I remember when I first arrived in Shanghai, thinking, “I wish that people in Shanghai, when riding the escalators, would stand on the right and let people by on the left, the way they do in Japan.” It’s just such a more courteous and efficient way of doing things.
But yeah, I know… this is China, not Japan.
So when recently riding the Shanghai subway for the first time in a while, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that …
My blog posts about visas probably generate more e-mails from random strangers than anything else. This suggests to me that a lot of people are out there scouring the internet for more info on the subject, so I’ll share a bit more. In the past two weeks, I have been involved, to some extent, with 5 Chinese visa applications: three to the USA, one to Japan, and one to Thailand.
USA
It’s been a while since my wife and I …
I’ve been feeling guilty for a month for not saying something about John DeFrancis’s passing. I have have no words more eloquent or meaningful than these three, however:
Not surprisingly, I especially liked (and identified with) Brendan’s. If you don’t know DeFrancis and you’re at all interested in Chinese, by all means, check out the man’s work.
I’m …
Shopping for stationery in Japan is an absolute pleasure. In China it’s sometimes fun as well. Looks like at least part of this latest round of designs is Korean-inspired:
UPDATE: Brendan has a good post on how English like in the top notebook above comes to be.…
Godzilla photo by Nanther
For reasons which will become clear soon, I was researching Godzilla recently. I was curious about the name. Godzilla seems like a great English name, but it’s a Japanese creation, and the Japanese name is ゴジラ (Gojira). So I had to wonder… did the Japanese start with the English name “Godzilla” and transliterate into Japanese, or did they start with “Gojira” and semi-transliterate into the fantastic “Godzilla?” The use of katakana for the monster’s name to …
handing out tissues in Japan
When I went to Japan in 1997 to study for a year, it was my first time out of the United States. I knew Japan would be different, but I had very few expectations. I went out there with a year’s worth of Japanese, eyes wide open, and a brain ready to soak it all up. Of the many, many cultural peculiarities I noticed in Japan, one of the most convenient was the tissue pack …
Chinese and Japanese faces
In 1942 the US War Department produced a Pocket Guide to China, which includes a comic book-like section titled How to Spot a Jap. The goal of the section is to teach American soldiers how to differentiate the Chinese from the Japanese. It covers differences in the face, feet, stride, and pronunciation of English. (Do any veterans out there remember this thing?)
I found How to Spot a Jap a fascinating little piece of …
Kitano Takeshi
This is a picture of Kitano Takeshi (北野武), AKA “Beat Takeshi.” (I always find his Chinese name, Běiyě Wǔ, surreally different from his Japanese name.) My syntax teacher looks a lot like this guy, except for having smile lines around his eyes instead of Takeshi’s perpetual mask of indifference. They seem to share a love of the cigarette.
So sometimes when I’m listening to a lecture on Chinese syntax, my teacher’s visage sends my mind back to a …
I went to a punk show at Live Bar on Thursday. I especially wanted to see the Japanese bands. (Japanese bands usually know their punk… moreso than me.) Some observations:
There were five bands: three Chinese, two Japanese. One of the Chinese and one of the Japanese bands were all-girl bands. Another Chinese band was composed of three guys with a female vocalist. Girl punk invasion!
The Chinese bands, when setting up, usually test the mic by saying “喂
I don’t read a lot of blogs these days, and the topics I write on tend to come from my own experiences rather than the internet. Here’s one blog entry on Harvard’s Global Voices Online that I have to point out, though (via Peking Duck):
Inside the Japanese Blogosphere – The Anti-Korea Wave
Also interesting:
P.S. Scheduled posting, it would seem, refers to the minimum quantity of posts you’ll see. So there might be …
John has lived in China for
11.5
years. He is a linguist focused on SLA and tech.
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