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Or she could not. We don't need more people who have no idea what they're doing teaching English in third world countries.
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Oct 26, 2016 04:09
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台灣第一名 I am so glad I never lived in the mainland and I don't feel that any of my Mandarin learning in Taiwan was a waste. It was super useful and I got to know the locals way better than I would have if I had stuck with English during my time there. Even in the south where Mandarin is not most people's native language, everyone still spoke it and I could communicate effectively. English is not really common at all once you get out of the major cities.
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Oct 26, 2016 09:03
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E_P posted:I still dont understand why people think you will be drowning in pussy if you move to Asia. My experience from seeing people come and go in Korea is if you weren't getting any in your home country you sure as poo poo weren't gonna get laid here. That is because all foreigners in Korea, especially English teachers, have HIV.
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Oct 26, 2016 09:58
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What the gently caress is 普通話? We speak 國語 in this family.
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Oct 26, 2016 11:53
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Ceciltron posted:I speak English and French natively, and Spanish with a decent degree of fluency. I've learned Latin, Ancient Greek and German in university and college. I've taken classes on Sanskrit, Proto-Indo-European and comparative romance linguistics. When I say "gently caress Chinese for being purposely obtuse and hard to learn", I say so because I am comparing it to literal dead languages that are easier to learn than a living, breathing clusterfuck spoken by 1.6 billion people. Probably. I'm not great at it or anything but I've never gotten what the big deal was.
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Oct 26, 2016 13:45
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Falun Bong Refugee posted:To a certain extent Chinese writing actually is intentionally obtuse and hard to learn. That's why they invented simplified Chinese. Nah traditional is where it's at.
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Oct 26, 2016 17:21
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Blistex's stories are reminding me why I left Korea. Man, that was a rough year. Taiwan was loving heaven compared to that place. The bureaucracy and infrastructure of Thailand are most certainly worse than either, but even though they view foreigners as money bags here, they at least aren't openly hostile to them the way Koreans are. I have never been hit in the face with a stool by a street vendor here, for instance, even if I deserved it. Thais have never approached my friends in a public park to tell us to gently caress off because the park was for Koreans only. And shock of all shocks, the only bars that would prohibit me from entering them in Thailand are for Koreans or Japanese only. Living in Dongducheon was the loving worst because everyone really wanted to believe I was a soldier since a ton of the infantry are stationed there and that's what I look like in my everyday clothes since I keep my hair as short as possible. Switching back to written Chinese, as far as writing something like biang goes, it isn't that tough if you know the radicals. It's not like you write pieces of each radical when you write it. You write a complete radical and then move on to the next one following the left-to-right-top-to-bottom pattern. What makes biang hard is that there are a bunch of radicals in it so you do have to know where each radical goes and in what order they need to be written. But that character is an outlier. Frankly, something like 龜 is much tougher because it doesn't really use radicals at all. That one is pure memorization. Everyone who complains about writing traditional probably was forced to just arbitrarily memorize the characters or learn them through repetition and muscle memory. Heisig has basically obsoleted those methods. I spent about three months with his two volumes on traditional Hanzi and I was effectively literate by the end of it. It helped that just walking around Taiwan means you see a million different characters all over the place to reinforce what you're studying. The major barrier was knowing when something was a compound or foreign word being represented phonetically. As far as comparing a phonetic script to Chinese, why would you do that? Chinese as a written language doesn't need any phonetic value. That was the whole loving point. It doesn't even really correspond with modern spoken Mandarin. Like you're never going to hear someone refer to a restaurant in conversation as 本店. You have to take the writing system for what it is, which is a method to represent each meaning individually so that speakers of diverse dialects can all understand the same document.
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Oct 27, 2016 06:18
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Passive aggressive assholes.
