The day started with two talks, one from the Director of the Language Centre at Cambridge and one from an Admissions Tutor. They focused on the disadvantage of monolingualism in the workplace. They stressed that in the global marketplace the requirement in business is your mother tongue, plus two others.
This was followed by a culture workshop and both students chose the Linguistics workshop. Linguistics is the scientific study of language and its origins. The lecturer spoke about the Latin origins of words; definite and indefinite articles in the Romance languages and Mandarin and linguistics combined with other sciences - such as bio-linguistics.
After lunch, it was time for the languages workshop. This time the students separated, James choosing Italian and Jack French. Jack reported a fascinating workshop in which they learnt about "le verlan" - French phonetically backward slang. "Une femme" becomes "une meuf"; "bizarre" becomes "zarbi"; "musique" is "zicmu"! But even more confusingly some words are flipped then have a syllable stuck on the end; e.g. sœur... sœu-r... r-eus... reus-da... reusda! French youngsters also like English sounds - they change the French word for youngster (un jeune) to a more English sounding pronunciation - un djeuns (pronounced uhn jerns)!
The day ended with a talk from current and former students on the courses available at the Cambridge Modern and Mediaeval Languages faculty. The students had a chance to ask any questions about university and university life in general. Both students thoroughly enjoyed the day and felt that it certainly made a strong case for the continuation of language study to Higher Education. The two boys both expressed the hope that with a bit of luck they may end up studying at Girton in the future!
Owned by: JWH | Last Published: 06/11/2015 11:15:02 | Next Update: N/A
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