Tag Archives: diversity

Word Nerd: 10 German loanwords that English is never giving back

11 Mar

When stepping out of your comfort zone to study abroad, learning a new language is often one of the major reasons. At least it was for me when I traveled westward from Germany as a foreign exchange student to spend a year at an American high-school. For me, learning a language in a classroom, online, […]

Word Nerd: 5 Aztec words that you definitely know

6 Nov

Technically, the language spoken by the Aztecs is known as Nahuatl, and there are many variants of it. It’s the language Europeans heard in the 16th century, when they first arrived in the great city of Tenochtitlan (the site of today’s Mexico City). Nahuatl has been spoken for more than 1,000 years in Mexico, where […]

Studying in Canada has helped me truly think like an engineer

13 Jun

Rishabh Mundhra, 21, is an Indian undergraduate student of mechanical engineering at the University of Toronto, Canada, and president of the Indian Students’ Society there. He will graduate next year. Here he talks about academics and extracurricular activities at the university. In the video below, he discusses how students learn to think like engineers, and […]

Word Nerd: Paneer, cottage cheese, and the vocabulary of diversity

18 Apr

Photo of cheeses by Rodney. Used under CC BY 2.0 license

Recently, a friend who is a professor of Italian language and culture expressed her frustration that an English-language textbook had translated “ricotta” as “cream cheese”. I remarked that it was like Indian cookbooks wrongly translating “paneer” as “cottage cheese”. She said that this was different because the author was a scholar of Italian cinema, and […]