Jenifer Larson-Hall comes from a family of people who loved loud talking, debating, and learning about languages and cultures. Her career in language learning had modest beginnings with its start in 7th grade Spanish, but later progressed to Russian, Japanese, and a smattering of French, Bemba (spoken in Zambia), Korean and Mandarin Chinese. An interest in math led to her combination of research in second language acquisition as well as statistics, which she firmly believes can make a great difference to how research is perceived and accepted by a research community. She wrote this book for the graduate student she was once was, trying to write a dissertation and figure out how to analyze her data by using statistics.