When you're reading a book about doing or learning to do anything, the most valuable thing you can get is practical steps to take. This book has that in spades. The author is a teacher of languages and it shows in the prose, which is clear and straightforward--iow, practical. She describes what she sees as the flaws in the way language is taught in school, which is important when you're writing about language learning because so many people come to the subject having failed at learning it in school.

After making it clear that the reader *can* learn a language, she lays out things to think about and tasks for how to start. This isn't a course in any particular language, of course, but a way to help anyone studying any language. The tasks and "action steps" alone will be very helpful to a language learning stuck wondering what they should even attempt to say. I'm definitely going to use it a lot.