An Expatriate in Taiwan

Category: Chinese

  • Bathroom cartoons

    Here are 3 small cartoons that I’ve taken pictures of in various bathrooms.

  • Hanzi Milestone: 1000

    I finally broke the 1000 mark on my Hanzi Flashcards on Friday. Feels good, yet I’ve got a long way to go. I officially started studying Hanzi on Feb. 9 of this year, armed only with Anki, pen and paper, and a book. I learned approximately 300 Hanzi by simple rote memorization (I also learned…

  • Small victories

    One of the greatest and most underrated joys of learning a new language is have small victories. All too often, big victories are emphasized – especially here in Taiwan and especially when learning English is the topic. However, I find so much more satisfaction in small victories. Learning new [hanzi]漢字[/hanzi] and recognizing them on tv,…

  • Happy Bird’s Day

    Today is my older sister’s birthday. She’s come a long way… To honor this occasion, I thought I would give my Big Sister a uniquely Taiwanese Birthday Present. In my meager Taiwan existence, it has become extremely clear that there is one birthday custom which MUST be honored: a trip to the KTV for a…

  • Mandarin and Taiwanese family names

    One of the most interesting things about learning Chinese is learning the various names for members of the family. In Germanic languages (such as English), this is relatively easy. A brother of either of your parents is an Uncle. Simple. Your parents’ mothers are Grandmothers. Simple. In Chinese, it just isn’t so. Chinese people place…

  • Speaking in numbers

    Laowai Chinese recently made a post about numbers in everyday Chinese language in mainland China. I thought I would take the concept and apply it to Taiwan. Most of these are used when instant messaging friends or sending text messages. A few of them, like 4, 6, and 8 are pretty well integrated to everyday…

  • I think I’m speaking Chinese

    I check in on the Forumosa Forums every now and then. If you can manage to get past all the threads where people just bitch about everything that’s wrong with Taiwan and how it should be fixed, there are some interesting threads there. One of the threads I’ve been reading lately is the “Ways to…

  • President shoes

    I learned something new from one of my students the other day. She was wearing Crocs shoes, and I asked her what they called those shoes in Chinese. She replied that they were called [hanzi]布希鞋[/hanzi] (bùxÄ«xié) or Bu Shi Shoes. You see, ever since W. was caught wearing crocs, the Taiwanese decided to venerate him…

  • Learning Chinese

    Chinese is a very difficult language for most to learn. Among the factors include certain sounds which are foreign to speakers of English and most European languages and the writing system, in which complex strokes are used to create characters. These characters must simply be memorized. No ifs, ands, or buts about it and no…

  • English speakers have it easy…

    At least as far as dictionaries are concerned. We can organize all the words alphabetically and it’s quite simple to look up the appropriate letter, narrow it down by the 2nd and 3rd letters and eventually arrive at the word you are looking for, complete with phonetic pronunciation guide, definition, etc. It’s not quite so…