Anthony Cerulli’s fascination with world religions began in high school and led him to texts as diverse as the Bhagavad Gita and the writings of Jack Kerouac. He came to UW-Madison because of its international renown in South Asian Studies.
Louis Wolfenson started teaching Yiddish at the UW in 1916, more than 30 years before Yiddish classes originated in New York City.
Cognitive scientists have come to view the brain as a prediction machine, constantly comparing what is happening around us to expectations based on experience – and considering what should happen next.
Monica Macaulay, a professor in the Department of Linguistics, has been working with the Menominee Tribe of Wisconsin for 17 years on language preservation projects. The tribe’s language is seriously endangered, with fewer than a dozen native speakers left — all of them elderly.
For German Professor Mark Louden, translation isn’t just about language. Through outreach with Wisconsin’s Amish and Old Order Mennonite (“Plain”) communities, Louden is working to break down stereotypes of these misunderstood groups – and to build stronger bridges between the state’s different cultures in the process.
Preschool teachers who work with bilingual or multilingual children in five states across the country, and as many as 13 additional states, soon will begin using new learning tools and receiving specialized training developed and provided by WIDA, an international nonprofit specializing in English and Spanish language development based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Eight University of Wisconsin-Madison students spent Easter weekend showing off their Chinese speaking skills. The UW-Madison team won a haul of medals at the Midwest Universities Chinese Speech Contest Saturday at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind.
The dictionary known as DARE, a landmark project housed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, now has a companion volume that gives readers a chance to dig deep into the definitive source on American speech from the first colonists to our neighbors today.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison has joined more than 25 other universities nationwide in an effort to help address the U.S. military’s need for critical language specialists who understand foreign cultures and can communicate in regions of strategic and economic importance.
After Tomislav Longinovic left his homeland, Yugoslavia splintered into seven nations.
They teach what Bloomberg Rankings has identified as the third-most-important business language in the world, after English and Mandarin. Yet, as budgets for public education continue to tighten, teachers of French are struggling to keep their programs off the chopping block in Wisconsin and across the United States.
The two surnames names are ancestral, with the father’s family name followed by the mother’s family name. In Colombia, for example, “Ernesto Escobar Vega” uses two surnames (“Escobar Vega ”) as his legal name, with “Escobar” coming from his father and “Vega” coming from his mother. This naming convention is the rule in Spanish-speaking countries, …
UW-Madison is an international leader in foreign languages, offering instruction in more than 80 modern and ancient languages, from Akan-Twi to Zulu. The campus also houses 11 area-studies centers, the National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages and the National African Language Resource Center.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison has always been a leader in language instruction and study abroad activities. Community members will now have a chance to experience what thousands of Wisconsin high school students have learned over the past decade: language and culture add meaning to our lives.
The Professional French Masters Program at UW-Madison is one of the only program in the country that offers a graduate degree that combines language skills with study in other academic areas.
Joseph Salmons has always been struck by the pervasiveness of the argument. In his visits across Wisconsin, in many newspaper letters to the editor, and in the national debates raging over modern immigration, he encounters the same refrain:
When Ryosuke Shibuya came to Madison in 2002, he had more of an adjustment to make than the average freshmen. Arriving from his home country of Japan, Shibuya did not speak any English. Six years later, he’s graduating with a degree in history.
It’s a rite of passage each spring for thousands of state high school students – heading to Madison for basketball, hockey and wrestling tournaments and a taste of the city, the university and a day or two out of school. But the siren call is not just for sports enthusiasts. The campus beckons each spring to those interested in exploring world languages and cultures at World Languages Day.
For the past five years, the University of Wisconsin-Madison has welcomed hundreds of Wisconsin high school students and teachers to World Cinema Day, a program of the Language Institute and the Wisconsin Film Festival to raise cultural awareness and deepen understanding of diverse perspectives through international film.
While the average U.S. high school may not offer classes in Turkish or Indonesian, an international competition will soon be bringing them to Madison’s high school students.