January 2012
2 posts
Anonymous asked: Are you still in China mate?
Anonymous asked: Dude, what? You're abandoning UQ?
September 2011
2 posts
UQ
Had to go and arrange a talk by Michael Kirby while I’m on the wrong continent.
pensiveskies asked: Ahh that's incredible! It must take so much work.. Chinese is so hard, especially all the different tones. Kudos to you Chris haha. ps. Winter is the best season in the world.
August 2011
4 posts
pensiveskies asked: how fluent are you in chinese now!
Translations
Lately, I’ve decided that I really want to work as a translator. Probably not as a career, but I’d love to be able to do it as a side job while I’m at Uni, and see where things go from there. Doing translation work is something I used to vaguely mention as one of the reasons I was studying Chinese, thinking maybe ten years down the track or something. Now, it seems like something...
July 2011
2 posts
Anonymous asked: Why do you want to switch uni, Chris. Were you unhappy with UQ? Will you continue to do Law?
voiceinquartz asked: Dude are you still in China? When are you back?
Google+
theydothingsdifferentlythere:
Am I the only one that feels that the marketing for Google+ was oddly similar to Eric Cartman’s ‘You Can’t Visit My Theme Park’ technique?
You mean the invite-only thing? Gmail used to be like that. It worked, too, I felt pretty special for having an account. Then again, I was about 14. (Never really watched Southpark(?), but the name seems pretty...
“Hey :)
just wondering how everything is going over there? give me a response which is as detailed as possible :)”
Hey! Sorry I haven’t really been in touch. Everything is going pretty well. I have two two-hour classes a day, and studying most of the time. I sat an exam a couple of weeks ago, the new HSK level 5, results come out around the end of this month. I have an...
June 2011
3 posts
2 tags
I have the friendliest breakups.
We broke up and then went out for dinner.
Fun tip
If you have a couple of hours to spare, or a few minutes a day for a while, learn to read and write Korean (Hangul). This is a good place to do it, plus here for the stroke order. You won’t be able to understand anything, of course, but being able to at least read out anything you encounter written in Korean seems like a pretty good payoff for a couple of hours work. A bit longer, maybe, if...
Since I can't reblog it:
http://tesslyon.tumblr.com/post/6470337680
Also more mundane than you’d think! Not that that’s a bad thing. I haven’t done anything terribly exciting, but day to day life is really good. Most of it is going to class or studying, I’m taking the new HSK 5 exam on June 26. Apart from that, hanging out with friends, usually going out to eat. The local food in Northeast China...
May 2011
6 posts
“And yet pain hurts but it doesn’t kill. When you consider the alternative — an...”
– Jonathan Franzen’s essay on social media, on ‘liking’ as a pitiful, narcissistic dilution of real experience, seems to have been met with wide acclaim; it is quoted everywhere, it seems immediately, obviously true, it resonates. Many of its points are fascinating, but most interesting is the claim...
I have an irrational fear of buying food.
More specifically, of potential embarrassment arising from not knowing exactly how to buy food at any given food-selling place. This is not entirely a being-in-China problem: it took a good few months before I went to the Souvlaki Hut at my Uni back in Australia, because I had never been to Souvlaki Hut, and I wasn’t entirely sure how to order, and what the meals were called, and what if I...
A sad day for land-owning men →
squashed:…
I really don’t think your as unhappy with the actual holding in this case as you think you are. The upshot of the holding is that if the police illegally enter your property, you can’t assault them. You can still take other action. You can file a complaint. You can sue them. You can have any evidence seized in an illegal search excluded at trial. You just can’t beat them up. This...
IPA
I was helping a friend of mine study English today. English teaching in China seems to pretty much universally use the IPA for pronunciation. Which, honestly, why don’t we do that when teaching foreign languages? I speak passable Mandarin with (just saying) a remarkably good accent, and my accent has been about the same since my Mandarin was a lot less than passable. If it wasn’t for...
Galaxy Rise: Galaxy Rise this is the only way I... →
theydothingsdifferentlythere:
galaxyrise:
theydothingsdifferentlythere:
Whats the perspective like from China? And when do you get home?
Well, the second question’s easy enough: Early next year, assuming all goes to plan. As for the first question, well, I’m liking it enough that I decided to stay the year, at least. Beyond that……
Dude I can’t deal with how awesome you are. Also, what’s...
