User Comments - bodawei

Posted on: Kinds of Nuts

Okay, I have Googled it in Chinese and it comes up in this order on Baidu:

昆士兰栗、(Queensland Nut)

澳洲胡桃、(Australian 'walnut')

夏威夷果 (Hawaii fruit)

The nut was originally called (in English) a Queensland Nut and subsequently, sometime in the last say two or three decades from my experience in Australia, became known as the macadamia.

Posted on: Kinds of Nuts

There are too many to name. :)

I can't believe that Chinese people call them 夏威夷果 - I will have to make enquiries. I think that this might be a Shanghai special.

Posted on: Kinds of Nuts

The data does not seem to explore the damage done by the drunk person (comparing drivers to pedestrians) but I imagine that third parties involved in fatalities would suffer similarly, at least psychologically, whether they ran into a drunk pedestrian, or ran into a car driven by a drunk driver.

Posted on: Kinds of Nuts

I'm just wondering how many people die from cancer caused by Aflatoxin versus smoking. Those SuperFreakonomics guys have analysed the data about a lot of scary things that we have no reason to be afraid of (if we take the usual precautions.) Eg. sharks - scary things. Annual death toll, world wide: 4. Drink driving (very scary). In the US you have a higher chance of dying if you walk drunk than if you drive drunk.

Posted on: Kinds of Nuts

好吃啊！ 我更喜欢油煎花生以后吃饭。 我的花生来自河南郑州。

Posted on: Kinds of Nuts

People in China are more likely to get liver cancer from smoking and/or Hepatitis. Actually to avoid liver cancer it helps to be young and female. (I better stop reading Wikipaedia.) Actually the toxin infects almost every food known to mankind. I may not sleep well tonight, because I like peanuts.

Posted on: Hungry Traveler: Shanghai

Yeh, being short on vocabulary the people use very colourful (too borrow a Chinese expression) metaphors. Look, unfortunately I can't speak it (I even made a mistake with 'meri blong mi' - it is meri bilong mi.) I made more of an effort with the trade language Motu but never really got beyond Elementary. My pronunciation is very good though. :)

I don't know whether you have heard spoken Tok Pisin (by a native speaker I mean) - let's say it is much easier to read (because so many nouns come from English) than it is to understand.

Interestingly, like Chinese there is a lot of ambiguity because of homonyms - context is hugely important in Tok Pisin. That and the native inflexions make it quite incomprehensible despite the cute metaphors.

Posted on: Kinds of Nuts

夏威夷果 ？？？?? This is just a bit too American-centric for me!!!  You must be joking.  These nuts are of course native to Australia.  They were first eaten by Australian aborigines, then appreciated by white settlers in the early 1800s.  They were not introduced into Hawaii until the 1920s.  

The dictionary definition of 澳大利亚坚果 is macadamia nut, but for me it will always be 昆士兰州坚果.   

Posted on: Hungry Traveler: Shanghai

Bislama comes from 'beche de mer' (according to Wikipaedia), once the main export earner for Papua New Guinea, with China probably the principal buyer! I was always vague about what it was used for - cooking, anything else?

Pidgin - I am always on the alert for discussions about pidgin, having been raised in Papua New Guinea I feel some irrational ownership. :) Some people assume that it is just a kind of bad English, and therefore easy to understand - it is actually not that easy to follow and harder to speak. Tok Pisin (not technically a pidgin in any case) is a language in its own right with a grammar. The reasons used to define it as a language make interesting reading. The number of people for which it is a 'mother tongue' is taken into account it seems. I think that in Tok Pisin the expression is 'meri blong mi'. :)

Posted on: The Mysterious Student Record

I have not seen that - and I will follow it up. 'Know your enemy'!

I don't doubt 'out of exam room' cheating of one sort or another exists - I mention a couple in my post above. There are incentives for this behaviour. But China and the West do have different ideas about what is cheating. Even that word cheating has to be translated. In China it is sometimes 'helping'. :)