Love can be a motivation. I’m not talking about learning how to say enough for “one night love,” I’m talking about this:
I am learning [language] so I can tell you how much I love you and have it mean more than if I told you in English.
I wonder how many years of study it will take…
Post Secret is still cool.…
Just in time for Valentine’s Day, direct shipping service of Chinese mail order brides has recently become avilable. Not only do they ship right to your door, but they arrive wearing the traditional qipao (旗袍). The clear shipping case ensures a few jealous looks from your neighbors as the delivery man sidles up to your door.
I for one applaud this all-out embrace of ultra-commercialized holidays. Not only do I love the over-priced Valentine’s Day rose bouquets, chocolate …
OK, so it only takes a tenuous link with China to make me link to Daily Dinosaur Comics. I love this webcomic! (Click the image below to read the whole thing.)
I’ll admit, this one isn’t particularly funny. But many of them are.
As for the real “people who date only Asians” discussion… I don’t really understand why anyone cares. (Cast your vote of disapproval for this boring topic by not commenting about it!)
…
This is another Chinese “love story,” but without a happy ending this time. It’s called “My girlfriend got pregnant, but she won’t marry me.”
We had been together for eight full months, and our relationship was going great. But last month I wasn’t careful enough, and my girlfriend got pregnant. I felt truly sorry about that — we weren’t married, after all. When I found out she was pregant, I took a week off work to be with
…
A Chinese story:
At 8:40am I called her on her cell phone. “Are you headed off to work?” I asked.
“Sure am!” she laughed back.
Choking back a sob, I said to her, “Wen… I’m sorry.”
After a moment of stunned silence, she replied, “why are you apologizing to me?”
“It’s nothing,” I explained.
“Xiao Nuo, you…” she started, but I quickly hung up.
At ten minutes past noon I dialed her office number.
“Why isn’t your cell phone on?”
…
At my girflriend’s urging I recently purchased my very first Bollywood movie. I only spent 7rmb on it, but watching it was a three-hour time investment. It was with much trepidation that I started viewing Veer-Zaara.
I was pleasantly surprised by what I found. Pakistan was not portrayed nearly as negatively by Indian producer-director Yash Chopra as I had expected, and there were fewer song/dance scenes than I imagined. The story, while not what one would call “realistic,” was …
I normally am not very interested in reading Chinese online. I just really can’t get interested in a lot of what’s written about. Recently, though, I found something that caught my eye. The writer is a Chinese girl with a foreign boyfriend (who is also very coincidentally named John). When she told her parents about her boyfriend, they were less than supportive. Below is a translated excerpt from the original.
Friday, I finally mustered enough courage to tell my
…
The main road that runs by Zhejiang University City College is East Zhoushan Road, or “Zhoushan Dong Lu,” as the natives call it. Along this road are quite a few colleges in a comparatively small space. There’s also Shuren University, and the Broadcast/Journalism School (I really don’t know what the English name is — I usually refer to it as the “fine girl school”), and some others. The road is packed with small restaurants, (legit) barber shops*, convenience stores, and …
As most of my readers know, a while back I had an idea about polling my students. The results have been posted here over the last few months. I also made polls into a class activity that I did with my English major students. It ended up being a great class activity. I had the students come up with their own “mini-polls” which were conducted in class with their classmates. I stressed that their questions should be interesting. I’m …
In class this week, as a follow-up to last week’s Halloween activities, we had a discussion on Ghosts and Aliens. Last week I provided vocabulary such as ghost, alien, UFO, abduct, monster, egg a house, TP a yard, Flaming Bag of Dog Poo, etc. I also had to give some cultural background about simple things we take for granted. For example, when I asked the class where ghosts come from, most …
John has lived in China for
11.5
years. He is a linguist focused on SLA and tech.
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