With the move to the new campus in Shanghai, we designed new coffee cups with wordplays or simply encouragement.
Coffee cups at GoEast
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Experience of Spoken Chinese language courses at GoEast Mandarin
This summer, I joined GoEast Mandarin‘s summer intensive course intended for students who finished HSK4. Here’s my brief recap and whether you should do it too. Why Spoken Chinese and not HSK5? Several reasons. First, I live in China, but I don’t need the HSK exam for my visa, nor am I studying at a […]
Ordinary people (老百姓)
For example, I like to buy notebooks, especially beautiful and expensive ones. But I’m afraid of writing down poor ideas, not worth such expensive and thus wasting such beautiful notebooks. So actually, cheaper notebooks are more useful than expensive ones. Very expensive restaurants or hotels are a bit like this as well. If they’re expensive […]
How to speak to a person who is learning the language you speak
Introduction placed underneath the tips. 1: Avoid figurative language such as expressions & idioms It’s extremely difficult for foreign language speakers/listeners to understand figurative or abstract language. With this, I mean fixed expressions, idioms, sayings, proverbs, interjections. Anything not literal. Obviously, this applies to complex sayings like “You catch more flies with honey than with […]
I don’t miss teaching, but I do miss the students
I won’t be teaching any marketing this semester because my visa doesn’t allow it. I won’t miss the two-hour inner-city travel from Yangpu to Songjiang, I won’t miss the meager pay, and I won’t miss the weekends spend working on Keynotes and homework. But I will miss all 24 students, enthusiastic and cleverly crazy, each […]
The Devotion of Suspect X review
The murder and perpetrators are clear, and so this would look like an anticlimactic read. And yet it’s extremely tense and incredibly fast — so fast that it feels more like a short story. This is also helped by the format: experimental storylines are usually reserved for short stories, and this is almost a ‘whodunit’ […]
Island of the Blue Dolphins review
I picked up this book because it ranks so high on young adult fiction lists, and because so many now-adults from English-speaking countries look back on this book so romantically. I am not from an English-speaking country, and the books that shaped my youth are different. But I really wanted to read this one, even […]
China CEO II review
This is why I don’t read non-fiction anymore. Big words like “talent” and “ambition” and “culture” are thrown around — but those words are such strong bullshit indicators because they’re neither an actual goal nor an actual strategy. Yes, there is some concrete advice in here, but in two hundred-plus pages it doesn’t get beyond […]
The Outsider review
“A person did what a person could, whether it was setting up gravestones or trying to convince twenty-first-century men and women that there were monsters in the world, and their greatest advantage was the unwillingness of rational people to believe.” Did you ever feel an author wrote a whole book just to one sentence? Libra […]
Old is the song, yet new is the messenger
This month I watched two nationalistic war movies, which use nationalism not just as a backbone to a story, but also because it sells. First; ‘Operation Red Sea’ (红海行动) is a Chinese war movie from 2018, and stands part for a larger phenomenon, namely China’s newly found identity and its nationalism which it no longer […]