Results in BLC Posts
Posted by Mark Kaiser on January 19, 2011
Last month’s answer: Czech. This language ... ... is spoken by nearly 78 million people. Most of its speakers live in one of two countries where this is the official language. ... is agglutinative, with an SOV syntactic structure. …has rich honorific forms and context-sensitive speech styles to designate various distinctions in status and situation.…
Posted by Mark Kaiser on November 8, 2010
Last month’s answer ........ Telugu. This language … is the official language of a country with approximately 10.3 million inhabitants. Significant numbers of native speakers of this language also live in neighboring countries, but there are groups of speakers also in Australia, Canada, and the United States. A well-known American novel, which many students read…
Posted by Mark Kaiser on October 6, 2010
To say that UC Berkeley and Berkeley Language Center in particular changed my life from the professional and personal points of view is to say nothing. I would better say my life can be now divided into two epochs – before BLC and after BLC. My English classes started here in Russia, and I have…
Posted by Mark Kaiser on October 6, 2010
This language ... ... is an officially recognized language by a regional government; ... is spoken by nearly 80 million speakers, placing it in the top 20 of the most spoken languages in the world; ... has a 1000-year-old literature and has been designated a classical language by its national government; ... has been referred…
Posted by Mark Kaiser on October 6, 2010
“One must love one’s work like one loves a woman,” says Dr. Armando Di Carlo. After 20 years at UC Berkeley’s Department of Italian studies, spring semester 2011 will be Armando’s last; he’s retiring. Armando Di Carlo ended up in the US because of love – not for work but for a woman – as…
Posted by Mark Kaiser on July 30, 2010
The mainstream media’s coverage of the announcement this week by the Librarian of Congress on new exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) (see the press release here), focused on the impact on jail breaking smart phones, but scant attention was paid to the exemption on circumvention of copying of DVDs. The latter ruling…
Posted by Mark Kaiser on June 21, 2010
The Library of Foreign Language Film Clips continues to grow in number of films, number of clips, and number of features. This spring we added our 41st language with the purchase of three films in Armenian. Currently our collection stands at 942 films, with Japanese, Russian, French, Spanish and Chinese accounting for 50% of the…
Posted by Mark Kaiser on June 14, 2010
DEADLINE EXTENDED! Clips from foreign language films present instructors with wonderful opportunities to model behaviors, attitudes, cultural artifacts and discourse strategies prevalent in the target culture. In this workshop participants will learn how to work with the BLC’s Library of Foreign Language Film Clips (LFLFC) to find, select, and annotate clips for use in the…
Posted by Mark Kaiser on March 15, 2010
This spring and next fall, UC Berkeley will participate in a national study on the goals and expectations of students enrolled in foreign language courses. The research project, directed by Professor Sally Magnan at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and funded by the U.S. Department of Education, assesses how the goals described in the U.S.…
Posted by Mark Kaiser on February 14, 2010
On February 12th and 13th, 2010 Slavic linguists in Berkeley’s Slavic Department hosted the conference “Slavic languages: Time and contingency.” The conference brought together scholars of Slavic languages who use a variety of analytic techniques both in investigating the early spread of Slavic: archaeology, genetics, and computer modeling of differences; and in investigating how languages…