There are many good general books on linguistics for both lay people and linguists out there. The Unfolding of Language is a very compelling book about language evolution in general.
The Horse, The Wheel And Language by David Anthony is a wonderful book to understand how Indo-European languages might have originated.
Terrence Deacon's The Symbolic Species is an old but still intellectually stimulating book on the very origins of human language within the realms of humans' evolution.Stanislas Dehaene's book The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics is more on mathematics and the brain but it touches language for number processing.
If you really want to get a glimpse into language and brain processing, you can go to Eric Kandel's Principles of Neural Science and read the chapters on language and learning - but that book is a general introduction and probably contains more than what most non-neurologists would like to know about the brain.| Genre | Title | Description | General suggestions | Lomb's How I learn languages | This is one of Kathó Lomb's book about how to master several languages |
| Chinese | Growing up with Chinese | This is for beginners |
| Chinese | Le Chinois de tous les jours | Also for beginners, it is just a good phrasebook with real phrases. It has the Chinese sentence, pinyin and French translation. You can download the audio |
| German | Radio Wissen | Public online radio about cultural and scientific things |
| Norwegian | Norwegian-English Dictionary: A Pronouncing and Translating Dictionary of Modern Norwegian (Bokmal and Nynorsk) (ISBN 978-0299038748) | Probably the best Norwegian-English dictionary, somewhat outdated |
| Norwegian | Norwegian Practical Dictionary (ISBN 978-0781811064) | There are few decent English-Norwegian dictionaries out there. This one is from and into English. It is fairly decent and has quite some information on collocations. |
| Norwegian | Norwegisch ohne Mühe Assimil (ISBN 978-3896250100) | I think Assimil has better and worse books. I liked this one because it contains a large amount of expressions and as its target is a public already speaking another Germanic language so it already assumes some general familiarity with many terms and grammar principles. Its humour is not my cup of tea but that is the same with the rest of Assimil books. |
| Norwegian | NRK | The public Norwegian TV and radio |
| Polish | Słownik tempatyczny Hispański (ISBN 978-83-7429-527-7) | A Spanish thematic dictionary for Polish speakers, it is also good for me as a native Spanish speaker who wants to learn some Polish. You won't find here morpho-syntactic information for Polish but there is a lot of vocabulary nicely organized |
| Polish | Trójka | This is a culture radio station |
| Russian | Dictionary of Advanced Russian Usage: A Guide to Idiom, Colloquialisms, Slang and More (ISBN 978-0884003502) | Lots and lots of concrete translation examples for expressions you do not find even in the Oxford Russian dictionary |
| Russian | Oxford Russian Dictionary (ISBN 978-0198614203) | There are very few decent Russian dictionaries out there and this is the best I have been able to come up with for the English-Russian pair |
| Russian | Russian for all Occasions (ISBN 978-1138960725) | A Russian English collocation dictionary! Finally we get one for Russian. This is an outstanding work. If you study Russian at an advanced level, I recommend you this book |
| Russian | Communiquez en russe (ISBN 978-2266037051) | This remarkable little book for French speakers has a lot of useful Russian expressions. Unfortunately, the book is out of print. |
| Russian | Novaja Gazeta | This is a fairly known Russian newspaper, good when comprehension levels are already high |
| Russian | Snob | You can find interesting stuff about culture, science in general |
| Calculating your English vocabulary |
| Om jouw woordenschat Nederlands in te schatten |
| Cliquez ici si vous voulez savoir combien de langues vous pouvez reconnaître |