"Witty, exuberant, also melancholy, and crowded with intelligence - Fifty Sounds is so much fun to read. Polly Barton has written an essay that is also an argument that is also a prose poem. Let's call it an oblique adventure story, whose hero is equipped only with high spirits, and a ragtag band of phonemes."
-Rivka Galchen, author of Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch

"It's a vivid excavation of language and memory, a dizzying odyssey through the struggles of immersion and language learning, and a deeply humane love letter to a country that helped shape who she is today."
-Florentyna Leow, Japan Times

"Both memoir and cultural study, Fifty Sounds is the record of Barton's attempts to grapple with the Japanese language. . . . Like falling in love itself, the experience of learning Japanese . . . is intimate, humorous and painful."
-Lamorna Ash, Times Literary Supplement

"Every adventure [Barton] has-culinary, sexual, or emotional-adds to the depth of her vocabulary. . . . Fifty Sounds is a delightful, granular account of communicating across languages, as Barton gradually becomes able to consider the world not in a new light, but with new words."
-Laura Waddell, Scotsman