The inspiration for our project was our mutual love for food and our propensity to dine out almost all the time. We decided to take our love of restaurants and show how there are multiple factors that contribute to the reputation that a restaurant develops in the minds of its patrons.

Our choice of restaurant to [...]

This past semester, students in a new Sophomore Seminar offered through East Asian Languages and Cultures and the Berkeley Language Center have taken significant steps toward understanding the complexity of language in multilingual environments like Berkeley.

Rather than focus on the speech or writing practices of bilingual individuals, however, participants [...]

Seeing a Japanese word I thought was buried in the past re-emerging in day-to-day use reminded me of a strand of posts I started but haven’t kept up with:「ありがとうございます」(Thank you very much),「入口」 (Entrance), and「おひさしぶりです」 (Long time, no see)  were posts I wrote as I tried to make sure my [...]

I was online and on Facebook when the first news about the earthquake in Japan was posted. I hurriedly went to check English language news sites and found next to nothing on them. I switched over to the Asahi Shimbun, Yomiuri, and Mainichi and spent half the night reading, refreshing, watching, and checking in on [...]

The 8.9 earthquake that hit Japan two days ago, the continuing revelations about the loss of life, the massive water damage, and now the minute-by-minute unfolding of an already bad and potentially horrific situation in a number of nuclear reactors in Japan … these seem to have reduced language to nothing. These are [...]

한 2년 전에 이 블로그 FIT에서 UC버클리 일본어 선생님들께 감사의 말씀을 적은 적이 있다. 내가 학부생 일때 그 언어를 철저하게 공부할 수 있게 해주신 선생님들께 적어도 그렇게 써드려야겠다고 생각 했기 때문이다.

About 2 years ago here on FIT I wrote a post thanking my UC Berkeley Japanese teachers. This was the least [...]

Hello, all! I’m Renee Bell, an undergrad at UC Berkeley, and this semester I took French 24: Language and Technology. A topic discussed during the course was internet slang, which I had seen primarily an English variation of, and I grew interested in the internet slang of different languages. The following is an expansion on [...]

OK, so this news has already been out for a few months now, but given that Usree’s “Animal Sounds in Different Languages” is the most-viewed post on FIT, I thought it only fitting that we give some blogtime to the latest in canine translation technology. “Bowlingual” (Japanese site) is [...]

It’s funny how translation can bring to light meanings in familiar words that you never knew were there. The last few days, I’ve been working on a document in Japanese—or, I guess “document” might be too formal a term. It’s an advertisement for a thermal blanket with different layers that are supposed to retain the [...]

Now, looking back and looking forward at the end of my third semester in Language and Power, I’m struck by how much the syllabus feels like it tells the story of a journey of survival. But, I have to admit, it’s a funny kind of journey, and one I wouldn’t have ever hoped for, since [...]

I’ve just come down to San Diego for my first-ever AERA (American Educational Research Association) conference, and there’s much to write about. Actually, with probably around 10,000 people spread across 4 giant convention centers and hotels, there’s way too much going on to capture anything more than a tiny fragment. But one thing [...]

A Republican Texan legislator, Betty Brown, created an uproar Tuesday by suggesting, during House Elections Committee testimony, that Asian-American voters should use names which are “easier for Americans to deal with.” Ramey Ko, a rep for the Organization of Chinese Americans, had earlier stated “that people of Chinese, Japanese and Korean descent often have [...]

This past Thursday, I attended Language Matters: Strengthening Asian and Pacific Islander Language Education at Berkeley. The stated aim of the event, according to the program brochure, was “to promote the creation of majors and minors for marginalized API languages like Korean, Tagalog, Thai, Tamil, Vietnamese, Khmer, etc, and to promote labor equity for [...]