My father recently recounted an anecdote from his post-graduate years at the University of Moscow in the mid-1960s. He and his friend-we’ll call him Dr. Ramanna-were chatting amongst themselves on a cold, wintry day, surrounded by a slew of Russian colleagues. One Russian gentleman seated nearby inquired: What languages were [...]

“What is Chai Tea?” I wondered, flabbergasted: “It makes no sense! Chai=tea. Tea tea? And it’s supposed to be Indian?”

Now, I take pride in knowing my teas: I come from a land where tea is the preferred beverage, ubiquitous in the national beverage-scape. Tea was incorporated into my breakfast routine [...]

In a recent post, I wrote about a circular from the Department of Official Language, part of the Indian Home Ministry, encouraging the use of popular English words in place of difficult Hindi terms in official Hindi communications. The Wall Street Journal’s India blog carries the same news posted a few hours ago, [...]

Long time, no see, FiTizens!

We’ve hit December and with that comes the start of the usual reflections upon the year that has just been. On the language side of things, this usually means lists of words that somehow manage to encapsulate or convey the events and general feeling of the year. The past week here [...]

Following a series of recent service outages impacting CalMail, the UC Berkeley email system, Berkeley’s Information Services and Technology organization (IST) announced Monday that it was implementing a major change in communications technology, effective immediately. Dubbed “CowMail,” the new system will involve rapidly phasing out email and other forms of electronic communication in favor of [...]

Ever wonder how Mount Diablo got its name?  What the “San” in San Pablo means, or what an “alcatraz” is?

California’s diverse toponymy comes from its rich cultural history — places like Ohlone Park, Sonoma, Solano, Petaluma, Marin and Napa all originate from the indigenous peoples of the area (Ohlone, more→

I have been taking French for 7 years now, since my freshman year of high school. I attended a French American school where I was learning how to say “Bonjour” while my many of my new friends were taking math and chemistry in French since they had been there since kindergarten — or maternelle as [...]

J’ai grandi dans une famille juive. J’ai passé mes trois dernières années de lycée dans une banlieue de Chicago à majorité juive. Il n’y avait pas moyen, donc, d’ignorer le Shoah. On en parlait. À la télé, on passait un téléfilm avec le Capitaine Spock en vedette et qui s’appelait “Never Forget.” Et, [...]

Last week I had the opportunity to go and talk with the students in Claire Kramsch’s UGIS 120 class, the introductory course for the new Applied Language Studies minor being offered out of the College of Letters & Science. The topic of the day was medium, discourse, and multimodality, and while my presentation [...]

A new circular from the Department of Official Language, part of the Indian Home Ministry, encourages the use of popular English words in place of difficult Hindi terms in official Hindi communications. The circular states that Hindi words such as “misil” (for “file”), “pratyabhuti” (for “guarantee”), “kunjipatal” (for “keyboard”), and “sanganak” (for “computer”) [...]

For Friday’s presentation at the Berkeley Language Center’s Moving Between Languages colloquium, I was really looking forward to moving beyond the world of Powerpoint or Keynote as a way of having visual support for my talk. But it didn’t look to be easy. Heck, even in that first sentence, I couldn’t write [...]

It still amazes me how I can grow up with a word, know what it means, but not know where it comes from.  In this sense, every word is a bit foreign to me.

Earlier this month I was looking at my calendar, the same way I do every day for work to make sure I [...]

It was a glorious Fall in the late ’80s, in a land filled with trees colored in autumnal brushstrokes. I remember with great vividness my first moments in an American classroom.  I was seated in the last row, in a corner, comfortingly next to the door (should I be overpowered by the need to escape). [...]

Today, we are attending the Berkeley Language Center’s conference on History and Memory in Foreign Language Study.

So, we’re asking you some questions:

How have you brought history into your foreign language classroom? Have you taught a language where you felt that a national memory or a historical period was off limits? Have you encountered [...]

I’m at the BLC one-day colloquium, History and Memory in Foreign Language Study, and though I’ll only be able to be here for part of the day, I’d like to leave a few thoughts. Or, as I’ve tried to indicate in the title, one view.

Before launching into the collection of liveblogging tidbits that [...]

I’m continuing a short but proud tradition of liveblogging on FIT but really doing it for the first time myself in a more public context, sitting here in Rm. C110 of the Haas School of Business for the full day unconference, Cal Educamp, put on jointly by Berkeley’s Educational [...]

As I tune in to tonight’s episode (14, but who’s counting?), Ratan is saying things about the different suitors, in what appears to be a slightly mocking tone. Her current target is Abhinav Sharma, the tallest of the bunch, a New Delhi software developer with a gaunt face and smoothed hair. The [...]

I am spending the summer in India with my wife and her family.  While I generally find it hard to forgo watching television, my desire to vegetate in front of frivolous entertainment has been severely challenged by the predominant share of programming allotted to films and serials in Hindi, a language I have not [...]

The late afternoons-when my husband and I play badminton in a park in a Delhi suburb-are a 100-and-something degree Fahrenheit here, extremely hot and dry. All day, we wait anxiously for the mercury to dip just a little so we can go out and play. The park is fun not just because it’s a lush [...]

As a U.S. citizen, I have had one reaction to the killing of Osama bin Laden.  However, as a student of literature, I have found little to say about this symbolic victory in the “War on Terror” except, perhaps, that it is extremely distracting from the research papers I should [...]