[jihadjihad]

The snob's take is bad, but there is a point of agreement I have with one aspect of audiobooks: it's impossible to remember details about things that fall outside your native language, if you haven't already studied them. For example, I listened to a nonfiction audiobook about Xi Jinping. I could tell you the broad strokes of the people in his orbit from the late 1970s on, but I have no idea how to spell or even Google them effectively, because I never read them--I only heard them.

The same goes for foreign concepts/places/etc., for me at least there is no substitute for reading when it comes to retention and recall of material.