Said & Done

Sato Moughalian and Ryan Nazari, both Ph. D. students enrolled in Armenian classes at Columbia, speak about their experiences and reasons for learning the language. They discuss the complex background of Armenian, which forms its own distinct, independent branch within the Indo-European language family. They also detail how their own personal and family stories intertwine with histories of genocid...

In this episode of Said & Done, Denzell Ivery, a master's student at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, talks about learning multiple languages—including Turkish, Russian, Azerbaijani, and Hungarian—and how his background as a musician has shaped his approach to communication. From the concert stage to deployments abroad with the U.S. Marines, he's found that sound and meaning...

In this episode of Said & Done, Leyre Alejaldre Biel, Lecturer in Spanish at Columbia, speaks about her Intermediate Spanish course, Afrolatinas en Estados Unidos. The class centers the voices and experiences of Afrolatina women, as students research and learn about members of this community. The episode also points to how this project extends beyond the classroom, with student-created podcasts av...

Emma Kaneira, a 2025 graduate of Barnard College, shares her experience learning Sinhala at Columbia through the Shared Course Initiative, which brings this language to Columbia from Cornell University. She reflects on her progression through the language sequence, how her studies inspired her to apply for and receive a Fulbright award, and how she envisions her knowledge of Sinhala shaping her fu...

Francisca Aguiló Mora is Senior Lecturer of Spanish in Columbia University's Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures and co-director of the Spanish Language Program. In this conversation, she discusses how the Climate Humanities can take a central position in the L2 classroom, and how she has begun to put this into practice in her own teaching. We also discuss a recent article, "Climate...

Video version here: https://youtu.be/trl-j5ulOLw?feature=shared Ever struggled with Mandarin pronunciation or stroke order? In our latest podcast episode, Ling Yan and Yike Li, both Mandarin Chinese instructors at Columbia, reveal how they tackle these common learning hurdles. They've developed a dedicated First Year Chinese Learning Hub that helps new students build confidence in pronunciation, t...

Kim Edmunds is the Educational Technologist at the Columbia University Language Resource Center. She is also a TESOL teacher trainer at The New School and an ESL instructor. In this conversation, Kim reflects on the similarities and differences between TESOL/ESL and world language teaching. We discuss key areas of focus, including pronunciation, cultural perspectives, motivation in language learni...

Maria Dewi Rosari (Rosi) is a Fulbight Language Teaching Assistant at Columbia in the 2024-25 academic year. She is also an English language lecturer in Indonesia. Gading Auliya is currently a masters student at Teachers College in Adult Learning and Leadership, and is also a facilitator for youth empowerment in Indonesia. In this conversation, Rosi and Gading explore the Javanese language, focusi...

Benjamin Williams, a junior at Columbia University in 2024-2025, is double-majoring in French and Francophone Studies, as well as German Literature and Cultural History. In this episode, Ben talks about his passion for languages and shares his experiences learning German, French, Italian, and Ancient Greek. He also reflects on his work in an advanced French course, where he collaborated with Franc...

Michael F. Moore is a translator and interpreter who has translated numerous works, including The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni, The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi, Live Bait by Fabio Genovesi, and Agostino by Alberto Moravia. His most recently translated Spatriati by Mario Desiati, which in 2022 won the Premio Strega, Italy's highest literary award. In addition to his translation work, he...

Wynnie Lamour-Quansah is a lecturer of Haitian Creole at NYU, the founder and managing director of the Haitian Creole Language Institute of New York, and the co-founder of Jaden Timoun, a Haitian Creole language immersion program for children. Wynnie talks about her own experience with growing up and speaking Haitian Creole. She discusses the origins and revolutionary history of the language, its...

Nelleke Van Deusen-Scholl, a sociolinguist and former director of the Yale Center for Language Study, speaks about heritage language learning, a topic on which she has published extensively. She then discusses other ways in which language learning has a transformative effect on people's lives, from migrant farm workers in florida, to university students, to any person who decides that they want to...

Reyes Llopis-García is a Senior Lecturer in Spanish in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia, a cognitive linguist, and a teacher trainer. In this conversation, we talk about cognitive linguistics and some ways in which concepts from this field of study can be applied in the language classroom. We also discuss a book that she recently published, Applied Cognitive Lingui...

Angelika Kraemer is the Director of the Cornell Language Resource Center. In this conversation, she shares her journey to becoming a scholar and language professional. She then discusses some solutions to the ongoing challenge of promoting and communicating about languages. We also talk about her podcast, Speaking of Language, from the Cornell Language Resource Center.  Subscribe to "Speaking of L...

Wesley Doucette is a Ph. D. student at the CUNY Graduate Center in the French Doctoral Program. In this conversation, Wesley talks about his long-standing interest in studying both French and Turkish. He discusses what it was like to learn Turkish at Columbia through an inter-institutional partnership called the Inter-University Doctoral Consortium. He shares his views on the benefits of studying...

Professor David Malinowski of San Jose State University discusses the topic of the linguistic landscape, which refers to the "symbolic construction of the public space." He defines and introduces the topic, shares examples of linguistic landscapes, and discusses the kinds of relationships that two or more languages appearing (or not appearing) simultaneously in public can have with one another.  M...

Fransha Dace hails from the South Side Chicago neighborhood of South Shore, and is currently a Ph. D candidate at the School of the Environment at Yale University. In this conversation, she talks about the relationship between climate and language, and how she has used her knowledge of Swahili to study the effects of climate change in Tanzania. She discusses her climate research, which pairs Dar e...

To celebrate the newly-released book, "Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York," we revisit a conversation with author Ross Perlin from 2022. Ross is a Columbia professor, linguist, and co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance. In this conversation, he previews several of the fascinating topics which later appear in Language City, such New York's linguisti...

Claire-Marie Brisson is a Preceptor in French at Harvard University. In this conversation, she talks about growing up in Michigan in close contact with multiple languages, including French, English, Spanish, German, and Arabic. She discusses her activities as a French language advocate and educator, including a course that she teaches at Harvard titled "Discovering French in North America." This c...

Liam Liesanggoro teaches Indonesian at Columbia University as the Fulbright Foreign Language TA for the 2023-2024 academic year. In this conversation, he speaks about the fascinating connection between language and sports. Liam discusses how language is used in playing badminton and basketball, both in Indonesia and in the US. He also talks about how playing sports can be a good way for a person s...

Timi Odunjo is a senior at Columbia University majoring in Drama and Theatre Arts. In this conversation, he speaks about studying the Yoruba language at Columbia and the cinematic traditions that have inspired him to become a filmmaker. He also discusses his first film, a documentary titled Ballet U.

Richard R. speaks about his journey to and within Tibetan Buddhism, and the central role that the Tibetan language has played in his religious practice and in his life over the past several decades.layed in his religious practice and in his life over the past several decades.

Skye Shannon Savage, a Ph. D. candidate in Columbia's Department of Germanic Languages, discusses a project that involved teaching some Yiddish in a German language class, in order to highlight the relationship between the two languages. Skye situates this experiment of linguistic cross-pollination within the broader context of metalinguistic knowledge, which is rarely taught explicitly in the for...

Simon Zuberek returns to Said & Done to discuss the rise in interest in artificial intelligence, and how it relates to language teaching and learning. We discuss how large language model chatbots like ChatGPT and Google Bard work, and how they might and might not be helpful to a language learner today.

Nandi Sipengane, instructor of isiZulu at Yale University, talks about speaking many different languages at home and at school growing up in South Africa. She describes some of the unique features of isiZulu,  including the famous click consonants. She also discusses how South Africans think about and understand their complex national, cultural, and linguistic identities. Watch this conversation o...