Halloween Horror, Made In China

Over the years, China has exported tons of the plastic Christmas trees and traditional holiday decorations, bringing the joyful atmosphere to millions of the western families. It’s the magic, invisible hand of the global economy in play.

This year, the same hand saw the huge dollar sign in Halloween; predictably, it went right into the money-making business: exporting Horror to the west from China.

How does China bring the Halloween horror to millions of the western families? New York Times Reporter David Barboza reported in this video clip from Dalian, China.

Warning: Unlike the faked fear that Halloween horror movies churn out, this is real deal. For those faint-hearted folks, please stick to the horror movies this year, not this video clip.

This is the first time ever that the Halloween truly scares me.

San Diego Fun: English As Second Language Meetup

If I lived in San Diego—a nice place to be, I would definitely join this Meetup group, San Diego International/English As Second Language Meetup. This is a group of people—808 in total—who meet often to practice their spoken English skills.

In less than four years, they’ve had total of 453 meetups; that’s about three gathering every weeks. I don’t know how hard these people learn English when they meet; but it’s quite obvious they had a lot of fun together. Just look at their calendar: movie night out, Halloween party, Mexican daytrip, to just name a few.

I’ve never met any current or past member of this group, but I’m willing to bet that most of them have improved their spoken English a lot over the time. They probably weren’t even aware of their progress because it sounded more like playing and didn’t feel like learning. Studying something is supposed to be hard and sober; otherwise, one feels either guilty or self-doubt, asking “can this be right? can this be real?”

Right or not, it’s real for sure. In fact, according to Meetup, there are 38 of such groups scattered in 36 cities of ten countries doing the same. And that’s just for practicing English alone.

Itching to talk in Cantonese or Thai? Go find a Meetup group in your area. And don’t forget to have some fun.

What Do You Want To Do With Your Life?

When I was young and ignorant, I wanted to do many grand things with my life; such as, walking on the moon, or emancipating all the oppressed proletariats in America.

A couple of decades later, I’m still walking on the earth. And I’d abandoned my revolution thought quite a while ago (as disappointed as I was, it’s clear no American was waiting for me to set free). Life went on, however, and I just kept coming up with the new goals, only less and less grand, like losing some weights; it’s clear I’m getting older.

I’m not alone. I found out from a cool website called 43 Things, that setting goals is almost a human nature next to worrying about future. At the time of this writing, 660,082 people in 9,844 cities listed 723,436 in the sites of the things they want to do with their lives.
Not surprisingly, a lot of people share many the same goals. By the count of the site, the top three most popular things people want to do are: lose weight, stop procrastinating, and write a book. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are three least likely achieved goals too; I’ve failed on all three more times than I care to count.

Going through the rest of list, I found that learn Spanish, French or Japanese, respectively, is among the top 30 popular goals. Learn English, I believe, would be in the top ten if not for the fact of a majority of 43 Things users being native English speakers already.

Apparently, for many people, study a second language is as much desirable as fall in love, get married, or travel the world. I’m glad I’d at least achieved a few goals that shared by many others.

Next, should I join 7,930 other people to want to get a tattoo? Life is short, as they say.

The First Beijing Olympic Gold Medal Goes To...

Chinglish, which shows up everywhere in China, is mostly amusing, sometimes embarrassing, and, occasionally, very costly. You rarely see one is all the three combined. Then we got really lucky. Someone works for the official Beijing Olympic Committee came out with a Chinglish word that hit a jackpot. Here is the excerpt of a report from the Wall Street Journal last Friday:

CHINA'S 'FRIENDLIES,' FIXED?: The Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee this week changed the collective name of the 2008 Summer Games mascots. Or corrected, rather.
Originally named "The Friendlies," the quintet of cuddly animals will now be known as the fuwa, or "blessed children." According to officials, the revision, estimated to cost millions of yuan in reprints and repackaging, is under way so that the English name is now a Pinyin translation of the Chinese name.

