Zev Handel, "Chinese Characters Across Asia: ...

In this episode of the Vault, we revisit the Italian writer Italo Calvino’s James Lecture, presented at the New York Institute for the Humanities on March 30, 1983. Italo Calvino was one of the most inventive and widely read Italian authors of the twentieth century. Born in Cuba ...  Show more

Jeffrey Shandler’s new book, Yiddish: Biography of a Language (Oxford UP, 2020), presents the story of Yiddish, the defining vernacular of Ashkenazi Jews, from its origins to the present. Shandler relates the multifaceted history of Yiddish in the form of a biographical profile. ...  Show more

Join Rita in this special episode and listen to our remarkable guest, Tim Keeley - a hyperpolyglot & author - as he tells us about his fantastic life journey in 30 languages and gives us valuable insights into the historical and cultural ties that bind 4 of the major East Asian L ...  Show more

In 1958, a brand new writing system was introduced in China called Pinyin. It used the Roman alphabet to help simplify Chinese characters into words. The mastermind behind Pinyin was a professor called Zhou Youguang who'd previously worked in the United States as a banker. Pinyin ...  Show more

Welcome two exceptional Chinese teachers: Suqing laoshi from channel of Comprehensible Chinese, and Keren laoshi from channel of Unconventional Chinese with Keren. Both teachers specialize in using the Comprehensible Input teaching method for Chinese language instruction. I ...

Today I had the pleasure of talking to Professor Xiang Biao on his new book, Self as Method: Thinking Through China and the World, which was originally written and published in Chinese. The English translation has just come out with Palgrave Macmillan. Self as Method provides a m ...  Show more