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Learning from Lei Feng

This week in 1963, Mao Zedong launched an initiative to increase neighborly actions called the "Learn from Lei Feng Campaign", writes Stefan Landsberger in a blog titled 45 years of Lei Feng (www.granitestudio.org). He tells us about Lei, a young soldier in the People's Liberation Army whose selfless actions toward those around him and his country earned him the title of "role model". After meeting an untimely death when a telephone pole fell on him, Lei Feng's image continued to evolve and remains a rallying point for selflessness to this day.

"Let us all learn from Lei Feng" Landsberger writes "Help your fellow citizens, assist the elderly whenever possible, and for goodness sake, watch out for large falling objects."

Myths of learning Chinese

Blogger and veteran Chinese-language student Matt, at www.lostlaowai.com busts some common myths he believed when he first started out learning the language, in his blog titled Fallacies in Learning Chinese.

Myth 1: You don't need to learn how to read and write Chinese, just how to speak it.

Matt: "What you don't know when you begin studying is how the oral and written languages intersect, and how a basic understanding of Chinese characters enables you to remember words far easier than if you relied solely on memory or pinyin."

Myth 2: Tones are not important as long as you learn to use the right words in the right context.

Matt: "Rather than trying to devise complicated methods of avoiding tones, learning them is actually much easier than you think, and after a while saying a word with the correct tones becomes second nature."

Myth 3: You only need to learn how to read X number of characters before being able to read the newspaper.

Matt: "The Chinese language is pretty logical, but learning characters in isolation won't do the trick. So while you might be looking forward to boasting about how many characters you know (as if you could ever be sure in the first place), forget about it. It's the words that matter, not the characters."

Translation lost in spelling

There are times when reading the English translations on Chinese menus make expats scratch their heads in confusion. Lee of www.leeinchina.com writes about his puzzlement after stumbling across a menu item called "aceteric cucumber".

Having no luck finding the word aceteric in the Oxford English Dictionary, or by typing it into a search engine, the blogger was bemused.

Finally, one visitor to the site shed some light on the situation, offering the suggestion that the menu actually meant "acetic acid", which is a more scientific term for vinegar, teaching readers the lesson that sometimes you have to interpret what the menu says very loosely.

(China Daily 03/07/2008 page19)