Galaxy Rise this is the only way I can really...
theydothingsdifferentlythere:
Whats the perspective like from China? And when do you get home?
Well, the second question’s easy enough: Early next year, assuming all goes to plan. As for the first question, well, I’m liking it enough that I decided to stay the year, at least. Beyond that… Let’s just say I can empathise with you taking forever to finish the Fes story. I...
April 2011
5 posts
“The thing I keep banging on about is that he doesn’t know what age he is. He’s...”
– Steven Moffat. He’s since confirmed this again on his twitter stream. So if you’re like me (a huge canon nerd) and the whole age thing from The Impossible Astronaut irked you, view it this way: the 200 years thing is probably bang on. But the 900 reboot thing is just vanity/bad memory/an impressive...
First page of my book. what do you think? →
lukehackney:
In which someone puts the first page of David Foster Wallace’s Pale King on Yahoo! Answers.
I’m about 32% sure the poster who recommended Strunk and White was in on the joke.
(It’s Infinite Jest, though. Not that I’ve read it, had to check.)
“More than that, I would question anyone deciding they speak for “the straight...”
– - Bioware Neglected Their Main Demographic: The Straight Male Gamer (Dragon Age II - Dragon Age II Official Campaign Quests and Story (SPOILERS)) | BioWare Social Network
This guy makes games for a living and now I want to buy his games. (via correlationstonone)
That moment when you come across a word in Chinese...
What do you mean this isn’t a universal human experience?
1 tag
So apparently April Fools Day has caught on in...
Isn’t that just great.
March 2011
20 posts
Anonymous asked: ni hao, Chris! I would like to ask which private school did/will you study in Harbin? xie xie!
20
I turned 20 a few weeks ago. And I was like, no, clearly someone’s been adding this up wrong, because I’m not supposed to be 20 years old. But my mid-(let’s say, optimistically, more like 1/5th-)life crisis was interrupted by moving into an environment where the median age of the people I hang out with is somewhere in the mid-20s and I’m reminded several times a day in...
The 'Comprehensive English-Chinese Dictionary'
on nciku.com has an entry for ‘Vogon Poetry’. Because, you know, after a month or so in China, I can attest that every so often, you’re having a conversation, and you’re like, crap, I forget how to say ‘Vogon Poetry’ in Mandarin. And then all hope of meaningful communication is lost.
Huh.
For whatever reason, I can suddenly access Tumblr (rather than just posting by email). I’m not sure whether that will last, but if it does, I might actually get around to posting once in a while again.
Doctor Who in Chinese
Turns out that the Chinese youtube-substitute Youku has all five seasons of the new series of Doctor Who. Even better, they have subtitles in Mandarin, which is super-interesting (to me and presumably a handful of other strange people). They’re pretty well done, but it still loses a bit in translation, unsurprisingly. The show’s name becomes 神秘博士 《shen2mi4 bo2shi4》, ‘Mysterious...
cinematographicgoggles asked:
w ARE you going? I just realised I havn’t spoken to you in a really long time!! Hows china? everything you hoped it would be? nice and dirty with some clean areas for tourists (which are still kkinda dirty)? how are you finding everything?” Hey! Yeah, it’s going really well. I’ve been too busy and/or lazy to blog for a little while, but at the moment I’m in Harbin...
And pretend I remembered to put a paragraph break after “addresses” in that last post.
Tomorrow
I leave for Harbin, which is where I basically finish ‘travelling’ and resume ‘living’, but the kind of living that sort of overlaps with travelling in a blurry grey area which I hope will be the best of both worlds. If all goes to plan, anyway, I’ll be staying there longer than I lived in either of my last two home addresses. There’s a whole lot of things I...
littlegreenbook asked:
I’d say a lot of other people share my opinion but just in case they don’t voice it, I think you’re incredibly brave for doing what you’re doing. Thank you! It wasn’t so much brave as that I didn’t actually think there would be anything difficult about it. And I’m sure it’s no surprise to anyone that I was wrong about that. But, so far the...
Japan
Just heard about the earthquake in Japan. Terrible- but from what I’ve heard, I don’t think there’s any country in the world better prepared. The nuclear warning is scary, but it sounds like it’s probably under control? And I’m glad I decided to start studying Chinese last year, not Japanese.
Oh
I sent all those posts with weird formatting and no line breaks, didn’t I? Oops.
