three questions for you!

[nibot]

AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION TIME

1. What are your summer plans?

2. If you're in Berkeley, how long will you be sticking around?

3. Tell me about something cool.

4. What is your operating hypothesis? (extra credit)

Comments

[once-a-banana.livejournal.com]

Oooh... and the other one looks like "deer". The next time someone tries to run me over with their car I will glare at them and bellow "Horse Deer!!! Damn you, Horse Deer!!"
Incidentally, one of the most common ways to (affectionately) call someone a moron in Costa Rican Spanish is to call them a "caballo" (horse, once again). How odd... since horses are really pretty smart. Why don't people get called cows instead?? They do like to say "vache" a lot in French (as an adjective), but it usually means 'nasty' rather than just dumb. But I learned a new my-favorite-French-adverb on Friday! Vachement -- it's a vulgar way of saying "extremely". How on earth do you go from 'cow-ish-ly' to 'extremely'?

[once-a-banana.livejournal.com]

Well, the last time I was actually studying Japanese was in Kyoto in August 2002, while living with a host family and roasting in the summer heat. We finished that "Intermediate Japanese" textbook (I think they use the same one at Berkeley--it's white with some black and red on the cover, and written by people in Wisconsin), so I guess I've taken like 2 years worth, and by the end of that summer I could have conversations with folks on most topics pretty easily, but of course I've forgotten lots of vocab and it would take me a while to get back in the swing of things at this point. Same story for Mandarin, which I haven't studied for 4 years. I find Spanish much easier to maintain without really trying because English vocab is so thoroughly Romancified, and I suppose this would be true for French too if I bothered to study more than the 1 year I just got through. I took Korean for a year and it's really easy to read but I can barely spit out a single sentence in it now, since I never traveled there to really solidify things. My German sucks too, although I guess I can read 1st-year level reasonably well now. Next year I get to take Thai to pay the bills (yay for a new alphabet and another tonal language!). So you see, I'm not at all "well-versed"... just "slightly versed" in a bunch of languages--it helps for studying linguistics and linguistic anthropology because there's a lot of work written in non-English (esp. French, German, Russian), and for dealing with cross-linguistic/cross-cultural data from around the world (not that i've really done much yet... I am a lame grad student, spending too much time in class and not enough time researching!)