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 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 […]
This series is called ‘Secret Listening’, from the Chinese word 偷听Tōutīng. I know this can be — and should probably be — translated as ‘eavesdropping’, but secret listening captures it better and adds a bit of jest. These little stories or remarks stood out to me, and show a more personal side of China away […]
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’ […]
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 […]
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 […]
“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 […]
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 […]
Shirts designed for GoEast Mandarin, with Pinyin: Hanyu Xuesheng (Chinese student) And Hanzi characters 请跟我说汉语 (Please talk Chinese with me) 一心一意学习汉语 (Studying Chinese with heart & soul) As well as simply a logo.
