To follow up my recent massive post on Language Power Struggles, I’d like to highlight the responses of Dr. Orlando Kelm, a professor of linguistics, teacher of many years, and learner of multiple languages. Dr. Kelm’s experience is largely with Portuguese and Spanish, but he’s also studied Japanese and Chinese, among other languages.
Dr. Kelm’s three main points were:
Chinese perception of use of English: There is something interesting about Chinese adoption of Putonghua as a lingua franca,
A little story from much-loved ChinesePod user AuntySue:
In hospital I ran into a few Cantonese speaking patients and visitors, who in some cases spoke no English. With the luxury of ample time, I was able to say things I don’t really know how to say, by finding inventive ways to use the few words I did remember. For example, instead of asking if she’d mind opening my water bottle top because my hands were too weak and the cap
…
I read this article on Discovery.com last week: Telling Bad Jokes Invokes Hostility, Violence. It prompted me to reflect upon my struggles with humor in foreign languages, and in English too.
Random observations:
A recent post on LanguageHat called Bad Language got me thinking about the laowai (老外) issue again. Yes, it’s a rather tired (often overly emotional) discussion, but I think that LanguageHat’s very rational view on the topic offers a new perspective on the matter.
Basically, LanguageHat’s view is this:
A while back I wrote about studying Spanish again. Well, I have a little secret about that to reveal. My teacher is none other than the vivacious Liliana of SpanishPod, and she’s a lot of fun!
SpanishPod is Praxis Language’s new website for learning Spanish. A while back they had one called SpanishSense that I wasn’t really involved in. Long story short, that one was a “learning experience.” Now I’m involved, and I’m happy to say that this …
This past week I started studying Spanish again after not studying or using it for over 7 years. I really didn’t know how I was going to do in my one-on-one lessons, considering my teacher would use only Spanish and I was expected to respond in Spanish. In my high school days I was reasonably fluent, but that was over 10 years ago.
It turns out that I did OK. I understood probably 95% of what my teacher said, and …
Funny English on t-shirts is the norm in Shanghai, but I rarely see anything in Spanish (especially comprehensible Spanish). So I had to share this one, which gave me a chuckle:
Translation: “Where are my pants?”
I didn’t intentionally leave the girl’s lower half out of the photo, but yes, she actually was wearing pants.…
It’s something I’ve wanted to implement for a while, and the new China Blog List made it possible. Although its main function is still to list China blogs written in English, The China Blog List now features a separate listing of non-English (non-Chinese) blogs about China.
If you’re interested in blogs of only one language in the non-English list, you can easily bookmark that one language (and RSS feeds are on the way). So far, the languages covered are:…
Not long after AP did a story on China which mentioned Adopt a Blog, Italy’s major newspaper Corriere della Sera also picked up the story. That’s likely how Punto Informatico, an Italian site, got word of it. From there, it has spread to the Spanish language blogosphere via Bitacoras.org.
La iniciativa se llama Adopt a Blog (adopte una bitácora) y persigue crear una ‘red de libre pensamiento’ que permita dar conocer las ideas, las opiniones y
…
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 …
John has lived in China for
11.5
years. He is a linguist focused on SLA and tech.
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