I am incredibly gifted at languages and linguistics. Not bragging, just saying. That’s my strong point. I can mimic the sounds of a foreign language after not much exposure. It only takes a little bit of partial or full immersion for me to start understanding the grammatical structure of a language, even if I don’t know any of the words. After four years of choir, a year of eighth-grade Latin, a semester of Portuguese, two and a half years of French, and many years of Spanish, I can recognize and “read” written languages, especially Germanic and Romance ones, competently enough. When I learn new words, I invariably pronounce them correctly. Languages are my strong point. We all have areas in which we excel, linguistic nuance happens to be one of mine.
So it’s interesting that last night I was writing a quick, informal review of a book on GoodReads, and I spent a great amount of time grasping for a word that I could literally see and hear, through some kind of curtain, in my head, but could not totally get out. I am very, very attached to my thesaurus, which is weird when you consider that I almost never need to look words up when I’m reading. I understand and remember the meaning of most English words, and I can look at them and probably tell you what language they come from, but I can’t call words up out of my head without a problem. And even though I can read a page of Spanish and be perfectly satisfied with the 80-100% I probably understood, I have a lot of difficulty translating word for word, and I absolutely hate it when people ask me “how do you say [blank] in Spanish?” because I cannot tell you, even if I previously spoke or read the word in question. I suppose my language skills are based on nuance, context, and intuition, not direct correlation. This is probably also why I don’t keep my languages separate in my brain, and why I don’t think I’ll ever be totally fluent in any of the languages I’ve studied, because they mix together. From growing up, my most comfortable way of talking about tropical fruit is to say the names in Portuguese, I use regionalisms and Spanglish slang, especially when talking about cultural or food things, I’m not funny except when I’m using Yiddish, and I adore learning new compound German nouns, because they are so damn good at expressing ideas. Continue reading
(Veera Hiranandani) is one of the better titles for these books, I think. Especially for a middle grade novel. This novel focuses on the life of Sonia Nadhamuni, a sixth grader who is half Indian and half Jewish, and whose father has just lost his job, forcing her and her sister to leave their private community school for regular public school. Like in any good middle school story, Sonia has to navigate the shark-infested waters of popularity, friendship, and academics, and she of course makes iffy choices along the way. She joins a cheerleading team, has to decide whether to sit with the black girl who likes books and writing like her or sit with the popular kids who exoticize her, and has to deal with being the formerly rich girl who now goes to public school. 
. Excellent talk, must read his book. Neuroplasticity is like neural mapping–it’s that part of neuroscience that I understand conceptually without having to remember without drawing a cell, so I love it. Also, I wonder if the current tendency towards multitasking and multimedia extravaganzas is linked to what I see as a rise in more of my peers choosing multiple college majors in disparate fields or going towards interdisciplinary studies. Hyperlinking gives us access to so many new ideas, and I know in my experience, it has made me more interested in investigating other areas of study. Could be interesting to look into…
by Joan Steinau Lester. I would throw it more on the lower end of YA, for its language, treatment, and plot. Most simply, it’s about a 15-year-old biracial girl, Nina, in Northern California whose black father and white mother are separating. Her father is going on a sort of back-to-Africa kick, and Nina is beginning to become cognizant not only of racial difference itself, but also her privilege, assumptions, and appearance when she rides the bus through the black section of town to get to her father’s apartment, when she finds herself angry at her mother for trying to relate to Nina’s feeling of ostracization and discrimination, and when she begins to branch out from her white group of friends but then realizes that everyone expects her to choose either the white group or the black group. At the same time, there is a parallel story through the frame of a novel-in-progress written by Nina’s father about his great grandmother, Sarah, who escaped slavery. Nina begins to identify strongly with Sarah’s journey and struggles, and there’s an inkling that Sarah might actually be biracial, too, so we get the parallels with being biracial and told to choose, and being biracial by way of being the product of master-slave rape. Nina becomes totally overcome with feelings of guilt (it’s hard when you’re friends with people whose ancestors were slaves with your ancestors but also you’re friends with people who owned people like, again, your ancestors might have, etc. etc.) and confusion, and that is coupled with trying to comprehend the result of the Oakland fires and the portrayals of looters by the media.
