I got an email from my undergraduate alma mater today. They were writing to inform me that, in May, it will have been five years since I graduated. This apparently means two things: 1 – my five year reunion is coming up (oh joy), and 2, my years of free email service are ending. No […]

“When words are immutable“–an article by Usama Hasan from The Guardian, in response to the question “Are religious texts lost in translation?”, being passed around Twitter today. Hasan wrestles with the contentious issue of the (possibility) of translation of the Qur’an, concluding in the end that “the best translation of its teachings is […]

Yesterday I was in Target shopping for a baby shower card with two friends that I’ve know since grade school.  My friend Tasha wondered aloud why there were no cards that represented black babies in the general baby shower gift card section. All of the cards had pictures of little white children, or animal figures. […]

(For those who can’t read Russian, I wrote in English below this. And for those who can read Russian, please excuse the errors!)
Вчера когда я шла по улице, я слышала девочку, которая говорила по-русски. Конечно я хотела её слушать, но только yслышала одно предложение: «Фреди, он должен быть смартый.» Сначала я думала что она бы […]

I remember what a good friend told me several years after he had finished his PhD in New York and moved to Osaka, Japan. We were going over some old emails–you know, the quality kind, the long kind of emails that were composed and not just dashed off in a series of bullet points and […]

…for Google? Here’s what’s up:

Google may be earning an alleged $500 million a year via companies and individuals who register deceptive website addresses.

The claim centres on a controversial scheme known as “typosquatting“, the practice of registering a misspelled variant of a popular web domain. For example, a typosquatter might register “newscientsist.com” in […]

There is something sexy about the term: “international student.” It’s an integral part of my identity, writ into my scholarly badge…For the past six years in California, I have rarely introduced myself simply as a graduate student; I’m importantly an “international student-from India.” And yet, I understand this term but little. It now feels as […]

The National Capital Language Resource Center’s “Culture Shocks” blog is offering prizes for 200-word-or-less vignettes of culture shock experiences that get published on their blog. Take a look at the stories there–and post yours here on FIT, too, while you’re at it! 🙂

The shivering saxophonist played an unrecognizable tune, the melody in competition with the out-of-sync car horns blaring ever so often at the intersection of Center and Shattuck in Downtown Berkeley. I heard snippets of this language and that, foreign to my ears, and then the familiar “American English” sounds-which to me still does not seem […]

Very worryfying!

“You know, like, yeah, what can I say, I mean, it’s just that, you know… I and my friends…” (English, altruism, big smile!) “Sorry, my friends and I…” ( I was, you were, he, she, it was, we were), “we were arriving, you know, oh, sorry, we arrived in the USA few days ago, […]

Few years ago, when I was an undergraduate student learning Korean, one of my professors started his methodology class about Korean studies with these two questions: Where is “Korea”? What do you call “Korea”?

Back then, everyone was quite sure about the answer and was wondering why a professor would ask that kind of question to […]

Want to drink a Bruichladdich? Scared to order it? Well then, this article published in the Food section of the Atlantic Online is the one for you!

Have you been learning a language recently? Are you trying not to forget one? Do you have other thoughts or experiences about language, language learning, or language teaching that you’d like to talk about? FIT’s having a get-to-know-you meeting tomorrow (2/5) at 2pm in room 34 Dwinelle.

We’re hoping that there are others out […]

The 36th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society is going to be happening on the UCB campus this weekend, February 6-7. There are several different session formats planned, and invited speakers include John McCarthy, Peter Daniels, Lyle Campbell, and Richard Sproat. Check it out!

FIT celebrates the official launch of the student-run Berkeley Review of Education. Congratulations to al the volunteers at the GSE who have made this happen!

From the editors:

We are excited to announce the publication of the inaugural issue of the Berkeley Review of Education. The journal can be accessed free online at more→

The beauty and dissatisfaction of that glorious new word !