Carnegie Mellon International Film Festival

Every year, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) puts on an International Film Festival, in which over a dozen films from all over the world are shown in various venues throughout Pittsburgh. This year, the theme is 'Faces of Others,' which, in the words of our director, Jolanta Lion is defined as such:

"How do we define the Other? The term Other can be defined as anyone or anything that is not us. At first a seemingly simple notion, under careful consideration the term becomes more ambiguous and complex. An Other can be identified as anyone of a different culture, language, religion, gender, appearance, sexual preference, personality, world view, the list could go on. In contrast, an Other can also be something very familiar to us: our family, our desires, or even ourselves in times when our thoughts and actions do not seem to align with the person we thought we were.

In the midst of these musings, our minds begin to wonder. Is it possible to understand the Other? Is it possible, in a world full of binary relationships, to know who the Other is: the citizen or the foreigner, the parent or the child, the audience or the film? Perhaps most importantly, can the Other even exist? Or is the Other just our mind's creation used to explain that which is different from us?"

I find these words to be beautiful, and I have learned, and am continuing to learn more and more with each event. I found myself especially attracted to the internship, as "Other" is a huge facet within cultural anthropology. These films have added another meaning to the word, as I watch the stories play out on the screen.

This weekend three of the directors will be in town, and it will certainly add a new dimension to the film to be able to have a question and answer session with the director following the screening. I encourage anyone and everyone to check it out: www.cmu.edu/faces. On this site, you will find the event schedule, ticketing prices, locations of the theaters and more!

I've also met a lot of wonderful people through this internship. Not just the director of the festival, or the film directors, or the guests, but also my fellow interns. They are all such great people from both CMU and Pitt, and we have worked so well together to help this festival run as smoothly as possible. Check out all of the interns here! That video is shown to introduce the major events of the festival to show all of our hard work, and displays our individuality-even though we all worked together, we are each an "Other" ourselves.

Come check it out!! You won't regret it!

Why Americans Can't Learn Foreign Languages

I found this interesting posts in my adventures through Stumble Upon, and I found it rather interesting, so I wanted to share it. Although it is from 2006, I believe there is still much factual truth in the article's main points:

WHY AMERICANS CAN'T LEARN FOREIGN LANGUAGES

What struck me most of all about Lawrence Henry's piece on accents was something Mark didn't even mention. Mr Henry notes that in American English a totally unstressed vowel is reduced to a sound usually written down as "uh" (the sound linguists call schwa); and he goes on:

It's a rampant American fault and accounts for our relatively poor performance learning foreign languages. "Effect" becomes "uh-FECT." Cassette becomes "kuh-SET."

An accurate enough phonetic observation: the first syllable in these words is pronounced with a schwa, whereas many other languages have no schwas at all, in any words. My horse laugh at the quoted remark comes not from this phonetic fact but from the astoundingly dopey idea that it is a "fault" that provides the key to the riddle of why Americans don't do so well at learning foreign languages.

Steve Jones points out me, for example, that western varieties of Catalan do not have schwa, but in Central Catalan (of Barcelona) there is reduction that makes schwa the most frequent vowel in actual speech; yet this doesn't correlate with any perceptible difference in language-learning ability Catalan speakers from different regions of eastern Spain. Henry's remark about how vowel reduction to schwa "accounts for our relatively poor performance" really is astoundingly dumb.

Why we Americans, with our staggering wealth of resources and (for example) the most highly ranked graduate schools in the world, do so poorly by any measure on our command of foreign tongues is a complex question with a mainly sociological, political, historical, educational, and social-psychological answer. (Never forget that John Kerry is said to have had to attempt concealment of his fluent French to avoid bad press during his Presidential run, and Nebraska in the early 1920s had a law making foreign language instruction illegal, and in that very same state as recently as 2003 a father was threatened by a judge with loss of the right to visit his child if he didn't speak English during his visits... This country could not exactly be said to be uniformly friendly toward polyglotism. Nor does it always honor the accomplishment of those immigrants and Native Americans who speak a heritage language at home and English elsewhere — in fact punishment of Native American children for speaking their Amerindian language while in school used to be commonplace.) It's certainly quite a bit more complex than anything traceable to the reduction of unstressed vowels to schwa. Don't give up on taking foreign language lessons simply on the grounds that as an American you are doomed to failure by your learned vowel reduction habits.

Posted by Geoffrey K. Pullum at November 23, 2006 01:34 PM