Asia | Dominik Mayer – Products, Asia, Productivity

And it was the first time that I’ve had enough Chinese food and couldn’t have eaten more.

Why don’t I learn Lojban. Seems to be so much easier than Chinese.

When I wrote about my inability to communicate with some classmates Karl commented:

did you speak chinese..? ;)

Today I did. And it worked. We had kind of the same vocabulary. Mine was a bit smaller as I’m still trying to catch up. At least we could have the simplest form of a conversation. Wow.

I needed cheap shoes to wear with a suit very fast. The shop was on my way home. I’ve never bought shoes that quickly, didn’t even try to bargain. Maybe that’s why he called me “pengyou”, friend, when I left. I didn’t understand much of the other things he said.

More Chinese Arabic food. As hard to eat as the one before. They said it was without meat. Following the Chinese definition of vegetarian food: You don’t see the meat at first glance, you find it when you’ve eaten half the food. That was the time I stopped.

In the meantime they were doing something with a large piece of meat that was lying on top of a cardboard on the ground.

Yesterday I bought noodles at the noodle man’s. But the noodle man himself wasn’t there so another one cooked them. When I put the empty box in my trash bin it started to smell very bad. Like animal oil. It didn’t help to open the window, I had to get rid of the thing. No more noodle man for now.

A Chinese friend asked how many female teachers we have (three out of four), said we’d sound like women rather then men when we speak Chinese. Alarming.

David Moser wrote a very interesting article named Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard. Here’s the outline:

1. Because the writing system is ridiculous.
2. Because the language doesn’t have the common sense to use an alphabet.
3. Because the writing system just ain’t very phonetic.
4. Because you can’t cheat by using cognates.
5. Because even looking up a word in the dictionary is complicated.
6. Then there’s classical Chinese (wenyanwen).
7. Because there are too many romanization methods and they all suck.
8. Because tonal languages are weird.
9. Because east is east and west is west, and the twain have only recently met.

I couldn’t agree more.

This time she came and turned the wheel to the medium program, not the shortest one. Wow. Perhaps it was due to the larger amount of laundry. In the end the things didn’t feel much cleaner than last week but still better than after the first time I had used the machine.