Tips on Effectively Learning Vocabulary Words for Foreign Languages

Posted on by Kamron Soldozy

As a senior concurrently enrolled in two Persian classes and working on completing a minor in German, I am no stranger to learning vocabulary words. To be frank, however, I have rarely enjoyed this process. From awkwardly jotting down words in the middle of conversations to hunting for their precise definitions and usages, I have found learning vocabulary to be more difficult and painstaking than the simple memorization task it is made out to be. The worst of all has been forgetting a vocabulary word I have studied or even failing to correctly identify a word, realizing after the fact that I ‘knew’ what it meant but couldn’t tease out the meaning in the moment.

There’s more to vocabulary words than memorizing terms themselves, as exhibited by the Persian word for attention, ‘ta-va-joh’. While we say we ‘pay attention’ to something in English, we more often ‘have attention’ or ‘do attend to’ something in Persian.
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My Virtual Global Seminar Experience: Jumping in Foreign Water

Posted on by Agnes Robang

In the summer of 2021, I participated in a virtual global seminar in Cyprus entitled Conflict, Borders, Multilingualism, Translation. I was particularly drawn to the idea of learning about Cyprus’ history and culture through the lens of multilingualism and translation. Personally, language has always played a key role in my understanding of identity and culture. Three languages are spoken in my home (Filipino, English, and Chinese Hokkien), and growing up in this way has made me very conscious of language-culture influences, code-switching, and nuances in connotation.

Image taken from the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies http://piirs.princeton.edu/piirs-global-seminars/2022cyprus
An aerial shot of Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus

Applying to this global seminar was a spontaneous decision; I major in MAE and am more used to spending my summers doing research and technology. However, when I read about this seminar in an email, I knew that it aligned with my personal interests in the social sciences. Because of the great time I had during the seminar, I am writing to motivate people to take advantage of the breadth of courses offered by Princeton and try studying something totally spontaneous and new!

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Preparing for Academic Work in Foreign Languages

Posted on by Saira Reyes

Last summer, I visited my native country, Honduras, for the first time in 10 years. Because I did not get to experience a lot of the culture while I was living there during my childhood, my family and I planned a trip across some of the most historically rich landmarks in the country, including the Mayan ruins. 

To learn the most during the trip, I knew I would have to complete some preliminary research on my own to acquaint myself with the history and culture in general, which of course meant reading research papers and articles in Spanish. I knew this task would be difficult, because despite the fact that I lived in Honduras for 10 years and had been speaking Spanish at home my entire life, I had never read or written academic work in Spanish. 

Whether you are reading sources in other languages, preparing to go abroad for research, or writing for a class or independent work in a foreign language, completing this task will be different than completing an assignment in English. In this post, I will highlight my two biggest take-aways on how to prepare to engage with scholarly work in another language. 

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Research Papers in Foreign Languages

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As the simultaneously dreaded and much-awaited Dean’s Date comes around again, many of us find ourselves writing final research papers for our foreign language classes. Conducting research and writing a long paper in a language in which we are not fully fluent is both harder and very different from writing one in our native language. Personally, I have spent the past few days writing a paper for French 307 discussing the ethics of weapons development, a fairly technical subject which presented a number of challenges.

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