Taiwan is my troll. A couple of tenth graders wanted to do their project on Greenland, I told them its not a country and to do Taiwan instead.

I was explaining "controversial" to the tenth graders and as an example cited the Diaoyu Islands belonging to China, Japan or Taiwan...oh Taiwan isn't a country? My bad. China, Japan or Republic of China.

When classes start again next week Chinese Taipei winning the East Asia Basketball championship and China finishing fourth will definitely come up in class.

So I downloaded the tantan app, added a few pictures and swiped for like 10 minutes, maybe swiped 5 people right, and then a message pops up that says my account was blocked because I used a fake picture. So I added another picture, a few minutes later it starts working again, then a few minutes later it gets blocked again. It happened 3 times in less than an hour. Never even matched/messaged a single person. I think they just have never seen somebody so handsome and think the pictures were fake so they reported it. You guys have similar problems?

No

Post your pics here ldo.

Haha, so many Chinese people use fake pictures on social media people probably assume yours is.

When I had my party people were joining my facebook group that I didn't recognize. Didn't use their Chinese name, their English name or have a picture of them-self. Annoying as hell playing twenty questions to figure out who they were. My boss said she uses her English name on wechat but would never use her Chinese name. When I asked her why she looked at me like she'd never even considered it. What's the paranoia? It's not like people are posting a bunch of political stuff and wanna hide from the police.

Maybe it's similar to everyone having bars on their windows like theyre living in the ghetto.

The World of Chinese has a particularly interesting roundup this week. A few thoughts.

1. Sounds like rich people problems. They're the only ones who could afford an apt in Shanghai anyway. Still it seems like buyers got screwed (and the sellers made out well). If the regulation said you can't sell one of these converted apartments vs "you can buy it, but must make it unlivable" I wouldn't be sympathetic at all.

2. the original video they mention is worth a watch. It's amazing how people can act like locking up a share bike "aint doing nothin wrong". What kinda a dick do you gotta be to put needles on them? Deserve a solid beating, that's just anti-social.

3. Sounds like a good idea. I think big and dangerous breeds should be banned generally. And fortunately, Chinese people don't think having whatever kind of dog they want is some kind of sacred right. It pisses me the hell off seeing people keep huskies in Guangdong or farm dogs in tiny apartments.

4. The key part for me is this is why I think that teaching and learning languages will remain worthwhile pursuits for the foreseeable future. Even the best free tech today (google/wechat translate, this bot) is spotty at best when trying to understand written language, and when you add spoken language it gets absurd (look on youtube for Trumps NATO speech with youtubes auto transcriber-the audio isn't perfect, but any fluent speaker would transcribe it no problem, but the software is HILARIOUSLY off).

Of course I'm not an expert on that, so if someone has some reading on it I'd be ears.

5. Yeah the gaokao is high pressure. I think Japan still crushes China in school related suicides. I kinda hate schools altogether. I had an unschooling experience from 2-12th grade and I liked it. ANd unlike public school, it didn't crush the love of learning out of me.

6. That video is rough. If you are ever hit by a car, you'd better pray it's not in China. It's unlikely anyone will help the laowai lying broken in the gutter. This isn't just a result of callousness-it's a common scam to get hit (or pretend to get hit) by a car and then demand cash or get sued.

Just found out today that about 20% of our graduating class will be attending Baylor next year. Really, really pissed off at our program manager right now. She is completely unfamiliar with any of the scandals as our a few of the kids I talked to (carefully).

I'm also completely unfamiliar with any scandals. BUt then it's not my job.

reddit/china is one of the worst places for info about China. I subbed when I first was planning to move, and before I　even left I had to unsub. It was constantly negativity and bitching, not to mention outright racism towards Chinese (which I get enough of in any expat community). The scorn directed towards Chinese is only matched by their disdain for English teachers. My current job is pretty much a breeze. It's mostly just chatting with people. Sometimes for "oral practice (LOL) class that's literally what it is. I do very little teaching in the sense of giving them information. They can learn new vocabulary words and grammar themselves. Mostly I'm there to facilitate them speaking and make sure it's directed towards specific goals. It's not hard, but that doesn't mean anyone can do it. The good teachers I know all have very good social skills. On Monday, I went to work, taught one class (which was the aforementioned oral practice). Then I had a long break that I studied Chinese, went shopping, ate dinner etc and taught three more classes, which were quite easy (it helps if yuo actually prepare a little first). The job has about as little stress as possible-I have no responsibilities other than showing up and teaching the classes. For this kind of work I get paid enough to save $1,000/month with ease and have job security that'd make public servants jealous. I don't think of it as a career, as it's hard to move up. BUt as a j-o-b it's pretty good.

Some of you may be interested in a blog post a friend of mine wrote here that compares Mandarin and English. I've had similar thoughts before about the utter simplicity of Chinese compound words compared to English, but never had such a long write up about it.

