I'm intrigued by language, especially one as different as Chinese. When you speak in Chinese do you still think in English and translate?

Are you going to release SOOTB in Chinese as well, and if you did would the story work as well?

Good luck with the thesis and the mosquitoes - legs are miserable, but better than everywhere, and certainly better than there!

Camy

Hi David

I'm intrigued by language, especially one as different as Chinese. When you speak in Chinese do you still think in English and translate?

 

Are you going to release SOOTB in Chinese as well, and if you did would the story work as well?

I wouldn't mind answers to those questions myself.

So have you considered wearing long pants? and maybe a little thicker if you already are. Lots of people are attracted to legs, I guess it's not unreasonable to think that mosquitoes might be too.

WOW that is so awesome about you getting your own discussion forum! Yay! I'll have a new place to run my mouth.

Good luck on the exam!

Take care and have a great day

Kevin

I'm intrigued by language, especially one as different as Chinese. When you speak in Chinese do you still think in English and translate?

When first starting out, you usually go through the "hear-think-translate" phase, but after studying Chinese now for about eight years, and almost six of those years spent in China and Taiwan, I think in Chinese when I'm communicating in Chinese, and English when I'm communicating in English. When I speak Japanese, I still have to think about it and translate in my head, as well as with my rudimentary French. I find that I now dream more often in Chinese than I do in English, even when I'm dreaming about people who can't speak a lick of Chinese.

What's fun, though, is when I go to holiday parties at a friend's house. He's also an American (like me), and is a professor of Chinese history at a university here (brilliant guy, Ph.D. in Asian studies from Harvard). He and I are usually the only two foreigners there, with the rest being Taiwanese ... so, to be fair to everyone else when we're conversing in a group, we speak to each other in Chinese ... now *that* is really weird for me ... speaking to another native English speaker in Chinese. Even when we're alone, and talking about Sinology, we speak half & half, since so many concepts and vocabulary are in Chinese, and it's just easier. If we're just talking about some cute guy we saw, of course it'll be in English! lol

I also get chewed up by mosquitos. I think, LB, that they like our blood because we are so sweet. I could be wrong on this though, at least as far as I am concerned.

Mosquito bites me

Mosquito dies

I rarely get bit.

Mosquito bites me

 

Mosquito dies

 

I rarely get bit.

 

 

So you're suggesting that the entire mosquito universe is aware that you're a bad ass? I'm envisioning the mosquitos flying around and they look down, one goes into Spitfire diving mode, and the other says "no, don't, that's dkstories!" at which point they both shriek (like mosquitos do) and fly off to sting LB and I.

I don't plan on working in a Chinese restaurant!

Around here, there are enough people in Chinese restaurants who speak Chinese. What they need are people who speak Spanish. It seems like at lunch time most of the folks you see in Chinese restaurants in this area are Mexicans. A place near where I used to live had a lot of Mexican working men come for lunch. One of the Chinese women would speak very fluent Spanish to them.

Mosquitos prefer to stay close to the ground. It may be an evolutionary thing in that the mosquitos that flew higher were more likely to get eaten by bats or something.