User Comments - auntie68
auntie68
Posted on: London
March 2, 2008 at 6:56 AMOh my. Thank you, changye. Wow.
Posted on: London
March 2, 2008 at 6:23 AM伦敦我最喜欢的景点是大本钟？ Help! rich, we need you again! Btw, I am still a bit confused about how to say "Britain/ British" in Chinese. The FCO's own website for its embassy in Beijing uses 英国. So does that mean that "England/English" would be 英格兰／英格兰人？That does make sense if you apply the logic of: 苏格兰 (Scotland) and "爱尔兰" (Ireland). I distinctly remember organizing conferences where the FCO asked us to use "United Kingdom" as the country name. Wonder what that is in Chinese...
Posted on: 河莉秀
March 2, 2008 at 2:05 AMtvan, thanks. And as luck would have it, only a few minutes ago I accidentally stumbled into an old "Advanced" lesson -- 坐月子 -- where the expression 哪门子 is explained clearly. That 哪门子 was what had me stumped... Only caught that lesson because our CPOD Hero, xiaohu, and mizzzee had activated this old lesson. I wonder how many CPOD heroes it takes to change a lightbulb...
Posted on: 河莉秀
March 1, 2008 at 4:40 PMheh heh, tvan, "that" business was already winding down by the time I was born (in 1968)... my (late) father was able to concentrate on his first love -- i.e., "teaching English literature". In fact, I still have my late father's personal teaching notes carefully preserved from those years. To this day, if I can say that I love my "Faerie Queene" and my Shakespeare and my Chaucer, it's thanks to his handwritten "teaching notes" hand-written in the margins of his teaching texts, which are all still with me. As an old Auntie who turns 40 (gasp!) tomorrow, it's still a bit of a pleasant shock to read the hand-written "teaching notes" that my father made when he was only 24 years old. The notes were so wise and fresh... only yesterday, I received a gift from a former student of his, who still remembered him thirty years later.. sorry to sound so sentimental, but turning 40 is a big thing for me!
Posted on: 河莉秀
March 1, 2008 at 3:10 PMHaving said that, tvan, if you had visited Singapore in any year from the 1930s through to the 1960s, you would almost certainly have been brought to the cabaret that was owned by my father's family -- "New World Cabaret". Hope that puts the "all-girls school"-thing properly in perspective... I like the sound of "live and let live" as my personal motto.
Posted on: 河莉秀
March 1, 2008 at 3:01 PMYes, tvan, I agree with you. I did appreciate wennytao's civil tone very much. To put things in perspective, in 1981 I was in my first year of secondary school, in an "all-girls" school, and still being driven to- and from- school each school day by my grandmother's personal "syce". My vigilant Amah -- or even the grandmother herself -- were usually in the car. So there's no way I could have had any direct (or even theoretical) knowledge of the kind of sights you saw in Singapore!
Posted on: 河莉秀
March 1, 2008 at 7:27 AMIn the words of one of the most senior relatives (his aged grandmother), nobody could say for sure that it wasn't my cousin's true destiny to be a man. From that point of view, the complex, gruelling surgery could be seen as a heroic effort to complete his destiny, obeying "Fate" rather than fighting against it...
Posted on: 河莉秀
March 1, 2008 at 7:15 AMjohn, I just wanted to say that I support you and the team fully on this. CPOD lessons do a brilliant and very professional job giving us students the language tools to form our own (reasonably well-informed) views on all kinds of current topics. Including controversial ones. They are absolutely scrupulous and professional about not allowing their personal views to muddy the pedagogical content of the podcasts. When my family was coming to terms with my cousin's FtM gender reassignment surgery, I was struck by how supportive the older folk were, especially the Taoists. The general attitude was that my cousin's recognized medical condition -- GID -- was somehow "fated", but it was also morally acceptable, even "pleasing before Heaven", for my cousin to persevere along a very difficult and painful path in order to try and overcome the very real handicaps arising from his "fate". I was pleased to detect some of these attitudes in the podcast. As a Roman Catholic, this resonated with me. In any case, I try to avoid condemning or judging others.
Posted on: Yang Jie's Fury
March 1, 2008 at 5:18 AMSorry, the characters for du4 ji4 are 妒忌... my typing is terrible!
Posted on: London
March 2, 2008 at 8:52 AMHmm. Interesting. changye, I'll never get a handle on these different names. And I hear that the national dish of the Land of Albion is now chicken tikka curry. Thanks!