Whew--we just made it through the third week of the new school year and into Golden Week, a little holiday I need more and more as I age. It means that next week I only have classes on Friday. Last Thursday (4/28) I did my three back to back standing up, high energy classes (Conversation-Culture-Conversation), had several seminar students in my office reading picture books so they can choose one each to give a report about, and then went to a lecture from 18:00-19:30 given by Professor Jacques Durand of the University of Toulouse, hosted by our own Yamada Sensei. Professor Durand talked about his and his team's efforts to record hundreds of speakers of French or English from different regions reading lists of words and short passages and engaging in informal conversation make a database revealing how French and English are changing, typically with dialect differences decreasing as the power of mass media coming out from Paris, London, and America increases. (In one funny conversation an Indian woman told someone that they were living in America not India because they watched so many American TV shows like Friends!) I'd been worried the lecture would be too technical for me, but Professor Durand's English was so clear and his lecture so understandable and his examples so interesting that I felt stimulated afterwards. Now for GOLDEN WEEK!
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Jefferson Peters (JP)
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December 2023
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