I've got other stuff to write about, which I probably won't get to soon because I'm incredibly busy, but this just has to get written right now. This week I was teaching a lesson on rhymes. All native English speakers do rhymes endlessly as children, but my students, despite being English majors, haven't spent much time on them. Every Mandarin syllable (each character is one syllable) ends in either a vowel, an n, or an ng (or occasionally an r). And in Mandarin, there are just over 400 possible syllables, whereas in English there are thousands upon thousands. So there's a lot more opportunities for rhymes in English. So I prepared a lesson that looked examples of rhymes that are spelled alike (cat/hat/rat), rhymes that are spelled differently (stuff/tough, great/eight), and alike spellings that don't rhyme ... read more

Some of my most nerve-wracking as well as exhilarating moments have come from ping pong. I'd been saying from the moment I decided to come to China that I would love to learn some good ping pong technique if I could just find a very patient partner to play with. I mentioned this to Mr. Wang, the adviser, who has connections to the physical education department (or, as they call it here, the physical department). He brought me to the first meeting of one of the ping pong PE classes, in a room with at least 50 tables and 100 students. The teacher, who is also the coach of the university's team, lent me his paddle and watched me volley with one of his players. Now, I've played enough ping pong that I can competently return ... read more

A bit about the city. For starters, Changzhou's prefecture-level population is around 3.5 million and url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China_by_urban_populationits urban population is about 825,000, making it a pretty small city by Chinese standards. Changzhou is conveniently located for transportation to other places, but is no tourist destination itself. The first three times I went to the downtown area, I did not see a single foreigner. Since then, though, I have met several expats and the who-knows-who web of this relatively small community has become a bit clearer. As for the nightlife...let's just say this is a city that seems to love to sle... read more

I took a six-week class (if you're looking for Mandarin, ask for Jonathan; he's superb) and met twice a week with an excellent tutor over the summer, learning about 125 words (for maybe 25 of which I knew the character) which I could say very, very slowly and could understand if said to me even slower than that. Much to my chagrin, I've not yet been able to set aside regular study time, but simply living here, learning some of the survival and high-frequency stuff, and really being very interested in the language, has upped my totals to about 175 words and 75 characters, and my comprehension (of those 175ish words) and pronunciation quite a bit. As with Spanish, I've tried to be diligent about pronunciation and I pretty much know the tones and pīnyīn on ... read more

First, some demographics. Of the 15,000 students at my university, five are from Finland and studying here in the fall. That's it. Next semester there will be zero international students. There are eight foreign teachers including me: two other Americans (one of whom is Chinese-American, and both of whom have a Chinese wife and child), two from the Philippines, and one each from England, Canada, and Japan. Five are around 30 years old, two are in their 50s. So I am the anomaly here in many ways. The city's demographics are similar but not quite as drastic. Changzhou is conveniently located for transportation to other places, but is no tourist destination itself. The first three times I went to the downtown area, I did not see a single foreigner. Since then, though, I have met several ... read more