Skip to main content

Home/ English Companion Ning Group/ Group items tagged french

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Wanda Terral

http://www.ccdmd.qc.ca/ri/expressions/index.html - 2 views

  •  
    Trilingual index of expressions with equivalent meanings. English, French, Spanish
Berylaube 00

Dyslexia has a language barrier | Education | The Guardian - 1 views

  •  
    " dyslexic in one language but not another. It shows that readers of Chinese use a different part of their brains to readers of English. eported prevalence of dyslexia is much higher in English (about 5-6%) than Chinese. I surveyed 8,000 schoolchildren in the Beijing region, with Yin Wengang of the Chinese Academy of Science, and found that about 1.5% were dyslexic. English, French and Italian dyslexics all showed the same abnormal activity involving the brain system underlying phonemic analysis. In Alan, this theory predicts accurately that the affected language will be English, since Japanese does not require analysis into phonemes.a key peak in brain activity in Chinese readers fell outside the network typically used by European readers. The second surprise was that dyslexics showed lower activation in several key reading areas compared with normal Chinese readers, but this was in a very different brain area from Frith's European dyslexics. Chinese dyslexia may be caused by a different genetic anomaly than English dyslexia."
Adam Babcock

Does Your Language Shape How You Think? - NYTimes.com - 5 views

  • Native American languages impose on their speakers a picture of reality that is totally different from ours, so their speakers would simply not be able to understand some of our most basic concepts, like the flow of time or the distinction between objects
  • rash-landed on hard facts and solid common sense, when it transpired that there had never actually been any evidence to support his fantastic claims
  • new research has revealed that when we learn our mother tongue, we do after all acquire certain habits of thought that shape our experience in significant and often surprising ways.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about
  • You may well wonder whether my companion was male or female, but I have the right to tell you politely that it’s none of your business. But if we were speaking French or German, I wouldn’t have the privilege to equivocate in this way
  • but I do have to tell you something about the timing of the event: I have to decide whether we dined, have been dining, are dining, will be dining and so on. Chinese, on the other hand, does not oblige its speakers to specify the exact time of the action in this way, because the same verb form can be used for past, present or future actions.
  • When speakers were asked to grade various objects on a range of characteristics, Spanish speakers deemed bridges, clocks and violins to have more “manly properties” like strength, but Germans tended to think of them as more slender or elegant.
  • gendered languages” imprint gender traits for objects so strongly in the mind that these associations obstruct speakers’ ability to commit information to memory
  • When French speakers saw a picture of a fork (la fourchette), most of them wanted it to speak in a woman’s voice, but Spanish speakers, for whom el tenedor is masculine, preferred a gravelly male voice for it.
  • Nonetheless, once gender connotations have been imposed on impressionable young minds, they lead those with a gendered mother tongue to see the inanimate world through lenses tinted with associations and emotional responses that English speakers — stuck in their monochrome desert of “its” — are entirely oblivious to.
ten grrl

Jean de Brunhoff's Histoire de Babar Maquette - 0 views

  •  
    This digital facsimile presents every page of a small, delicate maquette that Jean de Brunhoff created in 1930 or 1931 as he drafted the first book in the Babar series. The maquette, an extraordinary handmade booklet complete with cover and endpapers, text and illustrations, is the prototype for Histoire de Babar, le petit éléphant.
1 - 4 of 4
Showing 20 items per page