languages

I move four fingers each hand. Two makes eight. Thumbs are not fingers. Digits, though. I have ten digits.

Every week, I would enter the French classroom with more confidence than I did the week before. My professors were impressed by my progress. When I raised my hand in class, my spoken French sounded so natural and so refined. My only secret was that my progress had little to do with their pedagogy. 

The language of our family or our culture can help ground us, but what happens when a person doesn’t know the language of their culture?

If you are tired of spending the first three weeks of school playing catch-up, here are five ways for you to keep up on the language you are studying. 

I always wonder what people bustling around me think of the erratic snippets they catch of my daily phone conversations with my mother as I walk through Sproul Plaza.

While you may not have gotten that dream position you were hoping for, it doesn’t mean that you have to waste the next three months! Get off the couch, put the Ben and Jerry’s back in the freezer for your next breakup and get motivated.

In a Berkeley cafe, bustling on a Tuesday night, two men lingered over a word: bonito. Bonito means baby, one of them suggested. The other one hesitated — not quite. Bonito is beautiful, he explained. Baby is bebé. And if one wants to admire one of these miniature humans: bonito bebé, beautiful baby.