This morning I and my wife went to a Chinese café for breakfast. Somehow they offered free Chinese newspaper. I looked for the headline expecting some specular world event to unfold. To my disappointment, the headline read “華裔移民第二代 喜中西合璧婚宴” (2nd-generation Chinese prefer Chinese-Western fusion wedding banquets). It also showed the photo of a businessman who [...]
There was an interesting exchange between Steve the Linguist and Benny the Irish Polyglot. I downloaded the podcast more than a week ago but only managed to get through it on a red-eye flight back from Seattle yesterday.
In brief, Steve thinks that we should first immerse ourselves into a lot of input activities and then [...]
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 [...]
About 3 weeks ago, I accompanied my 4-year-old to play in a public play area. Watching her running around, I suddenly heard a mother beside me yelling at her kids, “¡Ven acá!” (come here).
My first impression was – ok, the Latino population has indeed increased in my area. My second thought was – what is [...]
Keith commented on my previous post, questioning on how SRS can fit into the “natural language learning” model. After all, it is not natural.
It seems to be me that different “language naturists” have different degrees of “naturalness” in their approaches. By all means, I am in favour of the “natural approach” as opposed to the [...]
