Why Chinese is such a difficult/dangerous language

So Mandarin Chinese is a tonal language, meaning not only the pronunciation of a word, but the tone of it, can change the meaning. The most widely used example is the syllable 'ma.'

妈: ma (first/high tone) = mother, mom
麻: ma (second/rising tone) = hemp
马: ma (third/dipping tone) = horse
骂: ma (fourth /falling tone) = to scold, chide

With the characters, of course, it's easy to tell the difference, but without them, you have to rely on the tone of the syllable to know which meaning it is.

So today, at lunch, we saw one of our American classmates at a table in the student center and went to join him. As we sat down, he said, "wo gan mao le." What he meant to say was, 'I have a cold' (我感冒了, wo-dipping, gan-dipping, mao-falling le-neutral tone). However, because he mixed up his tones, he said 我干猫了 (wo-dipping, gan-falling, mao-high le-neutral tone). My German classmate, whose English is pretty good, asked, in English,

"You f*cked a cat?!"

Liverpool top of the league...in December

Could not have predicted this. Hoped for it, yes, but never predicted it. Liverpool are top of the Premier League with the Christmas crush just around the corner. A bit fortunate to pick up three goals tonight against Blackburn, but deserved the win, at least in the second half.

Xabi Alonso has just blown me away this season. He's been a bit off form the past couple seasons, and there was a lot of transfer speculation over the summer. Whether that galvanized him into form or he just had a lot of trouble with injuries and such, I don't know if any of us will ever really know, but the fact is, he's shown this season why he really is a class apart. He just takes control of the midfield and forces opponents back on their heels with these amazingly accurate, long searching passes deep into the corners. And he got the first goal tonight, which you could just see meant a lot to him. After all the ups and downs, plus the form he's been in, I think he, more than almost any other player out there, deserved the goal.

Fernando Torres is out until after New Years, which is concerning everyone, including myself. He seems to have a fair amount of trouble with his hamstrings acting up, and the last thing anyone wants is for that to become a chronic problem that will keep him from ever reaching top form. He hasn't been nearly as devastating as he was last season, and surely part of that is that the defenders are on to him now and are thinking about how to deal with him well before gametime. Part of it, too, has to be the Euros over the summer and the fatigue/extra wear and tear that those laid on him and the other Spanish players. The consensus on the message boards at RAWK seems to be, get him completely fit and healthy, and don't risk him until absolutely necessary, like late in the season, when the other teams are worn out.

Sami Hyypia showed again tonight why he should be considered a legend. Class defending all game long, didn't get flustered or anything, kept his cool even when things got a little hairy in the back. Jamie Carragher looked really solid too, and Arbeloa and Insua on the wings kept things mostly under control.

Watching games like this makes me itch to just bite the bullet and make plans to go to France to visit Tom and jump across the channel to see a game at Anfield. I've been obsessively working out budgets this weekend, and on paper I can afford it, but I just don't know how it will all actually work out with the timing of our scholarship payments, tuition payments and so on.

But in any event, well in Liverpool. Haven't been this excited about the domestic campaign in awhile.

Cross-cultural Understanding

An e-mail I sent out to a select group of my contacts, figured it would work as a blog entry as well, so just copied and pasted:

After class today a group of us went to lunch together at a place we frequent just off campus in a little alleyway near the metro stop. This group consisted of two German guys, three Japanese guys, a French guy, an Austrian guy, a Japanese girl and me. Because not everyone speaks a common language except Chinese, and everyone's Chinese ability is different, we usually use a mix of all our languages to get our points across. It's actually quite entertaining, but as you can imagine, a lot of things get lost in translation or mixed up and misunderstood.

After lunch, we headed back across campus to Gongguan, the main hub of transportation, food, shopping and entertainment for the district that the university is in. On the way, I was walking with the Japanese girl, Nana, who is a classmate of mine. As we approached the front gates, we saw that the guys had gotten a ways ahead of us, and since we didn't know where they were heading, we called out to them several times. They didn't appear to hear us, and after several more attempts, Nana finally yelled out, "Shuai ge!" a sort of slang term which literally means "handsome guy."

Every single one of the guys immediately whipped their heads around to look at us, and Nana and I nearly fell over laughing. Trust a group of guys from around the globe, who can't even understand one another at lunch and don't hear their own names being called, to respond instantly to an indiscriminate call of 'Hey, handsome!'