1. An impressive demonstration of the difficulty of speaking Chinese.
2. Charming sidewalk chalkings that take advantage of real cracks and other anomalies.
3. The father doesn't remember, but the daughter does.
4. She found the right rock for her mermaid pose.
5. From a series of self-defense moves learned from horses.
6. The easiest way to fold a towel is to think of the towel as a Facebook group.
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7 comments:
Not really such thing as just speaking Chinese. Lots of dialects. Hear 3 spoken around me each week.
1. An impressive demonstration of the difficulty of speaking Chinese.
Shi-oot! just Shi-ows that it'd be EASY to speak Chinese.. If those Chinese were speaking English!
English is pretty darned hard too or a first timer. Chinese use inflections to identify specific syllables, we use it to denote emphasis for the sentence. Still, it was hard for me to get those tones down so I didn't scold when I meant to say mother, or horse or ask a question.
Wa St Blogger said...
English is pretty darned hard too or a first timer.
everybody always says that, but i don't think it's really true
I think you can make yourself understood in crappy illiterate broken english better than you can in most any other language. Because english isn't really a language; it's a pidgen or a creole or whatever you want to call it .
That's why English has taken over the whole world
It's a famous Mandarin tongue-twister.
@Readering. China used to have about a dozen major spoken languages (and more minor ones), but now has only one: the language formerly called Mandarin.
The PRC switched mainland China to a single official language in the 1980s. By a happy coincidence (for them), the Beijing leadership chose as the single official spoken language is the language spoken in and around Beijing ...
The dialect spoken near the capital is nearly always what becomes standard. True for Rome, true for London, true for Paris, etc. That this humorous standard joke in Mandarin is brought up now likely means they listen to John McWhorter's linguistics podcast, where it was featured.
@ gilbar - English was sanded down by the Vikings in the 8th C, as they spoke something similar which had different endings. So they just ignored them, and they all chipped off, with only a few oddities remaining. Subsequent encounters with English have reinforced this. Adult speakers of a new language get only the main parts, and that if a force for smoothing. Persian, which used to rather pretentiously be called Farsi by outsiders, is the same. Also, English-speakers, especially Americans, are very used to newcomers speaking their language and understanding it. Most other peoples do not have that experience.
Our famously-bad spelling is difficult, but even that is overstated. Phonics will usually get you through.
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