Yet another blog has risen from the ashes over at JohnBiesnecker.com and yielded an interesting entry called Characters aren’t really that hard. (Read this entry before it’s gone, as John is quite the nihilistic blogger and all content is ephemeral.)
This time John has attacked the theory that Chinese is hard. The chief reason that full (or even half-ass) mastery of Chinese is difficult is those darned Chinese characters, so that’s the focus of John’s analysis.
He …
Some of what I write attracts criticism, and even the occasional hateful comment. It’s nice to see compliments every now and then. What’s not nice is that these days the vast majority of my admirers are spammers. Scrolling through my blog’s collected spam I see the following:
I have just returned from yet another visit home. I no longer have many reverse culture shock experiences (e.g. the cliché “Americans are so fat” one), but I notice lots of little things. This is how I measure the growing disconnect between modern American culture and me. Here are some of my observations from my last visit:
Having lived in China for so long, I no longer like sweets as much as I used to. I find myself
Zhang Ziyi
If you do search for Zhang Ziyi on Youtube, you’ll find quite a few commercials. As I see it, this is good for Ziyi fans as well as those interested in either learning Chinese or seeing Chinese commercials. (Unfortunately, some have no audio.)
Here are some of the commercials featuring Zhang Ziyi to be found on Youtube:
An entry on The 88s entitled America’s China “Experts” has asked:
Just who are America’s China “experts?” And the question we all really want answered: do any of them actually speak Chinese?
To my dismay, the second question (emphasis mine) was not answered, but it’s an interesting list nonetheless. Well, interesting to me personally in that after some consideration I found that I really didn’t care who most of those people were. But maybe I should? Maybe you could convince …
While home my sister took me to see some stand up comedy here in Tampa. Two of the comedians were John Heffron and Tracy Ashley. We had a good time. The next day I was talking to my girlfriend on the phone, telling her what I’d been doing, and I wanted to tell her that I went to see stand up comedy. But I completely did not know how to say “stand up comedy!” I went into a long-winded …
虽然在美国我们不过“国际”劳动节，但是今年我在佛罗里达州跟家人一起过。昨天也过了生日。这些都是借口：我现在还是没什么新的东西给大家看。所以我催促大家去看另外两个“超级老外”的中文博客：
Brendan的中文非常好，而且文章写的认真得让我惭愧。请看看在北京找不着北。
“怪人”的博客一直写得很棒，但他最近写的“我误解过的中文单词”特别吸引了我的注意力因为我曾经也有同样的误解（除了最后一个）。
五一以后我要回沪。…
This is part three of my professor’s lecture on speech acts. This part is even more of a digression than the thoughts on race and “the weak,” but it’s related to the Confucian quote, and, more specifically, ideas about history.
My professor was saying that he thought that social order required there to be a “final judge” (最后审判者). For the West, that “final judge” has been the Judeo-Christian God and the accompanying system of morality. However, China’s …
John has lived in China for
11.8
years. He is a linguist focused on SLA and tech.
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