Sort of along the ESL and Applied Linguistics ideas?

go to your local book store.. and look for how to learn languages for dummies.. they are helpful

hey you know those Eyewitness Travel Books?
in the back, they have a small section about some of the words in that place where your book is based at.

Norman Spinrad, "The Void Captain's Tale."

The vocabulary in this amazing Sci Fi novel mixes many languages because in this future scenario, the spoken language borrows from the many languages we have today.