From the Defense Language Institute:

Continuing Education has the goal of providing superior post-basic foreign language instruction via resident and non-resident programs to approximately 25,000 Department of Defense and other U.S. government personnel each year to assure full linguist mission readiness.

As a fun note: how hard they think various languages are. Looks like I'm not taking Arabic any time soon >_>

ETA:
VoteForEnvironment.ca tells you if your riding is a swing riding or not, and analyzes who has a good chance to win based on recent polls and the past election. Do check it out.

Unfortunately my schedule on Oct 14 is not good for voting. My options are to:

1. Wake up early, vote, then rush to class to do a debate
2. Come home from school, vote, then take the bus back to school

(Everyone not voting by special ballot: please check what hours your polling station is open!)

Here's the first one! I picked Sapir–Whorf because honestly—not studying right now, don't want to do this one when I'm studying :p If you want to make me write about something, head over here.

( W. Whorf, Sapir– hypothesis )

"Brainwashing [dates to] 1950, a literal translation of Chinese xi nao."

And I always thought it was the other way around :o

→ List of English words of Chinese origin (an example of a bad Wikipedia article)

Also, just for fun: Unlikely phrases from real phrasebooks.

Bathrobe's Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese language site, by the author's own description "an armchair excursion three fascinating languages of the Orient." I found this website while searching for the names of the days of the week in Japanese, although it also has amusing things like how Harry Potter has been translated into these three languages.

When I first tried to learn the Japanese days of the week, I memorized them using the French names (which are based on the Latin names for planets) and the corresponding Chinese planet names. The two have an uncanny correspondence:

Latin (and French) name for day of week	Corresponding celestial body	Chinese name for celestial body
dies solis	the Sun	日
dies lunae (lundi)	the Moon	月
dies Martis (mardi)	Mars	火 (fire)
dies Mercurii (mercredi)	Mercury	水 (water)
dies Jovis (jeudi)	Jupiter	木 (wood)
dies Veneris (vendredi)	Venus	金 (gold)
dies Saturni	Saturn	土 (earth)

This list of Latin day of the week names translated in Chinese is, in fact, the traditional Chinese (and current Japanese) day of the week system. Yet the traditional Chinese order of the elements is 金木水火土 (gold–wood–water–fire–earth) - it's completely different. So it's obvious that these names were imported. Fingers point to Sumer, Mesopotamia, or ancient Egypt.

My eight-year-old niece and nephew came over. They're both starting to learn English, and neither can pronounce the entire English alphabet. As their English native speaker aunt, I am bound to help them; unfortunately I'm not quite in a position to tutor them. Instead, I gave them a chart of the English alphabet (in both majuscule and miniscule) with pronunciations in Chinese phonetics. As my dad can attest, it's how NOT to learn English.

( This is what I came up with. )

While I was doing this I realized I pronounced [u] differently in English and Mandarin. My English [u] is partly unrounded. (The unrounded version is the う u in Japanese or the 으 eu (thx y2) in Korean.)