I was at lunch yesterday after church with several people from the worship team; Larissa, the worship leader and an English teacher at a cram school (I’m the only one of the group not currently teaching), related her teaching highlight of the week:
Whenever the kids would finish whatever activity they were working on, they would promptly proclaim: “Teacher, I finish(ed)!” Pretty close, except that Chinese people have horrible trouble with closed consonant sounds, so their pronunciation of “finish” often comes out all wrong*. Larissa, tired of hearing the word “finish” constantly being butchered, finally instructed them to say “done” instead (true, it’s grammatically incorrect, but oh so much easier to pronounce..). The end of the next activity earned Larissa a chorus of “Teacher, I dumb”. Not exactly what she had intended since she’s not there to teach the kids how to unknowingly denigrate themselves, so she promptly corrected them. Sadly, their mispronunciation of “done” at the end of the next activity was no better than their first. Decidedly worse, in fact. “Teacher, I dung!”
Larissa didn’t say if she had the students go back to saying “finish”..
__________
(*) Closed consonant sounds like the letters “F” or “L” (eff, ell) generally end up being pronounced “effoo” and “elloh” by Chinese people. Chinese consonant sounds almost all end on an open vowel sound (bu, pu, mu, fu…), so the Chinese mispronunciation of the “sh” sound often comes out as something close to “shee” (German shü) — “finish” ends up sounding like “fee-nee-shü”. Making it past tense (finished) just leaves you with “fee-nee-shü-d(uh)”.
Kindergarten playground politics, all grown up. Here’s what happens when poorly raised children grow up to become bratty adults with no self-control or anger-management skills.
I initially saw the May 08, 2007 article back in, well.. May, and was a bit surprised at the immature behavior exhibited in such a public forum. I’ve since done some more digging and found that this is not outrageous, as it ought to be - it’s merely par for the course here. I should have guessed as much, based on classroom, traffic and other unacceptable behavior I’ve observed and been subjected to. It’s just another case of undisciplined, selfish children hiding in adult bodies.
Grab a bag of chips or popcorn and prepare to be entertained and astounded by the antics of (in these articles, anyway) Asian lawmakers. This is the kind of stuff that movies are made of, where we then ridicule it as being far-fetched and unrealistic.. Only these incidents really took place - the BBC says they’re so!
The .asia regional internet domain has officially opened for business. This should be interesting.. Especially intriguing and massively significant (and curiously mentioned only as a minor side-note in the article) is the separate initiative being tested by ICANN to allow for domain names in non-latin scripts/character sets, ie, domain names written directly in Arabic, Chinese, Thai, Khmer, etc. script rather than some phonetically romanized version of those. This change will make the internet infinitely more accessible to the masses who don’t speak/read/write English.
It will be very interesting to see what effects this addition of native language support, once complete, will have on the following and other areas:
IT and networking infrastructure — For example, the practical problem of an American or German network administrator troubleshooting a connectivity or DNS problem to a Taiwanese website with a URL like http://愉快的馬農場.中華民國 or a Korean website with a URL like http://행복한 말 농장.한국).
Business — This will potentially & likely lead to massive internet connectivity adoption rates among previously unreached people groups — lower-class and/or less educated people who only know a local language, but already have the connectivity infrastructure available to them. This could well turn out to be the shot-in-the-arm that the IT and Networking industries have been needing to help them revive from the slowing economy and the dot-com bust, which, although a relatively long time ago, left the industries badly shaken.
Politics — Control of the internet in many ways is currently still effectively in the hands of the US government, as it is after all basically a US DoD (DARPA; at the time known as ARPA) invention; the ARPANET was the direct predecessor to the internet. This change will vastly complicate that level of control.
Kindergarten playground politics, all grown up. Here’s what happens when poorly raised children grow up to become bratty adults with no self-control or anger-management skills.
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