Tag Archives: Chinese language
Speaking in Tongues and Dreaming in Chinese
A new PBS documentary, Speaking in Tongues, follows four students and their families at dual immersion schools in San Francisco. The film offers evidence that the study of math, science and other subjects in more than one language gives students … Continue reading
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Colombian Spanish, U.S. Spanish, and Dora the Explorer Spanish
In Colombia, you can hear Latin America’s clearest, crispest Spanish. As a result, Bogota is home to everything from call centers to telenovela production houses. The original Yo soy Betty, la Fea was shot and produced in Colombia. It was … Continue reading
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Translating disaster and disastrous translations
In this podcast, Carol Hills and I pick a few stories that had previously passed us by. We dust them off and turn them into out Top Five Language Stories of the month. 5.Translating Iceland’s economic collapse into English. Iceland … Continue reading
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A Chinese Valentine’s pod
Hundreds of language programs at public schools have become victims of shrinking budgets. Not Chinese. We visit Medgar Evers College Preparatory School in Brooklyn, NY, where 400 students are learning the language. Many of the students at the school are … Continue reading
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Spelling Obama in Chinese, oratory, and chop suey love
How do you spell Obama in Chinese? Depends who you are. The Chinese news media spell it 奥巴马 (àobāmǎ). But the US Embassy in Beijing recently launched a campaign to change it to 欧巴马 (ōubāmǎ). Why no agreement? The embassy … Continue reading
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Twitter freedom, a zeitgeisty Chinese word, and Lakota immersion
Question: what happens when a court gags a newspaper? Answer: The gag sags, 140 characters at a time. That’s what happened this month when microbloggers tweeted what The Guardian couldn’t report. Plus, they tweeted that The Guardian couldn’t report that … Continue reading
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Rosetta Stone: the method behind the hype, a spelling bee with a twist, and Hillary’s Congo adventure
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 … Continue reading
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