I had never seen the word “mascot” before and had to look it up. Then I got curious about what the Olympic mascots--the lucky symbolic animals--look like. They are ugly, each in its own way! (see from the official Olympic site)

But why the committee wants to drop the name of “Friendlies”? The same article goes on to explain:

Complaints about the "Friendlies" abounded. The moniker was hard for non-English speakers to pronounce and ambiguous in meaning. One academic noted that locals easily mispronounced "friendlies" as "friendless," that it could refer to both friendly people as well as meaningless football games, and that it was a compound of the terms "friend" and "lies."

Well, if these were the reasons, then I start to think the guy who created “Friendlies” is a master of the language; he knew what he's talking about! Three months ago, the reporter Jim Yadley of the New York Time sent this report from Beijing, detailing how the local residents got angry with the “friendless” government, who destroyed their homes to make a room for the Olympic stadiums. And to those residents, the authority’s explanation of such mass destruction sounds a lot like a lie.

That guy deserves a gold medal for creating such a master piece.

What Are You Thinking About?

A young German coastguard is new to his job. The first day on duty, he is very nervous; the full stack of the instruments in the central control room looks intimidating, and he seems to be ill-trained on how to handle them.

His inexperience with the instruments, however, is lesser a concern to him. It’s something else that he’s ill-trained for makes him sweating. He knows a disaster is going to land on his lap sooner or later.

As his fate goes, it’s sooner; right after he sits in the chair, before he glances off the panels of the instruments, the disaster struck…



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vBn2_ia8zM

Warning: This Menu May Be Choking Hazard

Warning: you are going to read a menu that may pose a choking hazard. If you are eating or drinking, please stop before you click on this menu; or read it at your own risk.

I was sitting in a coffee shop yesterday afternoon, reading a book and surfing the internet. It was gloomy outside, which could be the reason I was craving for caffeine. I already had one cup of Hazelnut; as I looked out, it still looked gloomy. So I ordered another shot. This time was Cappuccino. It smelled good.

At that moment, I decided to check out a few more Chinglish phrases in the web; I became quite fond of the “Racist Park” alike after my last posting. As to lighten me up, it might work well along with the Cappuccino, I thought.

I got a lot more than I bargained for.

Linked through Languagehat.com, a bilingual menu—in Chinese and English—showed up on my laptop. At a first glance, I was expecting some amusing Chinglish again like “Government Abuse Chicken”. Then I read on.

Before I knew it, a portion of the Cappuccino—milk and espresso—was sprayed in the air, out of my mouth, and the rest was spilled over the floor, out of the cup. Someone should have warned me beforehand. Boy, the cruelty of this Chinglish menu goes well beyond “abuse” level; it’s definitely above the “torture” grade.

This was the most hilarious bilingual menu I’ve ever seen in my life.

New Language, New Beijing

I’ve been whining for a while of the poor English education that I, along millions of others, received in China. I saw us as the helpless victims, and thought someday somebody had to pay a price for the wrong done to us.

Now, the pay day has finally arrived. And, unexpectedly, this time on the receiving end was none other than the government itself. Some of us—the victims in the past, but helpless no more today—took revenge in a perverted way; using the fine English skill bestowed to us, we meticulously translated each Chinese sign and slogan in public display for the convenience of the English-speaking tourists. Along the way, we invented a new language called Chinglish.

The Chinglish signs were a huge hit with the tourists, whom the government likes to call the “international friends”. They found many of those signs were the third most attractive scene, after Forbidden City and Terra-Cotta Warriors, that they saw in China. Whenever they caught one really impressive, some couldn’t help take a lot of pictures, as they did at the emperor’s bedroom in Forbidden City.

But a few, whom the authority deems to be the “malicious, tiny minority that’s hostile to the Chinese”, posted the photos all over the internet. Thin skinned as it's always been, the government felt humiliated, and claimed that the pictures and many mocking comments really hurt the “Chinese people’s feeling”.

To avoid such humiliation, particularly during the coming Beijing Olympics Games, when millions more foreign tourist will pour in, the authority launched a public campaign to clean up Chinglish, like “Racist Park” for a Ethnic Minorities Park, according to a BBC report on Sunday.

