This is the first in a new series of posts, called Mandarin Monday, that will discuss Chinese learning. The series will deliver advice through interviews with long-time Mandarin learners, sharing resources and discussing learning techniques.
Our first guest in the series is John Biesnecker. John is an American software developer who has been in China since 2003, and has been working on his Mandarin since 2001. He, his wife, and his son live in Shanghai, where he works at ChinesePod.
You know you have been in China too long when:
You start shaving your eyebrows and stop shaving everywhere else;
You don’t know the conversion between CNY and USD;
You send back ice water for hot water;
You have a stock pile of deodorant;
I’m sure everyone has heard the story of the friend of a friend from X country at X university in China, and the story is so remarkable you almost don’t believe it. Here are a couple I’ve picked up from different people, I don’t know if they are true or not. They are both very [...]
London, not quite my hometown, but a city I know very well, has its own peculiar culture called Cockney, which is evident as an accent, in traditional clothing, and in the idiosyncratic ‘Cockney rhyming slang’. The Cockney accent and mannerisms were famously mis-represented by the actor Dick van Dyke in the Mary Poppins movie, and [...]
Chinese is a really difficult and frustrating language to learn, but it always helps to laugh at yourself to get you through the process. My confessions 我的自白: Injuries I have, in frustration, banged my head against my Chinese textbooks. I’m pretty sure I’ve ruined my eyesight by staring at Chinese characters for too long. I [...]
“Generation gap” (代沟) , “supermarket” (超级市场), “honeymoon” (蜜月) and “breakdance” (霹雳舞). These words are all newcomers in the Chinese language. In fact, all of them have appeared after China started unfreezing its relations to the rest of the world with the Reform and Opening policy, embarked upon by Deng Xiaoping in 1978. In a fascinating [...]
The other day I was listening in on a class of Chinese students who were taking an evening course in my native language, Swedish. Their task for the day was to change nouns written in singular form to plural, (that is: “cat” to “cats”). This can be complicated enough in English: How do you now [...]
I was watching this video (see below) of some dude reading a Chinese passage. I don’t know about you, but when I hear Chinese spoken in this way it gives me that nails-on-a-chalkboard feeling. Sorry no, it gives me that I-want-to-kick-you-in-the-nads feeling.
Whenever I become too cocky about my Chinese skills I seem to have a humbling experience: The latest took place the other week at my university. After a class where I actually understood all the major points of the newspaper articles we were reading, I headed for the book store to buy myself a ruler. [...]
My second year of Chinese studies in China is about to start, this time at a Shanghai university. The first day of the semester consists of a placement test. All of us new exchange student wait outside the classroom, clutching our newly sharpened pencils and feeling like we did on our very first school day. [...]
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