Taiwan
Chinese Measure Words
So this is one of the first things that you start to learn after getting into chinese – “measure words.” It’s basically a classifier that you should add onto a lot of nouns. Image courtesy of this article on chinese medicine Personally, one of the main things I’ve noticed in 8 months of studying is [...]
Ping Hsi / Ping Xi Lantern Festival 2009
Last Saturday I visited Ping Xi for their annual Lantern Festival, which comes every year right after the Chinese New Year. For 1 day, this old coal mining town in the mountains turns into a tourist trap, and everyone is lighting off lanterns with new years wishes written on them. There is also a ton [...]
Chinese for Indiana
This is a screen shot of a free chinese dictionary I got for my ipod. This picture shows the chinese translation for Indiana. If you see the pinyin below the characters, you can probably read it to realize it sounds almost the same Indiana does. The 4 characters mean: Stamp / Seal Place Peace There [...]
Old Japanese Tea House in Jiufen (North Taiwan Coast)
Two weeks ago 13 of us all went to Jiufen on a really beautiful fall weekend in Taiwan. Jiufen is an old gold mining town an hour away from Taipei. It’s turned into a tourist trap, people from Taipei go there for the day and walk around and eat from all the different street food [...]
Why I Study Chinese
Why I Study Chinese – 為什麼我學中文 如果你從英文的國, 學中文學的困難. 英文跟中文真的不一樣. 我是美國人, 我不學習別的文. 我只會說英文. 我學完了, 就做工作. 這年, 我六年做工作. 今天, 又網路又最聰明的電機. 如果你要知道什麼, 就找得到什麼. 所以, 我想介世越來越小. 電腦很好, 很有用. 不過工作越來越用電腦. 人常常上網, 不見面. 我覺得以後, 找到工作常常跟人見面越來越小. 我要跟人見面, 所以我覺得學中文很有用. 聽說以後, 人用中文很多. 也聽說二零五零年大陸的經濟跟美國一樣. 對我來說, 大陸大概有機會得不得了. Photo credit: X Mei Associates 我決定在台灣學中文. 我選台灣因為台灣有: 1. 說中文 2. 對日本人好 3. 根日本用一樣的字 4. 台灣人喜歡美國人, 對我們好 5. 台灣又便宜又好玩 6. [...]
Santa makes US$100 an hour in Taiwan…
A department store near our house (Japanese Sogo store) posted an ad last week on a Taiwan website that lots of foreigners use (www.tealit.com), looking for a santa clause and paying US$100 an hour for it. Thought that was pretty cool. Being a migrant worker has its perks. MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!! Photo Credit: http://www.srichinmoycentre.org
Saving Face, with Fresh Deer Antlers
Most people who have some connection with Asia have heard of the concept of saving face. It is perhaps one of the big differences between Eastern and Western folks, and understanding what saving face is can probably help you as you deal with people from this part of the world. A few weeks ago, I [...]
Kleenex in Taiwan
I understood my first marketing tagline just the other day. Here in Taiwan toilet paper and Kleenex are one and the same. You buy big packs of them and you use them for just about everything in your house. Also, you do not flush toilet paper in Taiwan, so every bathroom has a small trash [...]
Electronics Industry Terms
I was at the Taiwan TPCA tradeshow last week in Taipei, and started to look at the basic electronics terms. I took a quick picture of the show guide to show the characters as they were written on it. All of the characters in the first line I’ve had to learn for class individually, after [...]