Whether it will succeed remains to be seen. The track record doesn’t look good. The authority tried once in 2002, with no avail. But before the Olympic torch being passed on to the city of Beijing, I’m sure the government will get rid of one commonly seen Chinglish sign: Question Authority.

No citizen has been granted that serious right yet. It’s merely an “Information Desk”, whereas if you get lost or need to check the subway schedule, go and ask the clerk on-duty.

For the foreign tourists, lucky you if he or she can speak English.

What's Talent Got To Do With It?

Since I mentioned Tiger Woods in the last posting, I’ve found more to say about him.

Today, Woods is the most recognized and admired athlete in America; only Michael Jordan is in the same league. Some people would say Woods got lucky; many would think he’s a genius; most would believe he’s talented. What would Woods himself say?

Well, it’s all in the book that he’s written: How To Play Golf. Although not a golf fan, I glimpsed the book anyway, and was very intrigued by one chapter called “Yearning To Learn”, in which he says:

Golf requires patience and perseverance. There are no shortcuts. Pop used to say you get out of it what you put into it. When my teacher, Butch Harmon, and I overhauled my swing during the 1998 season, Butch would sometimes have me repeat one movement for 30 minutes. I would get so tired it felt like my arms were going to fall off. But I kept at it until the move became ingrained in my muscle memory. Patience and practice pay off.
… …
The difference between golf and most other sports is that anyone of average intelligence and coordination can learn to play it well. It requires a commitment to being the best that you can be. That has always been my approach to the game, for I, too, started as a blank page.

Keep in mind, in 1998 Woods was already the best golf players in the world. And yet, he still practiced that “arms-almost-fall-off” hard for further improvement. It’s another way for him to tell those who stand in the sidelines watching: “Yeah, I won a couple of the Masters; but what's talent got to do with it?”

Well, what he says about playing golf can be said about learning a new language. Anyone, even those with bellow average intelligence, can do it; after all, everyone has mastered at least one language—his native tongue—just fine; he can surely do another if he wants to. It just takes patience and practice.

“Ultimately, golf is a journey full of learning and discovering.” Woods concludes in the same page. Aha, isn’t it so of studying a language too?

The journey of learning and discovering, I believe, is the ultimate power that drives people to take on new challenges.

What Tiger Wood And I Have In Common?

I always wonder what’s so great, or even glamorous, about golfing: you swing a stick to hit a tiny ball as hard as you can, walk a distance to find it, and then shove it as careful as you can to put it in a small hole on the ground.

Granted, golf course, with neat grass and all that, is a pleasant place to walk on. And sure, if you were Tiger Woods, you could make a lot of money by doing just that—hitting a ball afar and sliding it to a hole. Well, beyond that, it has to be something else that drives Tiger and million other golfers to do it.

It turns out, there is. Playing golf may get you in a flow, a mental state that’s been meticulously studied by a psychology professor named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced “chick-sent-me-high-ee; I told you not all Americans have easy last name like Smith).

What is a flow anyway? The professor defines it this way:

Being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost.

In another word, you are doing something that makes you happy as hell. It mostly often occurs while an athlete is on top of his game, an artist in peak of her creativity, a scientist deep in his thought, or even a video-gamer in captivation of her virtual reality.

The flow, however, doesn’t come from nowhere. According to the professor, there are several necessary ingredients in an activity that tend to enable a flow experience, including: set a clear goal; seek an intrinsic reward; stay focus; get a direct feedback; and match the skill and the challenge accordingly to avoid frustration or boredom.

I play neither golf nor video game. But lucky for me, there is one activity I enjoy doing—studying a second language—that often gets me in a flow. Examining what I’ve been doing in learning English, I see it mirrors several of those ingredients that enable the flow; no wonder I feel as happy as Tiger Woods does when he swings the golf club.

Admitted, making million bucks while doing it, as Tiger does with his golfing, would make me in a super-duper flow.

The Hollywood Lessons (6)

When I was young and silly, a friend asked me this question: “What sort of life would you want if you were filthy rich?” Unaware of his sarcastic tone, I bit the hook: “I want to own a private jet—is it called Gulf something?—so that I can depart in the morning for Paris to see an opera, and return to the States for a steak dinner the same day.”

