Archive for the ‘Rants’ Category
Saturday, November 5th, 2011
WARNING: This post contains explicit content because the Chinese language contains explicit content and we sometimes say it without meaning to.
Fear of getting laughed at (not with) is a common affective problem for language learners. While there's no escaping it in any language, there are a few reasons why Chinese is ...
Posted in Rants | 25 Comments »
Saturday, January 1st, 2011
Another post from the ranting "What's up with...?" series that focuses on vocabulary words we can't quite get a straight answer about.
Look in the dictionary for "persuade" and you basically end up with:
shuōfú 说服
quàn 劝
Now, let's ignore (for this whole post) the fact that these words often mean "try to ...
Posted in Rants | 14 Comments »
Monday, July 12th, 2010
Learning a foreign language can be very rewarding. But it can also be very frustrating. Chinese sometimes seems to be unfairly frustrating in many ways.
I've been thinking about outlets for that frustration and I've decided that the one I'm most prone to is complaining about the Chinese language. I've found ...
Posted in Rants | 12 Comments »
Friday, October 9th, 2009
I just got back from China Telecom trying to get an ADSL (broadband) internet connection installed. My end goal is to get a wireless router so I can have wireless internet and blog from the balcony as well as my desk. But I didn't tell the lady that, which is ...
Posted in Rants | 11 Comments »
Monday, August 24th, 2009
I was most intrigued when I saw a snippet of a recent article in the China Daily about the new U.S. ambassador to China:
"The ambassador also introduced her family to the media in fluent mandarin..."
This surprise me because I thought the new ambassador was Jon Huntsman. Turns out he is, ...
Posted in Rants | 7 Comments »
Add "Learn Chinese" to iGoogle
Subscribe to Laowai Chinese via RSS
