This week, the rise and rise of Rosetta Stone. With big government contracts and a huge advertising campaign, Rosetta Stone is now America’s #1 language teacher. It offers software-based language teaching programs in 31 languages (their assumption — perhaps well-founded — is that British English and American English are distinct languages, as are Castillian Spanish [...]
Entries from August 2009
August 7, 2009
New rhetoric on Israeli settlements, an international libary of children’s books, and faux French in France
In this week’s podcast, Israel’s Likud-led government tries out some new words to describe its West Bank settlement program. One particularly explosive term that some Israeli politicians are now using is the German word “judenfrei.” It means– literally– Jew-free. The argument goes like this: the West Bank should never be allowed to be judenfrei. Therefore, [...]