My answer surprised him. He smirked and quipped “I didn’t know you are an opera-and-steak kind of guy.” I wasn’t. And after years gone by, I stay roughly the same: still silly, cool to opera, and eating steak only sparsely.

The friend didn’t know that I, too, was surprised by my spontaneous reply. Stupid or not, how on earth did I come up with such a fancy version of rich living?

Well, all it took, I confess, was a silly Hollywood movie that I had indulged myself for too many times. It’s Pretty Woman.

A romance between a prostitute (Julie Roberts) and a banker (Richard Gere), as it turned out, was pretty good material for studying English. Vivian, a high school dropout, speaks a plain and simple English (“Gosh, I want to pee”). Edward, a rich bachelor, talks slowly to her in a polite tone (“Would you like to join me for a dinner?”).

Even better, the dialogues in several scenes were relevant to anyone who’s starting a new life in America: shopping for clothes, staying in a hotel, dinning in a restaurant, chit-chatting in a social event, and maybe once in a life, going to an opera. It's a delight two-hour English lesson, and only ended when Vivian went back to school in the end to get her a degree.

As my English proficiency advanced, I began to look for more sophisticated movies. I found a few; one of them came as a pleasant surprise. It blew my mind, Before the Sunrise.

Again a romance drama, only this time no Cinderella in any shape or form. Amazingly, there isn’t much going on in the movie at all, just a young American man and a pretty French student wonder in the streets of Vienna for the whole night, doing nothing but talking, until sunrise.

I’ve never seen a movie that’s so intense with just two people talking. The dialogues are so fluid that it's impossible to catch every word they said; making it harder, Jesse brings up many topics seemingly unrelated to one another, and Celine talks in a French accent. But hearing their conversations, in the background of various Vienna scenes, was a great joy. It's a unexpected romantic adventure. And it's a dream material for listening comprehension.

Such a joy also led me to see its sequel, Before the Sunset, in eager. The setting has moved to Paris, Jesse and Celine are a few years older, but their dialogues remain fresh and intense.

So is the joy of seeing it.

Home-Schooled, Taught By Google

Google announced today that it would buy YouTube for 1.65 billion dollars. If YouTube were a giant TV set, then it would still come a bit short to buy it counting everyone in the U.S. and China to throw in a dollar. Someone has become absurdly rich.

I applauded the deal, albeit for a non-financial reason. As a believer of nontraditional way of learning second language, I saw Google, combining with YouTube, just turned to be a perfect tool for anyone who aspires to study a foreign language on his own term.

Reading comprehension: go to the Google News everyday and read as often as you can. It offers a unique feature that can make your reading a great fun. It’s the news customization. Using the keyword, you can generate the news items that only interest you.

Say that you love to sniff around the celebrities, and are a big fan of Tom Cruise. Keyword his name and, boom, you will be reading so much about the couch-jumping, Katie-loving, baby-hugging star from so diverse news source until you are nauseated. Once reaching that point, don’t worry; simply change the keyword to Jolie-Pitt, and you are back to the reading binge again. Simply put, there are million ways to tailor the news to your taste that you would never be bored again reading in English. Besides the news, you can also go to Google Book to find the books that interest you too.

Listening comprehension: go to the YouTube or the home-grown Google Video. Man, where should I start. I already mentioned the video blog by a faked lonely girl for a better understanding of the teen English. And there are millions more video clips, as short as a minute or long as an hour, covering every possible topic, some of which are bound to be interesting to you; some geeks even uploaded a physics class taught by a UC Berkeley professor.

Spoken skill: start or join a Google Group, get to know other learners and native speakers. Then sign on to the Google Talk and talk to those likeminded people for some practices. It’s a global village now; isn’t it cool to talk to someone half way around the globe in her native languages about a town that both of you can bird view from a satellite shot in Google Map?

Someday, Google Translate, an automatic text translation between English and several other languages, might be a great feature for learning. But now, it’s too primitive to be useful. Try to let it translate “the big cheese is having a bad hair day” to your language.

