Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Books from around the world!


If you have been studying a foreign language for a long time, you know that after you reach an advanced level of fluency in the language there are only two things left for you to do: polish little mistakes and constantly refresh all you have learned so you do not loose it. Yes, it is sad, but, foreign languages are like a garden: they need constant care and attention, otherwise, all those verbs, nouns and prepositions that took you so long to master will slowly be erased from your memory. Not to mention how fast languages can change; a word you used five years ago might have a different meaning now or could have disappeared completely from the popular jargon.

At this point you might be thinking: how can I keep up with changes in language and avoid getting rusty? The answer is READING!!!!

This is one of the reasons why the Austin Public Library has a World Languages Collection at the Central Library (800 Guadalupe). This library has books in 29 different languages, including: Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Italian, French, Urdu, Croatian, Russian, German, Polish, and Portuguese among others. Some collections are bigger than others, but they all are constantly growing. We also have foreign language magazines and different branches also have books in foreign languages.

A week ago we received a shipment of new books, so, come to the library, check them out, and if you have any reading cravings, even in another language, let us know! We will get them for you.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

What is the easiest way to search the APL catalogue for foreign language titles?

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

I will use Italian as an example:

In the search box type:

italian language and works in italian
(there will be come irrelevant results).

For just novels in Italian:
type: fic ita and italian (which sort of works)

Aleph said...

Another way to look for books in other languages in our catalog is:

1.Go to Advance Search in our catalog

2. Type in the first box the letters "FIC" for fiction and leave the search option as "Search everything"

3. If you scroll down, you will see an option to look by language, in this case you can pick Italian

4. Hit search and you will get a list of fiction books in Italian. You can narrow your search according to location and also, age level if needed.

I hope this helps!