User Comments - martinphipps

Posted on: Is China Scary?

Hi.  I don't think "exagerate for dramatic purposes" is an accurate way to describe how the American media portrays China because this implies that what the American news media is reporting is untrue: what they are doing is selecting which stories would be considered newsworthy.  Over the past few years we've heard news about the earthquake in Sichuan, the milk tainted with melamine, the Olympics, unrest in Tibet and the recent deaths in North Western China.  Most of the news has been negative and so Chinese people might feel that the American media is trying to portray China in a bad light but, at the same time, what else makes headlines in America?  The War in Iraq, unemployment rates, the stock market crash, it's pretty much all bad news.  I don't see any exageration or negative portrayals.  Meanwhile, in China, there is the traditional instinct to cover up bad news: they even go so far as to censor the internet so that bad news doesn't get freely distributed.

Now, that being said, where I am right now is Taiwan and the difference between the Taipei Times and the China Post is like night and day in terms of how China is depicted: the Taipei Times is a pro-independence newspaper and China is depicted as a horrible place but the China Post is a pro-unification newspaper and China is depicted in a much better light.  I would argue that neither newspaper depicts China accurately because each newspaper has a political agenda.  I would argue that overseas media outlets are probably more fair because they don't have a vested interest in portraying China as good or bad.  Whether China is portrayed in a good light or a bad light is of no consequence to the people in charge of Western media outlets: all that matters is that the reports be interesting.  It's about ratings and not ideology.

I'm working here at a university in Taiwan and last year they appointed a new secretary who couldn't speak a word of English.  Buhaoyisi!  But yesterday and this afternoon I was able to talk to her easily.  I guess I'm making progress. 

Posted on: Amusement Park

miantiao,

I've heard that one quarter of the world's population is Han Chinese but I've also heard that three quarters of the world's population is Asian so (doing the math) two thirds of all Asians (including Indians, Filpinos, Indonesians, Mongolians, Turks and most Arabs) are NOT Han Chinese.  Koreans and Japanese probably all know what it means to "save face" but most Asians would not have a similar expression in their own language. 

Posted on: Amusement Park

desluo99,

zhenlizhang,

There really isn't anything wrong with the word Oriental: the word comes from Latin whereas Asian comes from Greek and they both mean "to the east".  As Greece was to the east of Rome, I suppose the Greeks were considered "Oriental" to the Romans but otherwise the two words meant the same thing.  Note that in modern times Asia is defined as the area to the east of Europe and actually includes Turkey (formally known as Asia Minor) so the meaning of "Asia" today is exactly what is was millenia ago.  Simularly, "Oriental" and "Occidental" are used in modern Spanish to simply mean "East" and "West".

So why do people say "Oriental" is offensive?  Basically, the claim is that the term is Eurocentric: people selectively observe that "Oriental" means "to the east" and ignore the fact that "Asian" means the same thing.  Besides, as Changye said Europe and America are refered to as 西方 "the West" in China: it goes beyond that though because the name of China in Chinese means "middle kingdom" and the name for Japan means "sun rise" or something like that.  All people see themselves as the centre of the universe: it's human nature.  (Also note that the term "Middle East" to refer to the area including Israel, Iraq and Iran only makes sense to people living in Western Europe.) 

Some people have claimed that "Oriental" was used to refer to things and "Asian" was used to refer to people but historically it was the other way around as "Oriental" was the word used to refer to people and "Asian" would mainly be used to refer to people and things that were from Asia but not stereotypically Oriental such as in the sentence "Pakistan is an Asian country."

Yes, I admit that "Oriental" had acquired a certain connotation of exotica: as European people became more familar with people from India they started seeming less mysterious and the word "Oriental" came to refer only to the Chinese, Japanese and Koreans.  Thing is, a lot of Asian Americans use the word "Asian" when they really mean "Oriental" as in the sentence "Asian people need to save face".  The expression "save face" doesn't even have a meaning to most people in Asia so by eliminating the use of the word "Oriental" there is the tendency for the word Asian to acquire the same meaning Oriental once had and -as I've observed- this is often the fault of Asian Americans themselves when they want to describe their native culture and they search for a term that means "Chinese, Japanese and Korean" but can only come up with "Asian".

Posted on: Amusement Park

Thanks for explaining 胆小鬼.  The word appears in a song by Cyndi Wang and google translate said it meant "little devil" which didn't fit the context of the song!

Posted on: Pop Music and Pop Culture

Hi.  Exercise 1 won't give me a score.  Also, Exercise 3 has 17 words and 19 blanks so that's either not enough words or too many blanks.

Posted on: Pop Music and Pop Culture

Haven't listened to the dialogue yet but what does it mean when they say pop "inspired a form of candy that still (if mixed with Coca-Cola) will kill you"?  They showed us on Mythbusters that Methos candy when dropped into a bottle of Diet Coke will cause an explosive reaction but they also showed that the reaction does not occur if the Diet Coke is poured out into a glass.  Therefore, nobody can die if they drink Diet Coke and eat Menthos.

Posted on: Manila

I can't get any sound for Exercise 3!  Help!

Posted on: She's Easy

A weird thing happened when I attempted Exercise 3: at first I had 2 拎s which I knew was not right so I restarted and got 2 随便s.  Every time I restarted it went back and forth between these two options so there was no way for me to get all the sentences correct.  Also, when I did Exercise 1 it wouldn't give me a score.

Posted on: Old Friend

I did Exercise 3: Fill in the Blanks and it said I got 4 right out of 5.  How is this possible?  How can the remaining answer be wrong?  Also the questions are numbered 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6.