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Interview to Marta, who is 16 years old and is studying in a Chinese high-school

December 10, 2012 by 8 Comments

High-school in ChinaAt the Chinese Great Wall (Marta is on the right side, in the foreground).

Anatomy of an interview

At the end of November I received the following email:

Hey,

I’m Marta, I’m almost seventeen and this year I live in Nanjing, I study in a Chinese high-school, I have a Chinese mom and sister (I mean, they host me at their house), I live the life and follow the rules of a traditional Chinese adolescent.

When I arrived here I thought that I knew everything about China. But after only a week I understood how wrong I was.

So I began to read a lot, till I also found your blog. Now I’m trying to open myself to all these new experiences and forget what I knew about China from Italy.

My answer was quite predictable: [Read more...]

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Chinese Courses: a short review of the most popular learning tools

November 22, 2012 by 20 Comments

Want to know the best method to learn how to write Chinese characters? Click Here!

A couple of months ago I wrote a post called 27 excellent free resources to learn Chinese online. Nowadays there is no shortage of free resources for learning a language: websites, apps, forums, videos, podcasts, you name it.

However there are still people that are looking for a more professional Mandarin course, the kind of course you generally have to pay for. Personally, during the past ten months I bought three of them. Why?

There are two main reasons for that:

  • Often you must pay if you want the best resources. Think of Chinesepod or Skritter. Who would take the time to develop such a wonderful learning tools for free?
  • The ultimate goal is to learn the language. And achieving this objective requires a long-time commitment. Personally I’m more likely to stick to my goals when I’m paying some money for it. No matter if it’s a good gym, a reliable server for my website or a language course.

The problem is that there are so many different Chinese courses and find the right one may be painful.

Given my experience with foreign languages – Mandarin is my sixth language – I thought I could help these people by listing the main Chinese courses in the market and highlight the difference among them. [Read more...]

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How to get poisoned and die of asphyxia in Xinjiang

October 18, 2012 by 10 Comments

Hemu, Altai MountainsThe eggs and tomatoes we ate in Kashgar, Xinjiang.

“I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night,” Galileo Galilei.

I wake up, jump from the bed and try to open the door of the hotel room. But it’s blocked. I panic and destroy the lock of the door with an elegant kick. I run to the small bathroom at the end of the courtyard, open the door and…

…diarrhea.

I watch the sky. The sunrise cannot be too far.

But let’s start from the beginning. [Read more...]

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How to survive to the crazy Vietnamese traffic (plenty of photos and videos)

September 24, 2012 by 4 Comments

While we get on the night bus that will bring us to Hué I look at Jelen and tell her:

“I’m happy we are leaving Hanoi. I was craving a bit of peace.”

It wasn’t because of the insistence of the street vendors or the screams of the pseudo-backpackers that cross the world to get drunk in an hostel 24/7.

It was the traffic that exhausted me.

I had heard some horror stories about the traffic in Vietnam but I wasn’t prepared for it. I mean, I’ve spent the last two years and an half between Beijing and Shanghai.

What the hell could possibly affect me? [Read more...]

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Go to the doctor in China

July 25, 2012 by 15 Comments

doctor in china

Introducing the creatures that populate my feet

It must be the humidity.

Or maybe the fact that I never bring flip flops with me when I travel. It’s not my fault, my zoom takes all the space available on my bag!

The point is that I got a fungus that is slowly (well, not that slowly) eating my feet. When after two weeks of itch I told it to Feng, she laughs at me:

“Haha come on, it’s summer. Everybody in China has the same problem, stop to complain!”

What a sweet girl I got. [Read more...]

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You know you are in China when…

May 19, 2012 by 6 Comments

You know you are in China when...wash your hair

While I explore the maze that represented by my external hard disk to find some photos for this post, I smile thinking about the different reactions that such a article will generate on the different people that populate the Middle Kingdom.

I bet the white devils perpetually pissed off, the ones that always claim [Read more...]

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How to learn Chinese fast: my (lazy) way

February 27, 2012 by 34 Comments

Learn Chinese fast

Want to know the best way to learn how to write Chinese characters? Click Here!

This article introduces my plan to learn Chinese fast, where “fast” doesn’t mean that I hope to learn how to speak Mandarin within two months. Conversely, I intend to optimizing my time and efforts to learn Chinese by only studying an hour per day.

My goal is to be able to read Chinese newspapers, understand a talk show and have a “normal speed” conversation with any Chinese person. I want to achieve this purpose within one year.

Chinese is the sixth language that I’m learning so this plan is based on my past experience.

Also, I’m a big fan of SRS (spaced repetition software). If you are just starting to study Mandarin or you never heard the word “SRS” before, you should definitely keep reading : – )

My plan to learn Chinese

Commitment

I’m a lazy pig. However when I pay for a gym I can easily motivate myself to train three times per week. So I thought that I could use the same strategy and I bought a Chinese course (Rocket Chinese).

This is also what Napoleon Hill suggests on his book Think and Grow Rich, which is probably the best book that I ever read on goal achievement.

The idea is that we will only pursue our goals if we have invested some resources on them (time, money, face and so on). For the same reason, I also decided to make a public commitment and monthly update my progresses on this website. [Read more...]

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Five reasons to love China

February 9, 2012 by 4 Comments

chinese marketChinese Merchants.

The markets

“kuai kuai kaui!” is the mantra you hear along the streets of Beijing, where there is not a market: Beijing is a market.

Luxury market at Xidan Square, Wang Fu Jing or the Village in San Li Tun; antique market at Liu Li Chang; fake market at the Ya Shou or at the Silk Market in Guo Mao; farmers’ market through the secondary streets full of villagers that come at night riding their horses and run away every time the police arrives; sex market inside the red light massages parlors. [Read more...]

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Five reasons to hate China

February 5, 2012 by 8 Comments

>hate chinaHow to pee on the street…

The daily savageries

Where do I start from?

The Beijiners that every summer wander with the t-shirt rolled-up on the stomach to get some fresh air; the Qingdao people puking in Pijiu Jie (Beer Street); the hygiene (?!) of the restaurants kitchens among the draining of dirty waters, garbage of epic dimension and fishes beheaded on the wet floor; the loud spits, so popular all over the Middle Kingdom; the parents that push the little children to pee on the sidewalks; the free burps at office or the followers of Schwarzenegger that arrive at the gym without t-shirt and let a ring of sweat on each bench?

The traffic

In Beijing even the taxi drivers get lost. Then they scream: [Read more...]

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Prostitution in China

January 25, 2012 by 3 Comments

In Shanghai there are so many prostitutes that I got curious and I did some researches about prostitution in China. One of best source of information on the topics is Red Lights: The Lives of Sex Workers in Postsocialist China.

According to the local police, in China there are seven categories of prostitutes (see N. Dougherty’s master thesis for details): [Read more...]

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