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Oct 27, 2016 08:17
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Imperialist Dog posted:Because written Chinese is not an ideographic system. It is a crippled phonetic system. The vast majority of Chinese characters consist of a phonetic component to aid the reader in pronunciation and a semantic component tied to the meaning. I am aware that written Chinese is made up of semi-phonetic ideograms. But the key word there is semi-phonetic. Many characters don't have any phonetic hint and since the writing system has been around for oh a few thousand years, pronunciation has drifted enough that the phonetic values are completely off the mark these days for a huge percentage of characters. Even with weird English vowel drifts and diphthongs, written English is still more or less phonetic. Edit: I mean, you're trying to evaluate written Chinese with the same tools you'd use to evaluate an alphabet or a syllabary and it's seriously apples to oranges. Chinese is definitely harder to learn than Hangul, but I had a much easier time learning to read and write Chinese than I've had with Thai. If you want a ridiculous nonsensical writing system, it's that. Atlas Hugged fucked around with this message at 12:29 on Oct 27, 2016 |
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Oct 27, 2016 12:24
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Blistex posted:loving LOL! Where in Dongducheon were you living? I was in Jihaeng, the station was just a 10 minute walk from where I lived. Dongducheon is a dangerous town to get a haircut. First time I went to a barber shop the lady took the clippers and started to give me a GI "High and Tight" before I could pull out the written instructions a Korean teacher had prepared for me. I think I was technically closer to Dongducheon Jungang than Jihaeng, but it was 6 of one half a dozen of the other. It just depended on where I was going. I worked way the gently caress up in Daegwang-ri, Yeoncheon County and so would take the subway up to Dongducheon station every morning and switch to the diesel train and ride that all the loving out there. It was awful. Miller Time was our go to watering hole, but after awhile we started making our way down to Cheers in Uijeongbu. There were also a couple of whiskey bars that I frequented because I'm a terrible alcoholic. Of course, only about half of them would let us in. Ah memories.
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Oct 27, 2016 14:36
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When I was living in small town Taiwan, there was only a single bar in the town and as a result I frequented it quite often. One night, I was there with a buddy when we noticed a large group of Koreans drinking by themselves in the corner. This was most unusual as there was no significant Korean population in the town. We figured they must have been there on business. So being that I had a few drinks in me, I sauntered over and in my best Korean told them, "Drink, and death!" which got a big cheer from all the men. They started pulling out phones and showing us photos of their kids and stuff while we drank for a bit. Then the old guy who had remained quiet up until then calmly told us that it was nice to meet us but we needed to back to our side of the bar. At that point, all of the young guys immediately stopped talking to us. For the rest of the night, the guys would go alone or in pairs to the bathroom and when they past by our spot at the bar, they'd quickly pop over, apologize, and chat with us about their kids studying in America or Canada. Eventually they all left and the bartender came up to me and said thank gently caress they were gone. He already didn't like Koreans, but apparently every time one of them went to the bathroom they tried to drag a waitress into a stall with them so he had told all the girls to hide in the back until they left. I should mention that this was a rowdy gangster bar for blue collar Taiwanese and I had personally seen it get a bit sketchy, so for him to send the girls to the back it had to have been seriously dangerous for them. But I think the bartender was more mad that it doubled his work. Anyway, that's my Koreans outside of Korea story!
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Oct 28, 2016 02:26
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Ironically, probably my favorite drinking buddy in Thailand is a random Korean guy I met.
