(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 […]

The White House website announced that the State Department has prepared translations of President Obama’s major “A New Beginning” speech delivered at Cairo University .

There are translations into 13 languages so far: Arabic, Chinese, Dari, French, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Malay, Pashto, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Turkish, Urdu and Portuguese. And at the […]

I got this email from Wolfgang E. Adolph in the Department of Mod. Lang. & Linguistics at Florida State University via the Language Learning and Technology International Information Forum listserv; considering the UC system’s ongoing budget woes and threats to our languages at Cal I thought it’d be good to cross-post in its […]

A recent post on Lexiblog has a list of the top ten languages hardest to learn, according to “language enthusiasts”:

1. Icelandic
2. Russian or Mandarin
3. Arabic
4. Mandarin
5. Hungarian
6. English
7. Hindi
8. Cantonese
9. Chinese
10. Tamil

What are some of the hardest languages YOU have acquired? What made them hard?

After being gently prodded to do a “post” on this, rather than simply offer an “aside,” I thought I’d write up “25 Language-Related Random Things” about me, inspired by the Facebook phenomenon taking the Internet by storm.

1. Sometimes when I am writing quickly in Bengali, I use Hindi letters.
2. When I was […]