I’m at the joint NEALLT/NERALLT conference being held at Yale October 30-31, and hope to post a few more updates on language learning and technology topics. For now I thought I’d share a neat link to language learning applications for smartphones (for all you iPhone owners out there!), put together by [...]

In his 2001 book, Mediated Discourse: The Nexus of Practice, Ron Scollon began an exposition of discourse as action in the same way he began numerous presentations and, no doubt, other conversations with scholars, students and friends: with a cup of coffee. But this was no un-ordinary cup of coffee; he discussed what was, in [...]

When I was using the Google Calendar service this morning, the server or something in cyber-ether-serverland must have hiccuped, because my screen was suddenly filled with the enormous error message below, in no fewer than 18 languages. It was a bit shocking to see, because Google normally seems to know my (the user’s?) preferences so [...]

Thanks to Alexis on FB for the latest collection of unnecessary quotation marks on signs, this time on Huffington Post.

My personal favorite from the group, a billboard ad from a pair of lawyers, it seems:

Waitz & Downer: Fighting for your “legal rights” since 1959

If you haven’t already, see the collection posted [...]

The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s tech blog The Wired Campus ran an article today announcing that the San Francisco-based Internet Archive has a new service that allows anyone to find free or for-charge books online. The service is called BookServer, and describes itself in these words:

The BookServer [...]

I don’t know when I started hearing this, but nowadays I can’t help but cringe every time I hear expressions like these:

Watching the weather forecast on the evening news: “Your weekend weather coming up, right after these commercials.”
Transferring from the Fremont to the San Francisco-bound train on BART: “This is your San Francisco/Daly City-bound train.”
At [...]

I just added info about the Kiswahili/Swahili language table meeting every Thursday at 1pm in the Bear’s Lear to the FIT calendar. This table is open to anyone who’d like to learn or practice their language skills, and you can contact The Center for African Studies (510-642-8338) if you’re interested.

So far [...]

Last night I had the privilege of joining Usree for a visit to a language-learning event and screening of Najib Joe Hakim’s film that chronicles the successes of children in bilingual programs in San Francisco schools, Speaking in Tongues.

Held at Beverly Cleary Hall across the street from the Unit 3 residence hall, and [...]

I noticed that Language Log recently had a post reporting on the results of the Marist Poll’s question, “What word or phrase bothers you the most?” And, noting the fact that they noted the fact that this was a multiple-choice poll (all in English of course) with all five options pre-selected, [...]

If you haven’t been there recently, check out the Languages @ Berkeley calendar on FIT. It’s an attempt to bring together events of interest to those on and near the Berkeley campus who are interested in language learning, presentations or exhibits related to language, and conferences of interest.

Here are some events that have [...]

Learning a new language at 41 is a humbling experience . . . I struggle to catch the rhythm and grammatical structures, skills that I took for granted while studying in China 20 years ago.   Now I have an intimate understanding of losing “linguistic plasticity,” and I’m jealous of my younger self who merrily writes [...]