Oh, and one more thing
To round off this deluge of posts, which are really just one post, but I didn’t think anyone would bother reading it if I didn’t split it up: I got to haggle for something today, which I’ve always wanted to do. Wandering through the Xiu Shui markets, after saying “不用了 [I don’t need any]” to the first 10 or so stalls, I figured I could use a scarf for Harbin. I...
Other things worth mentioning
-I’m pretty happy with how my Chinese is coming along. I definitely feel more fluent speaking and, particularly, find it easier to pick up what people are saying, than when I first arrived. On the other hand, I don’t feel like I’m learning very much new language, just getting better at using what I already have. So I’m looking forward to starting classes in Harbin, and I...
Beijing
After arriving in Beijing, I headed to my hostel. I had no trouble getting there, thanks to the subway. Have I mentioned the subway before? I’m in love with subways. The Shanghai Metro was incredibly convenient, and after the few days I spent there I have no doubt that I know my way around Shanghai better than I know my way around… Well, any of the various places I’ve lived....
Shanghai to Beijing
After Ningbo, I went back to Shanghai for a couple of days, mainly because it was too hard to get transport straight from Ningbo to Beijing. I do like Shanghai a lot, though. I didn’t do too much worth writing about in those couple of days, but I did get to see the Bund at night, which was cool. That’s the riverfront area in Shanghai with a lot of old buildings and nice architecture on...
Ningbo was great. The city itself wasn’t somewhere I’d visit for its own sake, but it was really nice to meet my friend who goes to university there. Also, with her showing me around, I got to try things that you can’t really do when travelling alone- like eating at proper Chinese restaurants. (Aside from the fact that I can’t for the life of me read a menu, you can’t...
Spam
It’s a little odd that keyword advertising things like Google Ads haven’t yet figured out that people looking at the spam folder in their email account are actually not statistically more likely to be interested in purchasing Spam. Or maybe they are?
If I could
The other night in Shanghai, on one of the busy commercial streets, I found a group of rather elderly people dancing energetically to what sounded like some kind of Chinese rap music, with a crowd gathered around watching. That was entertaining… But not quite as cool as the group 20 metres away, dancing to Simon & Garfunkel.
China
I’ve managed to get by well enough with my Chinese so far, although that’s largely because in Shanghai they’re used to foreigners, and the fact that I can speak any at all seems to come as a surprise. I’ve developed a fondness for people who tell me prices in Chinese straight away rather than using English or pointing to a calculator (not that I blame the others, who are...
Would somebody let me know if this works?
I won’t be able to get on to Tumblr here, but apparently you can post by email (and if you’re reading this, it’s true!) I won’t see replies, or anything, obviously. Could one of the people who follow my Tumblr and have my email address let me know if this shows up okay? So, in actual news, I’ve arrived in Shanghai! I’ll be brief, just jumping online in my room...
February 2011
9 posts
Non è difficile
One of the reasons that learning Chinese is more difficult for an English speaker than learning most European languages is the lack of cognates, words with a common origin. It’s easier to remember that “scuola” or “Schule” means “school” than “学校 xuéxiào”. On the flip side, though, if you want to talk about people behind their backs, you’ll...
1 tag
土豆
煮它们，把它们捣烂，把他们放在炖菜里吧。。。
I'm going to China, part 3.
You know what’s really big? China. You know what’s deceptively small? Maps of China. I mean, the Shanghai dot where I’ll be arriving, and the Ningbo dot where I’ll be meeting a friend, are right next to each other. But the cities they represent, as it turns out, are a 4-hour train ride apart. The Harbin dot on the other hand, where I plan to be living for a few months, is...
1 tag
Galaxy Rise: I'm going to China. →
theydothingsdifferentlythere:
galaxyrise:
theydothingsdifferentlythere:
galaxyrise:
I’ll be leaving in about a month, and staying for at least 3 months or so studying Mandarin at a private language school in Harbin (possibly until the end of the year, depending on how things go, if I enrol at a university). I wanted to avoid ‘publicising’ that too much until I got a visa, just in…
We...
Galaxy Rise: I'm going to China. →
theydothingsdifferentlythere:
galaxyrise:
I’ll be leaving in about a month, and staying for at least 3 months or so studying Mandarin at a private language school in Harbin (possibly until the end of the year, depending on how things go, if I enrol at a university). I wanted to avoid ‘publicising’ that too much until I got a visa, just in…
We expect very regular blog updates.
Planning on...