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 [...]
This incident happened about 2 months ago. I and a colleague arrived at the airport in Atlanta. He was a Mexican-immigrant from Toronto, and it was my first time working with him.
We hopped into our rental car. After spending about 5 minutes or so figuring how to start the car using the state-of-art ‘keyless’ key, [...]
Due to business reasons, I had to travel to Seattle back-and-fro in the past few weeks. I came back to Toronto each weekend stopping over at the Vancouver Airport. In the Memorial Day long-weekend, I had trouble connecting to an immediate flight from Vancouver. I ended up spending 6 hours in Vancouver. I went out [...]