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Oct 28, 2016 06:54
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Pon de Bundy posted:what are chinese weddings like? like is it expected to spend a huge amount of money to show how important you are? would a a wedding on the cheap be very face lose worthy?? i've been to some pretty sad American weddings, like they didn't even try sad. Well in good China they're all pomp and circumstance. In the morning the groom and his party are collected by the bride's family and brought to their home. There are a series of trials the groom and his groomsmen must pass in order to earn the hand of the bride. The trials are rigged and have "hilarious" consequences, like kissing the bride's brother. Then there are pictures. So many pictures. I think there is supposed to be a tea ceremony at some point where the bride travels to the groom's parents' home and serves them to demonstrate her domestics abilities, but we skipped that since my parents were staying in a lovely hotel. There are probably also religious bits but I declined to incorporate that into my wedding. Anyway, in the afternoon you host a banquet and a wedding hall and all of your friends and family attend as well as local politicians who want to get photos with the white guy. Everyone hands over a red envelope before being seated and then everyone but the bride and groom are served a traditional Chinese feast of bad sushi, bird's nest, pork knuckle, etc. My wife literally was given a 便當 to eat in the back room. Meanwhile there are more ceremonial bits like the father of the bride handing off his daughter, the bride and groom being introduced on stage and jointly pouring fake champagne down a tower of glasses that aren't served, and then they go from table to table toasting all the guests and thanking them for attending. The guests drink bad wine (at my wedding it was literally called Obama Vintage which drove my Trump supporting father nuts) and the groom is closely monitored to make sure his glass is filled with tea so as not to embarrass himself (this was literally a policy of the wedding hall). The bride also changes dresses like three times. Mine went with red, white, and blue because yeehaw. Afterwards, the bride and groom give cakes and cookies to each group of guests as they leave and take photos with each person who attended. Somehow her loanshark dodging uncles got trashed but since there was only a single bottle of wine at each table we have no idea how. We suspect flasks of baijiu were involved. My dad at least brought a handle of Jack, but it was shared by like a dozen waiguoren so it didn't last long. My wife's mother runs a shop and actually stocked up on six boxes of beer, like the kind that hold 12 large bottles, but the staff of the wedding hall forgot to bring them out and I was too busy to think about it. We ended up drinking then while waiting for rides back into town. Then we all went on a pub crawl in her tiny rear end town which consisted of her mom's shop, the new bar where the old bar used to be, and the place the old bar moved to. We got trashed and sang Bohemian Rhapsody despite there being no karaoke or music, as is the way of our people.
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Nov 15, 2016 18:19
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fish and chips and dip posted:Boring as gently caress. You just sit and eat and smoke, I've been to around 10 at this point, and none had any games, music or fun, just sitting and eating, drinking and smoking. Cheap wedding is indeed a massive loss of face which was hilarious when my wife and I told her parents we wanted a cheap wedding lol. The games portion of the festivities was exclusively for the bride's family and the wedding party, which sucked because I totally would have pulled in ringers for the different games. It was pretty embarrassing for me when they made my English friend who lives in Bangkok try to read a Chinese tongue-twister. And of course it never crossed anyone's mind to write the words out in Pinyin so that the dumb foreigner could at least attempt to sound it out because of course in good China Pinyin isn't a thing.
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Nov 16, 2016 03:50
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Super Christian and covers things in sticky-notes?
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Nov 16, 2016 05:15
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Pirate Radar posted:My bigger complaint here is actually that there isn't enough Zhuyin, it's not really worth my time to learn it since I'm not five but it would make my life so much easier if it were more common I saw a couple of shops that realized the marketing potential of this, like advertising a drink menu specifically for kids, but yeah you barely see it at all outside of the random characters they use for phonetic sounds or to write specific Taiwanese things.
