Tag Archives: food

Word Nerd: 6 easy tricks to pronounce Italian words correctly

19 Jun

American physicist Richard Feynman was a genius. Not only did he know a thing or two about science (he won the Nobel Prize in 1965), but as an adult he learned how to speak Japanese, play a Brazilian musical instrument, and how to paint (he even sold some art). One thing he did not know […]

My first semester at Northeastern University, Boston

13 Jan

Ranked 39th in the US, Northeastern University is a great place to study. I study Computer Science as a graduate student. I joined in Spring 2016. University Coming from a non-computers background, I found the first semester real challenging. We spent a lot of hours in the library. The lecturers and Teaching Assistants are helpful […]

Food adventures of a first-year international student

20 Oct

I’m a pretty easy-going person in terms of what I will or won’t eat. I am happy to be vegetarian – or not. I like spicy food, but do not equate hotness with taste. I’m willing to try strange foods even if I don’t quite know what they are. I’m just as happy with a […]

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 […]

Word Nerd: Everyone speaks Farsi

28 Mar

We Indians are used to sneaking in the occasional English word when we speak in Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali, Marathi, or some other Indian language. But it wasn’t until I shared a home with an Iranian roommate in the US that I realized how much Farsi I already knew, without ever having learned the language. My […]