Cross-cultural Communication, Books that Changed my Life

I saw discussion about a book that changed your life. There's a series of books that changed my life, relevant to this week's discussion on culture, history, and decolonizing STEM:

• StarBridge (StarBridge #1) (Starbridge Series)
• Silent Dances (StarBridge #2)
• Shadow World (StarBridge #3) (StarBridge Series)
• Serpent's Gift (StarBridge #4) (StarBridge Series)
• Silent Songs (StarBridge #5) (StarBridge Series)

There are two more in the series, that I haven't read:

• Ancestor's World (StarBridge #6)
• Voices of Chaos (StarBridge #7)

The stories are about interstellar space travel, contact between and among alien races. There's a school, called "StarBridge," with three learning tracks: Translator/Interpreter, Telepath, and Interrelator. From "Silent Dances":

Learning Russian

Over the summer between my freshman and sophomore year at college, I continued reading books from the space history section of the local library.  One of the books that I found, was Deke!, the autobiography of D.K. Slayton, one of the Mercury 7 astronauts, who flew on the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project mission.  As part of the project, he had to learn to speak Russian, at 40-something years old.

Russian is a Slavic language, very different from English. Also, our brains are wired to learn languages when we're young.  It's still possible to learn new languages into adulthood, but adults tend to struggle more.  So, Deke wrote about his struggles to learn Russian.

I had always intended to study more languages than just Spanish.  Spanish was simply the first language I had access to.  Had I stayed at Mercy High School for four years, I was thinking of taking beginner French.  I wanted to learn German, Russian, Arabic...