) for US$10, a hard-cover edition of Langenscheidt's Standard German dictionary for $5 (non thumb-indexed, which is what I wanted), and a couple of novels (for the future) in German. (It also netted a 3-volume Oxford Latin Course, at $5.95 per volume - I am still trying to figure out why I bought these.) Edited by frenkeld on 24 July 2006 at 12:29pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sir Nigel Senior Member United States Joined 6898 days ago 1126 posts - 1102 votes 2 sounds | Message 20 of 50 24 July 2006 at 3:15pm | IP Logged | ||
|
I just picked up a written exercise book to the Modern Russian course from Half Price Books that I didn't even know existed! My sister and I also found Transparent's 101 Language CD for fun for a mere $8. They're really good as they cut the prices compared to the other books stores.
They have a website that shows stores all over the US. I live near at least six of them. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| hamiltonguyo Newbie Canada Joined 6493 days ago 21 posts - 21 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, Latin, French | Message 21 of 50 27 July 2006 at 12:46am | IP Logged | ||
|
My local Chapters Has almost it's whole back shelf as forieng languages.
Its where i got my Italian made simple. About a third is french and the rest is on various stuff. I think the only language i conciously said " oh they don't have it" is welsh. they even have a scots gaelic dictionary. here is some stuff i remember french Italian Spanish portugese romanian German Dutch Danish Sweedish Russian Czech Hungarian Polish Mandarin Cantonese Japanese Korean Hebrew Arabic Greek Turkish Latin Serbian Afrikaans Hindi Urdu Bengali Scots Gaelic Irish Gaelic 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Daniel Diglot Newbie United States Joined 6606 days ago 23 posts - 23 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Dutch, Italian | Message 22 of 50 27 July 2006 at 6:39pm | IP Logged | ||
|
I live in a small town of only about 17,000 and the only bookstore we
have is a small used bookstore. However, I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of language books they have. There weren't any fantastic programs, but the nice thing is that the books are so inexpensive it doesn't matter if it's not as good as Assimil and FSI. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| jmlgws Senior Member Canada Joined 6896 days ago 102 posts - 104 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, German, Spanish, Mandarin | Message 23 of 50 27 July 2006 at 11:52pm | IP Logged | ||
|
I actually also purchase most of my materials over the Web, often Amazon.ca, because it is often cheaper (and I can collect air miles), but have wondered about physical bookstores too.
I wonder if the best idea in a large city is to try to locate the local language community? Here in Toronto for French there is the Librairie Champlain. You can't really "browse" their website, I guess you need to ask them for material and they get back to you, but I have visited their store once, it is a moderately-sized location with all French books. As well there are the various French schools like the local Alliance Francaise. I don't know about other languages. We do have a Goethe Institute in Toronto, and a Spanish Centre, I have visited the latter, their bookstore isn't that big by any means but they might be of help (I'll tell you in 6 months - 1 year, since hopefully by then I'll start learning Spanish). I know even less about other languages but have visited many local area cultural centres in the area (e.g. Portuguese Centre, Polish Center, Macedonian Center - what's great about the Toronto area is that there seems to be a community of almost any language). The Toronto Chinese community surely is the largest of the foreign language communities here, we have several Chinese language newspapers, surely there would be something similar? Of course no comment on the price... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| victor Tetraglot Moderator United States Joined 7112 days ago 1098 posts - 1056 votes 6 sounds Speaks: Cantonese*, English, FrenchC1, Mandarin Studies: Spanish Personal Language Map | Message 24 of 50 28 July 2006 at 8:06pm | IP Logged | ||
I didn't quite understand what you meant. You mean a Chinese cultural centre or a Chinese bookstore? There are both. I don't really know of huge Chinese bookstores, but there are quite a few smaller ones, and in fact the public library has a larger collection of Chinese books than most book stores, I believe. I also want to mention that in Yorkville, just about a block away from the Reference Library there is a store called "La Maison de la presse internationale" which has a good collection of French magazines and books. 1 person has voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
