Learning Chinese family relationship words is a huge headache. It’s way too complicated and tends to come far too early in a typical Chinese course. Really, who wants to memorize the word for “father’s older brother’s wife” before you can even handle a basic conversation?
The reason Chinese family relationship terms are so complicated is because they can take into account (1) relative age, (2) mother’s or father’s side, and (3) blood relative or relative by marriage. In…
In a lecture on the rules of speech acts, one of my professors recently quoted Confucius. Believe it or not, I have seldom run into this kind of thing. The only other time I can recall Confucius coming up was in a discussion on sex back in Hangzhou. (The quote then was “食色性也.”) Anyway, this time it was:
质胜文则野，文胜质则史。
Now I’m no scholar of ancient Chinese, but seeking to better understand…
The class I teach here in China is Spoken English. I am here this term to improve the spoken English of close to 300 Chinese college students. How does one accomplish that? Well, by making them talk (harder than you think). There are many ways to do this, of course, but at least something done in class has to result in grades given out, which can be very limiting. My semester plan centers around discussions. I won’t bore…
John has lived in China for
9.9
years. He is a linguist focused on SLA and tech.
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