The other day I was listening in on a class of Chinese students who were taking an evening course in my native language, Swedish. Their task for the day was to change nouns written in singular form to plural, (that is: “cat†to “catsâ€). This can be complicated enough in English: How do you now …Read More
I was watching this video (see below) of some dude reading a Chinese passage. I don’t know about you, but when I hear Chinese spoken in this way it gives me that nails-on-a-chalkboard feeling. Sorry no, it gives me that I-want-to-kick-you-in-the-nads feeling.Read More
Recently a friend of mine from Australia recently confided that while he likes learning Chinese, he still fails to see the utility of characters. “I still don’t see why they just don’t use pinyin,” he said with a shrug. I began to explain why characters are, in fact, useful, beginning with the sheer number of …Read More
By Barry M I was just leaving a comment on the always refreshingly drinkable Beijing Boyce blog when I saw one of my biggest Chinese Pinyin pet peeves – chuanr. 串儿, for those who’ve been in China for less than an hour, generally means tasty bits on a stick. Chuà n/串 (meaning to string together) + …Read More
Whenever I become too cocky about my Chinese skills I seem to have a humbling experience: The latest took place the other week at my university. After a class where I actually understood all the major points of the newspaper articles we were reading, I headed for the book store to buy myself a ruler. …Read More
My second year of Chinese studies in China is about to start, this time at a Shanghai university. The first day of the semester consists of a placement test. All of us new exchange student wait outside the classroom, clutching our newly sharpened pencils and feeling like we did on our very first school day. …Read More
Nothing boosts one’s ego in the early days of learning Chinese as conversations with taxi drivers. I’m sure we all have had this experience; you step into a cab and spit out your address (carefully memorized, of course), the cabbie subsequently nods and tells you how good your Chinese is. A bit later, once you …Read More
I recently spent four days in Hong Kong as the final stop of a brief Southeast Asian trip, and as usual I found the language situation there somewhat mystifying. Hong Kong, as we know, has three official languages: Cantonese, Mandarin, and English. Because I don’t speak the former, I was reliant on the latter two …Read More
With that title, it sort of sounds like they were holding one of those eager English-language students hostage. Terrorist activities aside, Chinesepod.com has produced a fantastic guide to the Beijing Olympics for visitors, athletes, journalists – or just whelps like myself who can’t be bothered to deal with the crowds, but wouldn’t mind brushing up …Read More
I first became aware of the enormous language gap in China three weeks into my first year, when I taught English at a public high school in northern Jiangsu. One afternoon, feeling slightly homesick, I hopped into a taxi with a simple mission: to go to McDonalds. Being completely unable to speak Chinese at that …Read More
I recently learned a neat new word in Chinese: è¯æ„Ÿ, literally “language feeling”. In English, a more common translation might be “language intuition”, a mysterious ability that some seem to possess and others do not. When I tell people that I speak three languages, I often hear in response, “oh, you must have an innate …Read More
For a terrible liar like myself, coming up with excuses for missing class was never easy. I always tried to strike a balance between telling the unvarnished truth and not being too evasive, but didn’t always succeed. Going to high school in the States, saying “I had things to do” simply didn’t suffice. Explanations like, …Read More
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