China | Dominik Mayer – Products, Asia, Productivity

Artifical Language

Why don’t I learn Lojban. Seems to be so much easier than Chinese.

Lift

When I wrote about my inability to communicate with some classmates Karl commented:

did you speak chinese..? ;)

Today I did. And it worked. We had kind of the same vocabulary. Mine was a bit smaller as I’m still trying to catch up. At least we could have the simplest form of a conversation. Wow.

85 Yuan

Shoe store

I needed cheap shoes to wear with a suit very fast. The shop was on my way home. I’ve never bought shoes that quickly, didn’t even try to bargain. Maybe that’s why he called me “pengyou”, friend, when I left. I didn’t understand much of the other things he said.

Shoes
Shoes

(No) Meat

Chinese Arabic food

More Chinese Arabic food. As hard to eat as the one before. They said it was without meat. Following the Chinese definition of vegetarian food: You don’t see the meat at first glance, you find it when you’ve eaten half the food. That was the time I stopped.

In the meantime they were doing something with a large piece of meat that was lying on top of a cardboard on the ground.

Bad Smell

Yesterday I bought noodles at the noodle man’s. But the noodle man himself wasn’t there so another one cooked them. When I put the empty box in my trash bin it started to smell very bad. Like animal oil. It didn’t help to open the window, I had to get rid of the thing. No more noodle man for now.

Cables

Shinla Levain

Our usual table was taken so we chose another one and Ouwen found himself sitting on a bunch of cables. He said he could even see some copper…

Two Teas I've Never Tried Before

Chocolate tea

Chocolate tea. Tasted like a mixture of tea and ice chocolate.

Honey lemon black tea

Honey lemon black tea. Taste very … delicious. ;-)

Like Women

A Chinese friend asked how many female teachers we have (three out of four), said we’d sound like women rather then men when we speak Chinese. Alarming.

Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard

David Moser wrote a very interesting article named Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard. Here’s the outline:

  1. Because the writing system is ridiculous.
  2. Because the language doesn’t have the common sense to use an alphabet.
  3. Because the writing system just ain’t very phonetic.
  4. Because you can’t cheat by using cognates.
  5. Because even looking up a word in the dictionary is complicated.
  6. Then there’s classical Chinese (wenyanwen).
  7. Because there are too many romanization methods and they all suck.
  8. Because tonal languages are weird.
  9. Because east is east and west is west, and the twain have only recently met.

I couldn’t agree more.

Quelle Surprise

This time she came and turned the wheel to the medium program, not the shortest one. Wow. Perhaps it was due to the larger amount of laundry. In the end the things didn’t feel much cleaner than last week but still better than after the first time I had used the machine.

Long Noodles

Noodles

I’m getting used to chopsticks but this was hardly eatable. The noodles were too long and slippery.