China Favorites
-adventure
-hanging out with Chinese friends
-riding my bike around the city
-local food
- still being a student
(Here's my Panda! Fully equipped: the basket, the bell, the blue)Language Favorites
- no verb tenses
-no difference between singular and plural nouns
-pronouns are the same whether before or after the verb (there’s no difference between the word for “I” and the word for “me”)
-sometimes you don’t need the verb “to be”…you can just say the sentence without it, and it’s perfect grammar
-feeling successful in speaking Mandarin
Things I miss most
-Family and friends
-The smell of the fall season
-CoffeeHouse in Lincoln
-Barbecue and Mexican food
-Warm feet
Things I’m thankful for
-Good friends here
-Skype
-Books
-Adventure
-Patient people in communication
Least Favorites
-honking
-very sensitive car/motorcycle alarms
-riding the bus when it's packed
-being illiterate
-trying to find ingredients for western food
Thinking about literacy motivated me to learn more about it here in China. According to good old wikipedia, literacy is defined as recognizing 2,000 characters for workers (1,500 for farmers), but an educated person can read, on average, 6-7,000 characters. Chinese speakers use the left and right side of the brain, according to some U.K. research by Wellcome Trust, while English speakers only use the left side of their brain. The World Factbook states that in 2000, the literacy rate was 90.9% overall, which I think is fairly impressive, after my limited experience studying them! While I'm definitely still illiterate here, it is exciting when I recognize a couple characters here and there when I'm out and about.
some characters etched in stone