Monthly Archives: March 2009
Obama en español, Sarkozy en français, and Wikipedia gone polyglot wild
On this week’s podcast, we begin with President Obama’s improving Spanish on display on Univision. Then we take a trip to a language school in Mexico to hear about changes in Spanish-language learning. Then it’s to France, where traditionalists are … Continue reading
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Yiyun’s Li’s original Chinese title for her English novel
You’ll hear in the latest podcast (#46) about Yiyun Li’s original idea for a title for her first novel, The Vagrants. In Chinese it is 贪生怕死 or, in pinyin, tān shēng pà sĭ. It means, literally: greedy for life, afraid … Continue reading
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Words of comfort in discomforting times, a ban on jargon, and Yiyun Li’s exquisite English
In Britain, the economic crisis may be worse than in the United States. Brits, though, are just about keeping their upper lip stiff with the help of a revived World War Two slogan. Also in the UK, an association of … Continue reading
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podcast #45: Hillary’s Russian lesson, and don’t mess with Canadian spelling!
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been circling the globe, hitting the reset button on America’s foreign relations. But then someone at the State Department tried – and failed – to translate “reset” into Russian. Russians know all a … Continue reading
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podcast #44: Haruki Murakami’s fans, confessions of a kanji-holic, and kwassa kwassa
This week, we check out a claim that with the aid of a supercomputer, it’s possible to predict which words will become extinct in a few centuries. The word “dirty” apparently doesn’t have much staying power. Nor do “guts” and … Continue reading
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