Tips and Strategies about the Chinese Language and Culture
As an American who highly values efficiency, I’ve always been annoyed by the huge number of suggestion boxes at businesses in China. They seem to be: 1) everywhere, 2) always empty. (Also, there are usually no pencils or paper provided.) Continue reading The Useless Suggestion Box
This is the start of a new series: “In Chinese Shoes,” where I will explain bizarre and baffling occurrences in Chinese culture to help Westerners understand and sympathize. The more I reflect on my past 15 years in China, the Continue reading The Importance (and Sneakiness) of Culture
In the United States, the charming southern accent is all about vowels that get swapped around or changed. I still remember this great game of Catch Phrase where the southern belle mother gave this clue “It’s long and thin” and Continue reading Chinese Southern Charm
Testing… 1, 2, 3… does this still work? Great! I still have a blog. Let me see if I can remember how to work this thing… Walking through the Guangzhou subway the other day I saw this advertisement for real Continue reading Top 10 Most Feared Questions for Chinese New Year
Since this is my first year working in business in China, I was introduced to a new tradition this week. Everyone (well, almost everyone) came back to work on Monday after being home with family for the Spring Festival holiday. Continue reading Lucky Money for Big Kids
I was greatly encouraged to read in the news this morning that some Chinese reporter made the ol’ 2-syllable-mix-up mistake that’s been my Achilles heel these past 10+ years of speaking Mandarin. I get bizarre looks when I ask a store clerk if Continue reading Business Chinese: Resigning or Making a Speech
(Now that my coughing fit has stopped after blowing the dust off this blog, I think I’m ready to write something.) After 10 years of teaching English at universities in China, I have made a career change (gǎiháng le 改行了) Continue reading New Job Forces Me to Study Chinese Again
(I… can’t… quite… remember how to use my blog… Oh yes. It’s coming back to me now. I type here, right?) I saw this fun article “The world’s languages, in 7 maps and charts” from the Washington Post today and wanted to mention Continue reading Cool World Language Stats Graphics
It appears that every 7 years or so (that often?!), I update my blog’s appearance. This new layout, while feeling a bit… umm… “thick” to me, actually works much better for mobile devices so all my readers with smart phones Continue reading Another Facelift for the Blog
Yesterday a friend showed me Waygo, an app that uses your camera to read hanzi off menus in restaurants, etc. (By the way, that feature is called an OCR = Optical Character Recognizer.) What impressed was that it’s free! Here’s the Continue reading Free Hanzi Reader for your Smart Phone Camera