Mathieu Blondel

Japanese TV has many programs to learn English. Today, I was zapping channels when I saw one of those. It was about ordering food in a restaurant. And I noticed that “entrée” means “main dish” in American English. This is an example of misuse of French.

In French, like in British English I think, entrée means first course. This noun comes from the verb “entrer”, meaning “to enter”. So it should be quite obvious that entrée is the course to “enter” the dinner. Japanese is borrowing the French word too, アントレ (an-to-re).

Speaking of which… Japanese is noteworthy for having many loan words too. During the GW, I did paragliding. In Japanese, this is called パラグライダー which comes from paraglider. But in English, paraglider is the name of the person doing paragliding, not the name of the sport.

So it’s funny that sometimes some languages borrow words from other languages but they get the concept wrong or make some blatant mistakes…

I’ve been living in Japan for 6 months already. I must say, wow, time flies very very fast. This is abroad for me so there’s always something new to do or to see. I don’t have much time for myself or personal projects. But I have (very) slowly been working on some experiments on handwritten Chinese character recognition. Stay tuned.

I will graduate from my engineering school in June (masters) so lately I have been thinking to what I want to do in the future. As I said, times goes very fast. It’s thus very important to fulfill myself during the 8 hours that I spend at work, whatever it may be. So far, I’m pretty sure that I don’t want to work as a software developer for a private company. I want to do something more challenging and in connection with research. Most importantly, I want to LEARN new things every day. Options I’m considering are creating my own company, becoming a research engineer in a private lab or starting a PhD. I’m glad because I think I have narrowed down the fields I would like to work in, in the future. I would like to work in the fields of Machine Learning and Pattern Recognition, especially handwriting recognition, natural language processing (NLP) and speech recognition.

I uploaded some of my pictures of Japan. I still have many others that I need to sort out but if you are interested, take a look.