Yesterday I met up with some friends to go to a concert. Among them were Brad and Micah. We ate an early meal of sushi. The restaurant played Bryan Adams’ “Everything I Do I Do for You” on repeat the entire time we were there. I was served an interesting California roll:
Is this normal for California rolls now?! I gotta say I feel there’s something wrong with mixing cantaloupe and wasabi….
Then we were on to the concert. …
The moon represents my heart. I wince when I type out this sentence. It’s terribly awkward English, but I really don’t know how else to translate it. I’m no accomplished translator or anything, but I’ve given this quite a bit of thought and come up with nothing better.
月亮代表我的心 (“The Moon Represents My Heart”) is an extremely famous song in China. Most foreigners here know it, and every Chinese person seems to know it. It’s a pretty simple song, but …
What have I been doing for the past 2 weeks (besides trying to get my site back online)? It seems like a lot of nothing, but the list goes something like this:
I recently discovered a very interesting site: ShanghaiNing.com. It’s designed specifically for the native Shanghainese. The tagline at the top says 侬白相啥？ That’s how you would write 你玩什么？ (roughly, “what do you do for fun?”) in Chinese characters to represent the particular words the Shanghainese use.
Translated excerpt from the about page:
We represent the new Shanghai culture…..
…
We invite you to our website…
to discuss our concerns in our own language,
to sing our songs to our own
Ever hear of an opera called Turandot? Perhaps you’ve heard of the film The Turandot Project, which is about the opera. The opera is by Giacomo Puccini, and it’s in Italian, as any proper opera is, but it’s set in ancient China and tells the story of a Chinese princess named Turandot. The name, seemingly French, is not. In French the opera is called Turandeaux, but apparently in English the final t is pronounced. (I read that …
I think we’ve all had incidents of misheard song lyrics. You think you hear one thing in the song, but the actual lyrics are very different. I’ve had a bit of that in China.
My first main incident with this phenomenon in China was with the song “Nanren Ku ba bu shi Zui“ * (“Man, go ahead and cry, it’s no crime”). In the song, Andy Lau repeats “ku ba” over and over in Chinese, which basically …
head like an empty sterile room, somehow I made a mess
like watching newborn babies crack from work-related stress
-Alkaline Trio, “I lied my face off”
Well, it’s the beginning of the semester, a fresh start. New students, new teachers, new lesson plans… Somehow it all seems a little “messy” though. I wonder if it’s because of the constant rain. We actually had nice weather today, but that’s a rarity. The other day I accidentally said “rain forecast” instead …
Check out those 3.5″ X 5″ real wood picture frames. Note the smooth, graceful curves of the frame on the left and the timeless straight lines of the frame on the right. Classic backing design. All three frames just 10rmb!
No, this is not a catalog. But can you believe that?! Only 10rmb (US$1.25) for all three frames. I don’t know who decided that in the USA frames are allowed to be expensive, but it’s not right!
Speaking of frames, …
John has lived in China for
11.8
years. He is a linguist focused on SLA and tech.
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