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Nov 16, 2016 11:22
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Having worked in the English teaching industry for awhile and being behind the scenes I can say that it is 100% a charade with a few accidental successes. Like I worked at a kindergarten for a few years and we had kids there for 8 hours a day every day and even if the teachers had no idea what they were doing, just being in that environment means the kids are hearing English used for the majority of their waking day and will come out of it speaking English. But the more common thing is that schools get a foreign teacher and they see each group of students for 50 minutes a week. You're not learning English from that, especially when the teacher has literally no training in teaching and is just stuck in a classroom without any experience and often times without even a textbook. The biggest joke has to be Thailand though. The big thing there is "English Programs" where the students are taking all of their subjects in English. On paper this isn't a terrible idea since it's an attempt at actual immersion in the language, but as was mentioned the compensation is miserable so you get completely unqualified people trying to teach math and science. I've seen literal high school dropouts teaching advanced physics with really no understanding of the material themselves. You combine this with generally underfunded programs and a lack of materials and it means you have a guy who really likes Steam sales trying to teach computer classes using handmade flashcards and a promise that they'll get some actual machines in a year or two. As far as Filipino teachers go, Thai schools are mostly OK with it, but begrudgingly so. Our contracts would usually stipulate a ratio of native speakers to Filipinos, who had higher requirements and less pay. We'd get around that by giving the school the official Filipino teachers then fill the rest of the positions with "temporary" Filipinos while we were "interviewing" native speakers to start at a later date. Of course we then never removed the temporary teachers and the school just pretended like they wanted them the whole time. But I get a good laugh out of the people in this thread who are talking about qualified Filipinos being passed over because of racism because while that's true the "qualified" part is also a big loving joke. Even though they had teaching degrees and degrees in the subjects they were teaching, they were all still miserable teachers who just stood at the front of the room and lectured without any thought to actual activities or engagement. At least all the edutourists who think they're making a difference in the world by dancing in front of classroom for 25 hours a week were after that "Oh Captain, My Captain" moment and would even sometimes incorporate feedback into their lessons. With the Filipinos it was just a lot of, "Sir, yes, sir," and then going right back to standing in front of the classroom and drilling vocabulary. The other thing with Filipino English is that it's not the same as American English or British English. We get into some grey area with what constitutes a native speaker, but a Filipino accent is markedly different and some of their word choice and syntax is different. Plus a lot of them aren't actually native English speakers and their grammar and spelling is terrible. I spent hours and hours correcting tests written by my Filipino teachers and editing their comments on student reports. Our lovely edutourist teachers weren't necessarily better in that regard either, but at least they could get the pronouns correct.
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Nov 20, 2016 06:59
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Blistex posted:Korean productivity is 100% the fault of the environment in Korean businesses. I imagine their factories are pretty efficient, but whenever there is admin work they fall behind big time compared to western workers. An example was when I was working at the Korean provincial high school and the head Korean teacher was flabbergasted that I had completed the entire semester's work (lessons, handouts, exam, assignments) before the midpoint of the semester. I would create templates and re-use them with different lessons and materials, having most things fall into a simple form-factor instead of doing it the korean way where every day needed to be stated from scratch, which included creating a band new template despite the lesson being 99% similar to a previous one. They would also try and jam 5 different things into a lesson instead of doing one or two things for a longer time then when they are finished, moving on. It's sort of like every class was an episode of Game of Thrones where 20 things were happening every day, but they would continue for the whole year. So a student would do 5 minutes of one activity every class for the whole year instead of getting that activity out of the way in a week, then moving on. Also everyone is hungover and operating on about 3 hours of sleep.
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Nov 20, 2016 16:19
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Barudak posted:The Beijing accent is a crime against language. It took me forever to figure out why people hated how Chinese sounded so much and it finally clicked when I started encountering large groups of 強國人 in Bangkok. The Taiwanese accent is quite nice and for me very easy to listen to and understand, but then those northerners start ar-aring and I can't follow a goddamn thing.
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Nov 22, 2016 16:26
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Grand Fromage posted:The extraneous post-vowel R sounds when speaking English seems to be universal, I haven't met a native Mandarin speaker who doesn't do that (except a couple who have learned perfect American accents). It's different than the hard constant arrs from up north. I think in Taiwan the only one that ever really stood out to me was how they said "breakfarst" instead of breakfast. Other than that their issues with English pronunciation were on differentiating "oo" like in food and good and on the "th" and "v" sounds. The Taiwanese-Mandarin accent is quite different and lacks most retroflexing so that's probably why they don't force R's into English.
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Nov 22, 2016 16:31
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Grand Fromage posted:Mandarin to me is sshhhrrrr sshhrrrr shsssshhshhrrr sh shrrr shshshshshshr shr shrr *long loogie hawk, spit* In Taiwan it's si si si si si si *blank stare* *offers bubble tea*
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Nov 22, 2016 16:33
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Grand Fromage posted:ooh-duh. Oh this is huge in Taiwan and was always frustrating because Taiwanese Mandarin has an initial w for every vowel accept their "u' sound. So 五 sounds like "oo" instead of "woo" and then they carry that over to wood and would.
