On April 14, I tried to access my Google Calendar at 1:35 PST and got this error screen (link may not always work). All this text showing up instead of your calendar grid is an instant cue your calendar did not load but you can also search out your most natural language [...]
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Originally posted at my other blog, but highly relevant here, on December 19, 2009. ******** Have I told you yet about that funny, funny episode when I endeavoured to formally learn Mandarin a few years ago? Vancouver, being the special city it is, commonly offers two flavours of introductory Mandarin classes. The first is that class where on day one, you learn basics like sounding out “bo po mo fo” and how to count; students start knowing nothing about the Chinese language. The second type of course is named something like “Introduction to Mandarin for Cantonese Speakers” where it is assumed you have a firm grasp of the Chinese because you are a “heritage student”, as UBC puts it.1 Of course I was somewhat snooty about being able to take the latter course. After all, my mother made a lot of effort to teach me Chinese speaking, reading and writing with handmade flash cards and then she purchased volumes and volumes of bedtime stories and readers when we summered in Hong Kong. One of those summers, I even had a Beijing-trained Mandarin tutor for private lessons–and while I was a straight-A student back in Halifax, I was a shameful delinquent when it came to summer classes!2  No sooner did I hear about this (non-Chinese) guy who speaks Cantonese on YouTube did I also hear that he was making a guest appearance at a Chinese mall in Vancouver (Richmond) and this is just the cusp of his Internet stardom. This could be an interesting ride. The first video I watched from [...] |
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