User Comments - fulankelin

Posted on: Special Green Hat

Who is going to lead the Shanghai St. Patrick's Day Parade this year?

Posted on: Getting to Know CPod Teacher Helen (and exciting content news)!

I sat a couple of tables away from my Chinese friend recently when she was talking to three of her Chinese friends.  I asked her why they spoke in English.  She said it was because English was their common language.  The three younger woman in their '30s, all from different provinces, could speak Mandarin to each other (with provincial accents she said) but the older woman who was born in Fujian Province not far from where my friend was born and was brought up in the Philippines only spoke a Fujian dialect that my friend could barely understand.  English was what they had in common.

Posted on: The Shanghai Literary Festival

The AIDS areas I read about were in "China Road: A Journey Into the Future of a Rising Power" by Rob Gifford in Henan Province. Here is a brief new item I found on it, http://www.chinagate.cn/english/medicare/48789.htm

Posted on: The Red Spectrum of Meaning

Here is wikipedia's take on the Nian Shou / Year Monster and it is as Catherine describes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nian

Posted on: The Red Spectrum of Meaning

Someone once told me the significance of the color red in Chinese culture was there long before the revolution. The revolution usurped it. (篡 cuàn​, to seize to usurp?)

Posted on: Cold Weather Is Coming

Jan Wong, a Canadian journalist and a CBC (Canadian born Chinese), has spent about 20 of the past 40 years in China including getting a degree from Beijing University during the Cultural Revolution. She says that when she is excited she still gets her tones wrong and that when she has something important to say she tries to get a native speaker to say it to get the tones right. I think native speakers confuse tones often - this might have to do with dialects to some degree.

Posted on: The Left-handed Child

nuaa_er

Yes, "isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer" has to do with intelligence - or really lack of it.

Posted on: The Left-handed Child

4 of the 5 current and most recent past U.S. presidents are/were left-handed. The exception was George W. Bush and he isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer.

Posted on: Minor Changes, Virtual School, and a Lefty in the Studio

In defense, maybe, of left-handedness the current and three of the four immediate previous U.S. presidents are/were left-handed. George W. being the exception.

Posted on: Getting Taller (Not Fatter)

This is a fascinating lesson.

Here in a tourist oriented town in rural Illinois there is a Japanese restaurant run by a Chinese family (the wife is from Fujian, the husband from Hubei) where I go to practice my Chinese and because I enjoy it.

They have a baby daughter with them here and a three year old son who has been living with the grandparents in Hubei. Soon the grandparents will bring the son here to stay (I lived through the suspenseful time when the grandparents went to the  U.S. Embassy in Beijing to get tourist visas to bring the boy, a U.S. citizen, which went smoothly). Seems to me a scary thing to do with a kid, but common I understand.

This lesson will be helpful to me in talking with the son. Maybe I can find him an Aoteman. I just checked on Ebay and this might work

fulankelin