Thank You For Taking Us Back
Woo-hoo, woo-hoo! July 1st, the day of Hong Kong’s rebirth! I think it’s so kind of the mainland to accept us back in the fold after all the horrible things we have said and done →
Thank You, Norwegian Writer
Today I want to publicly thank a Norwegian writer named Are Kalvø who in the year 2007 had a brilliant idea which inspired me no end. He would travel all around Norway and eat in →
Walk Some Steps For The Cause
WEI! Everybody everywhere! I’m off to the motherland for a long but not long enough weekend, to make programmes about … oh, I can’t talk about it. OK, Mandarin. Anyway, when I get back next →
World Domination in Our Time
Why this photo? Found it and liked it again, innit. Anyway, the other day one of my students suggested that I set up some kind of counting device; you know, something like the count-down to →
Ten More of Us, Ten Fewer of Them
Last Saturday I started a new thing: Learn everything about Chinese characters in two hours. Ten people turned up, and when they staggered out of the venerable Honolulu Coffee Shop two hours and fifteen minutes →
Character-building
Hi people. Sorry about the delay. Delay no more! Yesterday the following delightful email clattered down into my inbox: Hi Cecilie, I'd like to start learning to learn Chinese characters. What I need is a →
Learn Chinese Characters Without Really Trying
This is ah-Fa, one of my long-term Cantonese students. You see that piece of paper she’s reading? I wrote that the same morning and emailed it to her. Out of all those Chinese characters, there →
Dumbing Down of Chinese Culture
When the communists, soon after they came to power in 1949, introduced simplified Chinese characters, it was ostensibly to reduce illiteracy on the mainland. However, their real objective was to enable peasants and other illiterates →