Comments | glad_ghosts: wang wang

glad_ghosts

wang wang

Dec 05, 2009 09:25

the online dictionary is my only dictionary and it is unreliable. this last week's classes were on relationships. we were trying to explain what "flirt" means and used the dictionary's only translations for the first couple days, and students would giggle and say that "tiaoqing" (supposedly "to flirt") is a "negative" thing in China (which we ( Read more... )

Comments 2

strangeraeons December 7 2009, 16:43:09 UTC

My mind has never, ever been able to wrap itself around icon-based languages. How the hell do you do it?

glad_ghosts December 8 2009, 05:04:41 UTC

I don't really. I can read pinyin, which is just Chinese with the western alphabet. I know about 10 characters, and I can't write any of them. (and I can't tell them apart from vaguely similar characters that mean totally different things.) basically, I can identify the meat flavor of ramen that isn't labeled in English, and determine whether it is spicy (because here, "spicy" means "way too fucking spicy"). it sucks. I want to work on reading but first I have to learn how to actually talk to people.