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Nov 22, 2016 16:37
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beep-beep car is go posted:Th is an English only thing? I think it comes out of Scandinavian languages since modern Icelandic still uses a letter for it that old English dropped with the advent of the printing press.
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Nov 22, 2016 17:12
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Sheep-Goats posted:Latin doesn't have it (as evidenced by our alphabet not having a letter for it). This is actually where the y in Ye Olde English comes from. It was one of the shorthand ways of representing the th sound and modern readers totally misinterpreted it and thought people used to say those words with a y. But like I said, English did used to incorporate the thorn character (Þ, þ) but it was dropped with the printing press which lacked that letter and hence y was introduced as one of the abbreviations for it.
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Nov 22, 2016 17:40
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His 繁體 books a fantastic too.
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Nov 22, 2016 19:17
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Yeah that seems like every other job posting I've seen for an English teaching position. Hours per week then monthly salary.
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Nov 23, 2016 08:08
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If you are going to live in or spend a long time in Taiwan, learning 國語 is a good idea.
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Nov 25, 2016 14:42
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Pirate Radar posted:It's a little harder to truly speak none of it than, say, Bangkok, but you don't even need much here if you're in the city like I am. That said, I look enough like a student that people tend to assume I can speak way more than I do. Perhaps a student of... Hogwarts?
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Nov 25, 2016 15:12
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Haier posted:I don't understand why they wouldn't want them to leave China. They already don't want them there. Why are they preventing them from going somewhere else? I think the idea is they cross the border, get bomb making material and cross back. This allows them to know every Muslim who wants to travel abroad before they do.
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Nov 25, 2016 15:20
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Alzabo posted:Fun Fact: this movie was shot on land that was used for nuke tests. A lot of the crew and cast got cancer. Including the Duke himself.
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Nov 26, 2016 11:07
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My Chinese Malay friend just asked me for my opinions on smoking cigarettes and then got mad because I didn't say it was good and healthy but rather that it was bad and addictive. He then swore he could quit whenever he wanted because he could stop smoking for sometimes a whole week. Sometimes.
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Nov 27, 2016 06:40
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nomad2020 posted:~3.5b+ years of Earth culture Most of it rocks.
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Nov 28, 2016 05:22
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Thanks to Japanese Brazilians we got Lyoto Machida and he once kicked Tito Ortiz in the liver. Bless that adorable man. Anything is pasta bowl!
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Nov 29, 2016 03:11
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THE PWNER posted:I just broke up with my Chinese ex 2 weeks ago and now only Chinese girls (students here, not the ones in China) are interested in me. 3 in the last 2 weeks. It's my calling. At least go to Good China, aka the 51st state.
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Nov 29, 2016 15:30
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This is well worth watching. I also highly recommend "My Thai Bride" as a companion piece.
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Nov 29, 2016 15:50
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Sheep-Goats posted:Canada? Taiwan.
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Nov 29, 2016 19:21
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simplefish posted:This is Good China (Hong Kong), not Bad China or Best China Wait is Taiwan best China now?
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Nov 30, 2016 03:54
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Pirate Radar posted:Thai TV sucks now but I keep betting that sometime in the future there's going to be some amazing Thai shows about Thai history. You just can't make them now because of lese majeste laws. I'm not so sure of this. People still freak out in the US whenever someone tries to portray Reagan as out of his mind and he doesn't hold nearly the place in American culture as Elvis does in Thailand. Though seemingly contradictory, censorship laws are often a boon in art because it forces creators to come at stories and themes from angles they wouldn't approach if they could be direct. Subtext is always more interesting than being literal.
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Nov 30, 2016 12:32
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Gargamel Gibson posted:A proper sex scene is way better than a train going into a tunnel. I see someone hasn't seen Eraserhead.
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Nov 30, 2016 13:17
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 18:59 |
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My wife's family plays a game where the loser of the round gets their face written on by another player. I'm not sure how widespread it is but it could just be that.
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Dec 2, 2016 07:24
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