Here is my latest fish-joke. It was Chinese New Year last week. My colleague of Mexican origin instant-messaged me: ‘新年好’ (good New-Year). Obviously, he had been playing around with Google Translate. So I challenged him that, with the help of Google Translate, he should not have any more excuse not to chat with me in [...]
Finally, I have persuaded my wife to go to Mandarin class. She had her first class last Thursday. OK, this was not her first attempt, but at least I regard this as a new beginning. There is always hope.
Coming back from the class that night, my wife started firing all kinds of pronunication questions at [...]
Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan caught the attention of the international media back in 2006, when he accepted the flag at the closing ceremonies of the Turin Winter Olympics. He is Canada’s first disabled mayor and also the first quadriplegic mayor of a North American city.
The mayor was paralysed after a tragic skiing accident when he [...]
After more than a year of waiting, the data finally came out last week. Statistics Canada released the language-related statistics of the 2006 census.
Here are the top 20 languages “spoken most often at home” in Toronto, my home town, and their corresponding head-counts and percentages:
English – 2746480 (55.31%)
Italian – 185760 (3.74%)
Chinese, n.o.s. – 172040 (3.46%)
Cantonese [...]
Since I have joined so many language exchange websites, I am quite used to receiving language exchange requests from time to time. Back in September, I received yet another one. But this time it was a bit unusual.
First of all, she was a native French speaker (bilingual French/English to be exact) asking for a Cantonese [...]
