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Does the Language You Speak Determine How Much Money You Save?
A controversial new study out of Yale concludes that people who speak languages without future verb tenses like Chinese are better at preparing for the future than people who use a future tense like in English, French, and Spanish for example.
The Debate Over Whether Greece Should Quit the Euro
European and US officials met Friday to discuss how to save the European currency, the euro.
German Court Rejects ‘Euroskeptic’ Bailout Lawsuit
Germany’s Constitutional Court has rejected a challenge to the country bailing out other nations in the eurozone.
Fukushima Motivated Soccer Victory
An interview with Japanese radio broadcaster Hirofumi Nakano of FM station J-Wave on Japan’s women’s soccer team.
English-only in the US, translating tweets in Japan and satire in Egypt
The English Only movement in the United States is always active during times of high immigration. Now, the movement has got a shot in the arm from the Tea Party. It may help convince lawmakers and voters in the 19 remaining states that don’t yet have a law on their books declaring English to be the official language [...]
From Cicero to Lynne Truss with Robert Lane Greene
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Robert Lane Greene’s new book “You Are What You Speak” examines how language we speak is bound up in our identity. How much does our native language define us? How much does it set our ways of thinking? Can we think a different way in a different language? Why do people get so persnickety about punctuation? Why do grammar sticklers yearn for a golden age of usage that usually coincides with their school days? Download MP3
World Books Review: The Weekend – A Portrait of German Guilt
In this novel, German writer Bernhard Schlink wants to explore the powerful guilt that the German people still feel after World War II, how they are still rightly disturbed by displays of nationalism and religiosity parading under the banners of truth and justice.
World Books podcast: Peter Filkins
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A few years ago, Peter Filkins, an award-winning translator of German, walked into a bookstore, read a few pages of an obscure German novel and recognized that he had stumbled onto literary gold. ‘The Journey’ was one of the 26 volumes penned by the German Jew H. G. Adler, a Holocaust survivor who sought to memorialize and understand the experience through fiction, poetry, social history, and philosophy. Filkins has now translated another of Adler’s books, entitled ‘Panorama.’ Download MP3
World Books Review: Visitation — Difficulty for Difficulty’s Sake?
That Jenny Erpenbeck’s latest novel, Visitation, is ambitious is unmistakable, for it is undeniably difficult and precisely crafted. Following in the footsteps of T.S. Eliot, who suggested that a difficult world as ours calls for a difficult literature, I think it a moot point as to whether the novel ultimately succeeds in its being difficult. Is it really difficult for difficulty’s sake? After finishing this novel I have to admit my own ambivalence, not based on, admittedly, its philosophical import, but because of the way it reads.
‘Mohammed’ cartoonist gets German media prize
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Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard penned a controversial cartoon of Islam’s Prophet Mohammed a few years ago. It sparked protests from Muslims in several countries. Now Westergaard has been awarded a German media prize. The award fuels the ongoing debate about Islam and freedom of the press. Anchor Marco Werman has details.World Books Review: The Mad Bad Moralist
The collection’s choice of writings by the late 18th century Teutonic bad boy Heinrich von Kleist is streamlined, yet carefully balanced, giving readers a neatly packed sampling of his necessary lunacy, narrative brilliance, and the far-reaching vision that influenced Freud, Thomas Mann, and Franz Kafka.
US concern about the sliding euro
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Anchor Marco Werman finds out more on the possible contagion effect of the sliding Euro and what it could mean for the American economy from economist David Blanchflower of Dartmouth College. Download MP3
World Books Review: Memorable ‘Ghosts of Home’
Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer’s monumental book “Ghosts of Home” is a stunning marriage of intellectual curiosity and personal search, a compelling historical reconstruction of the German-Jewish Central European culture of the embattled city of Czernowitz, once known as the “Vienna of the East.”
Ach, du liebe Zeit!
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Writer Jen Percy is dating a German-speaking man. She’s found that the language of love is not, as advertized, universal: expressing her love in German is fraught with linguistic confusion. Download MP3
German anger over GM’s decision on Opel
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General Motors has decided not to sell its European subsidiary, Opel. And that has the German government fuming. Reporter Brett Neely has the story from Berlin.
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