I’m like, What Are You Talking About?

Several years into my living in the U.S., I thought my English had progressed well; I asked “excuse me, can you say that again” much less frequent than before during the conversations, and I could hold a court much longer with confidence, particularly when talking to someone whose first response to whatever I said was always “Oh, that’s interesting. Tell me…”

That confidence was shattered when I first talked to a teenager in length. She was slightly shy but talkative. Only a few minutes into our conversation, I thought that either she was talking in Spanish, or that all those “oh, that’s interesting” I heard before were grossly misleading.

First of all, she never said oh-that-is-interesting crap; instead, she alternated “that’s so sick” and “that’s totally disgusting”, despite what I said were either mundane (“there was no school bus; we walked”) or even funny (“no, I never ate dog in China. There were not many around.”

Then, she peppered every single sentence with one word “like”, which confused me “totally” (another word she often used), such as, “I’m, like, hey, what a bummer; you know, I’m, like, whatever”.

If the ubiquitous “like” wasn’t confusing enough, she also liked to quantify it with “kind of”, like “Basically, I’m kind of like, leave me alone; like, you know, I don’t want to hear this crap.”
Basically (one of her frequent words too), if she were talking Spanish, then I was lost in translation.

Luckily, for anyone who wants to understand the teen English better, there is a great video blog at YouTube called Lonelygirl. It’s supposed to be a home-schooled, 15-year-old teenager—her name is Bree—in real life talking to a webcam about her boyfriend, her parents, and her lonely life, but later was revealed as an acting gig by a 21-year-old former film school student of N.Y.U.

Faked teenage she is, but the way Bree talks is, like, authentic teen English. Totally.

New Concept English, Old Fashion Lawsuit

A British widow filed a lawsuit last month in Beijing, charging several local publishing houses for copyright infringement of the book that her husband wrote 40 years ago. Her name is obscure, the case draws little publicity, but the book has been well-known among English learners in China for two decades.

The book is New Concept English, a four-volume textbook writen by L. G. Alexander.

I first bought the book out of curiosity while in high school. As I mentioned in “Karl Marx, Me and Learning English”, the standard textbooks mandated by the Ministry of Education were insanely boring. Then, as a “reform experiment of English teaching”, the Ministry sanctioned several elite schools in Beijing and Shanghai to introduce the New Concept English into their curriculums.

I smelled something goodie. In China, the elite schools—two dozens or so in total, called the National Key School—enroll not only the best and the brightest, but also those whose parents belong to the most privileged ruling class. If the authority was willing to risk them as guinea pigs to try out this textbook, it had to be something really special in it. Hence, I elected to be a guinea pig too on my own term—reading the book after school.

I skipped the first volume, First Things First, which covers the basic grammar, and took a plunge in the second in the series, Practice and Progress. It didn’t take me a long to apprehend that those guinea pigs in the elite schools indeed received a lot better treat, as they always did.

Comparing it to our mandatory English textbook was like comparing a butterfly to a fly. And in this case, the butterfly outshines the fly in a couple of aspects.

First, because it’s written by a native Brit, who didn’t seem to be overly obsessed with class struggle or revolution, the content was original and natural. I felt at home the first time since I studied English.

Second, it’s fun to read it. The second volume is made of many stories, usually about a hundred-word long, most of which are quite amusing and genuine. One story told of a young boy skipping school, taking a nap in a boat, and waking up to find himself on the other side of the English Channel. He became an instant hero of mine; I’d daydreamed of skipping school numerous times, each time being waken up in the middle of one class or another by the teacher.

The third installment, Developing Skills, proved to be challenging, as the stories were much longer and vocabularies grew significantly. But the materials were so fresh that I managed to read it through without the torturing feeling of reading “How Karl Mark Learn Foreign Language” alike. I had never finished the last installment, Fluency in English, which collects many long articles from British newspapers and magazines.

