BOOK REVIEW: Talking about Second Language Acquisition

During my work as an English teacher in Beijing, students asked me (the first author) tricky questions about learning English as a second language (L2). These tricky questions include “should I learn the phonetics first or vocabulary first?”, and “how many hours should I spend on learning English if I want to communicate fluently with native speakers?”. A father even asked me would his 7-year-old daughter get confused if she studied two languages simultaneously. Some of them I could manage to answer, but oftentimes I was struggling to give plausible explanations which I would be doubtful either. Even if I tried my best to reassure these students based on my own experiences, truths about language learning eluded me. I could not help but think if Sadeghi’s book was out back then and I happened to read it, I might have given more satisfactory answers to these knotty questions concerning second language acquisition (SLA).