Chipanglish

August 2009 »

Post by Peter

Bird or Fish?

August 24th, 2009 | No Comments

Two weeks ago, I read an article in the New York Times about nomenclature. The author argues that there is something inherent about the way we name things, particularly animals, that lets us separate them into categories. Brent Berlin, an ethnobiologist at the University of Georgia conducted a study asking students to listen to a pair of 50 names read aloud. Each pair contained the name of a fish and the name of a bird. To combat bias, he chose names from the Huambisa language, spoken by people of the same name in Peru.

Students were able to correctly identify the bird and the fish 58% of the time, suggesting that they subconsiously picked up on linguistic cues. Somehow, the names gave a sense of “bird-ness” or “fish-ness”.

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Post by Yvonne

So I’ve Been Lazy

August 22nd, 2009 | No Comments

I haven’t cracked open a non-English book in weeks, including Grandma’s Crazy Phrasebook. I haven’t done any practice with my Anki decks either. The truth is, I was on the verge of language burnout, and then I had to work a billion hours to finish my dissertation. Brain fried.

And so I’ve been lazy.

Though this doesn’t mean I haven’t been getting worthy language practice, as it turns out.

My husband and I have been watching Code Geass. Japanese audio, English subtitles. Each episode is a little over 20 minutes long and we finished Episode 20 today. I’ve already noticed some improvement in my Japanese comprehension even with this small amount of semi-immersion.

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Post by Peter

Chinese Etymology

August 1st, 2009 | No Comments

I stumbled across this website while perusing one of favorite etymology websites. Growing up and attending Chinese school, we saw pictographs that eventually became the written characters today. However, after looking at some of the archaic written Chinese, I’m not convinced they weren’t written by preschoolers.

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