I don’t recall ever seeing L.G. Alexander’s name anywhere in the book that I bought. Was it a pirated copy published by a state-owned publishing house? I wouldn’t be surprised if it was. Back then, copyright in China means the right to copy. Since, the progress has been made; it’s not right to copy. But do it rightfully anyway. Good luck to her lawsuit.

What Should Not I Call You?

I’m a political news junky. I pay a lot more attention to the domestic affairs of the nation, like presidential and congressional elections, than the domestic affairs of the home, like home improvement.

Having heard countless speeches, debates, or even testimonies by politicians, I can attest that American politicians, save our current president, are the most articulate group of people among all. In fact, I even wouldn’t “misunderestimate” George W. Bush’s speaking skill. After all, he persuaded American people twice to elect him to the highest office.

Politicians are usually very precise about the words they choose to say in public. Words are their weapons that need to be handled with a great care. They know every gaffe costs them votes. Some politicians go to extreme for clarity, such as former President Bill Clinton’s famous one-liner “It depends on what “is” is”, when replying the question about his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

Despite of their carefulness, the politicians inevitably make a gaffe or two every once a while. George Allen, the Republican Senator from Virginia, became the latest victim of a slip of the tongue. His gaffe? Calling someone by something that I had absolutely no clue what it means. Here is an excerpt from the Washington Post’s report:

At a campaign rally in southwest Virginia on Friday, Allen repeatedly called a volunteer for Democrat James Webb "macaca."… pointed at S.R. Sidarth in the crowd. "Let's give a welcome to macaca, here. Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia."

What does “macaca” mean? According to the same article:

Depending on how it is spelled, the word macaca could mean either a monkey that inhabits the Eastern Hemisphere or a town in South Africa. In some European cultures, macaca is also considered a racial slur against African immigrants, according to several Web sites that track ethnic slurs.

The incident happened in the mid-August, when Sen. Allen was leading in the polls by a large margin. Since, he’s been on network every night apologizing for what he said. Yet, he saw his lead evaporated. Once a potential presidential candidate in 2008, Sen. Allen is now just trying to save his political life.

I’ve learned a new word from Sen. Allen, as well as a lesson at his expense. Knowing what should not to call someone is even more important than what should.

When in doubt, better say lady or gentleman. Don’t try to be a smart monkey.

What Should I Call You?

In the first months of my living in the U.S., I always addressed Americans by last name, matching Mister, Misses, or Miss carefully. “Oh, just call me John, please” was the typical response I got. After a while, I figured that a lot of Americans were at ease to be called their first name, even though we met the first time.

That’s a huge relief for me. Not that I’m a casual, touch-feely kind of guy; I simply had a hard time to pronounce—let alone remember—most Americans’ last names, whose complexity came to a surprise to me. The English textbooks I had in China gave me a wrong impression, as they always had the convenient last names like Smith, Jones, or Wilson.

But at any given day, I could easily meet a dozen of Americans with name like Giordano, Rodriguez, Wisniewski, Kamynin, and Abdul before meeting any Smith alike. Talking about the country of immigrants!

I had enough trouble with my spoken English then, and struggling with the name like Miklaszewski was the last thing I wanted to deal with. Neither could I pronounce it right, nor was I able to roll it out of my tongue completely in less than two minutes. As a result, whenever I heard “Oh, just call me John, please”, I cried out “Yee-Ha” before saying "Yes, John."

I can almost count the first names used by the majority of Americans by just two hands. Better yet, Stephanie seems to be the most complicated one. That I can handle without sweating.

However, what did make me sweat a bit were variations of a first name, some of which make absolutely no sense to me. My first boss’s name is William, but everyone calls him Bill. Then some more: Mike for Michael, Chuck for Charles, or Liz for Elizabeth. John seems to be the only one left with no stand-in.

Once three guys in our groups share the same first name—Robert. When introducing themselves to me the first time, they confused the hell out of me. In a short succession, I learned they preferred to be called Bob, Rob, and Bobby, respectively. Only Richard matches Robert in variations, going by Rich, Rick and Dick.

I couldn’t tell you how shock I was when an old gentleman told me to “Oh, just call me Dick, please”, shortly after I picked up a few of dirty street slang.