Fortune cookie fortunes
Some Americans, not realizing that fortune cookies were invented in their own country, are dismayed by the lack of fortune cookies in China. It’s a fun little tradition.
I was equally surprised, then, to discover fortune cookies in Shanghai recently. Some company was offering free fortune cookies at Zentral (a yuppie restuarant). The catch, of course, is that there’s advertising on one side of the fortune slips.
On a side note, one thing that really annoys …
Hank at Network Sense introduced me to TagCrowd, a site which takes a chunk of text and displays the highest frequency words as a tag cloud. He tried it out by copying all the text on the main page of several blogs. Interesting results. Here are two of his results and two that I did:
Sinosplice (before this post):
ESWN:
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My critical discourse analysis class is getting interesting. The professor has assigned small group presentation topics. All five topics are related to homosexuality. Pepe and I have “homosexuality in the West.” Yeah, pretty huge topic. Other topics are pretty narrow, such as “lesbians in China.”
Just as a reminder about what we’re going to be analyzing:
Discourse analysis challenges us to move from seeing language as abstract to seeing our words as having meaning in a particular historical, social, and
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Asian, Brunette, Blonde: that’s the order. A friend of mine recently explained this to me.
Most people with any China experience know that when there’s an Asian among a group of foreigners in China, Chinese restaurant/hotel/etc. staff will naturally approach the Asian in the group. This is very understandable; there’s no way of knowing that one of the white people has been in China 10 years but the Asian has lived in Idaho all his life and doesn’t speak a …
The other day as I was walking through my apartment complex I noticed what appeared to be a child of 3 or 4 and his grandmother. The child was on one of those little toddler vehicles, pushing himself along with gusto. As the child got farther and farther away from his grandmother, I heard her start to make some noises as she hurried to catch up.
I knew what was coming on. The kid was about to get a volley …
People’s Daily has an article on the changing Chinese language entitled 49 obsolete Chinese words (part 1, part 2, part 3). The really annoying thing about the article, though, is that it tells you the English translation of the obsolete words without telling you what the actual Chinese words are. (The second most annoying thing about the article is that some of the words are definitely still in use.)
After Ken of ChinesePod blogged about the …
My friend Heather sent me a link to a NY Times article called In China, Children of the Rich Learn Class, Minus the Struggle. The article talks about the great lengths to which China’s new rich are going in order to ensure their children the cultural education befitting of China’s new elite.
This passage about FasTracKids struck me:
The private program’s after-school sessions are held in brightly decorated classrooms, where fewer than a dozen children, typically 4 or 5
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John has lived in China for
11.8
years. He is a linguist focused on SLA and tech.
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