How hard is English for Chinese? This is my best student-by far-out of a class of 20. Given the prompt of "earning extra money" she writes:

Not bad ideas, and I admire than she wrote something about 3x longer than the rest of the students. The grammar is all over the place though.

Something like 50 rapes by football players over a few years covered up by the entire administration. Similar to Penn State in some ways but almost certainly a lot more individuals involved in the cover up.

Its not just that its dangerous--obviously sexual assault happens at every college campus--but that also Baylor's reputation is absolute garbage. Its 80k a year for the kids to go to high school here and the whole purpose is to prepare them to attend a US university. The administration not doing due diligence about the schools the kids are applying to is unacceptable.

I already signed a contract to come back next year because this job is awesome--I get to teach economics and all my classes are in the morning so 90% of the time I can leave around 13:00--but this has me a lot more shook than the standard "this is China, just have to deal with it" sort of thing.

And yeah, r/China is an absolute cesspool. I'm absolutely convinced that the hatred towards English teachers mostly comes from English teachers with a complex about it (absolutely nothing wrong with teaching English--I used to and still do part-time). Notice also how everyone on that forum is fluent in mandarin.

If I had a thousand RMB for every variant of "how can I be racist when I fetishize Asian women?" on r/China and other online expat hangouts I'd have enough money for a smoking hot 小三.

I think that if I were to write something in Chinese (I had to for my classes, about one 600 character essay per week) the grammar and usage would probably be around that girl's level, obviously if I could use pleco it could be much better, got a 96 on my writing final which I was pretty pleased with. Usually it seems like I will think that something I wrote should be decent but it still gets torn to shreds by red pen, like mistakes in almost every sentence.

Sidenote/brag- I won some commendation award this semester, 3 out of about 60 students got it and I didn't put forth nearly as much effort as I should have. Was honestly surprised to be called, but hey, I'll take it.

I'm a pretty big redditor, mostly gave up on 2p2 following my discovery of reddit, but absolutely have to stay out of r/china. RWC you're definitely right about the majority of posters there, I just don't really understand how everyone can hate everything about China and continue to live here.


In other news, my first tantan add was asking for a threesome with her and her husband, she was quite hot but I'm not too into that idea. I got a few other matches, but it seemed like I was only swiping right on like 2% of the girls so my chances of matching were pretty low. So I stopped using tantan and downloaded momo. Having more success and have upped my swipe right range to like 5% to try to make some things happen. In the past week I've gotten like 35-40 matches, but it is pretty difficult to get anything going as far as progressing from conversations to meeting. That said, I should be meeting one this weekend so hopefully that goes well. Maybe I'll add some pics if there is any success.

Tyler or others, do you or your girlfriend have any suggestions for pickup lines or anything in terms of getting girls to open up more? A few didn't reply to my initial message which is no big deal, but quite a few more are just content sending one or two character replies and I won't be very persistent, if it seems like they're not interested and just sending 嗯 对 哦 type stuff I'm pretty much giving up after 3 or 4 questions or statements. It generally feels like "flirting" is not a thing here, which seems crazy to me but when I ask people they just say 美女你好 is like a standard open. Nothing playful at all. Not that my chinese level is at the point where I could be like that, but it doesn't hurt to try, right?

That essay is pretty good for somebody who doesn't live in an English speaking environment.

English isn't hard for Chinese people. The environment is lacking and most Chinese English teachers from K - 12 are pretty crappy.

Man that essay reminds of how horrible the English level is in China.

Not really the fault of the students. It's the classroom environment and norms dictating the relationship between teacher and student that make learning and teaching English effectively difficult. When typical Chinese classes are composed of 100 minutes of a teacher talking and students listening, it's hard to suddenly walk in as a foreign teacher familiar with western pedagogy and get a bunch of active participants dying to get involved in group activities.

I'm taking two hours of Chinese tutoring M-F during the Summer. My Chinese is definitely a level or two below PE's.

This is kind of a random question. As native English (or whatever else) language speakers, how frequently do you guys use 把 in written or spoken communication? I've had a very flawed understanding of it for a couple of years but don't think I've ever used it. Studying it today there always felt more English-like ways of expressing 99% of the same meaning. I also don't think I ever use 一边 and prefer to make the sentence work using 当 which feels closer to what you'd say in English.

I suppose that's why Chinese subtitles on English movies or TV shows are far easier to understand than Chinese subtitles on a Chinese film.

In spoken Chinese, you should be using 把 all of the time. One of my teachers told me that you really start to sound 'Chinese' when you start to use 把 and 被 correctly。

把门关好／把窗户关上吧
你把房间打扫一下吧。
我们明天要把作业交给张老师。
你可以把你的手机借给我吗？
风把树吹倒了。
把桌子上的杯子拿过来。

I'm not exactly sure which forms of the other two you're referring two, do you have any examples?

被你发现了
被别人骗的
PE在哪？

Oh, now I see what you're saying.

So the 一边做什么，一边做什么 structure is doing two things at once. Using LonelyBox's example, 一边打飞机，一边吃水果 "Jack off while eating fruit."

The other is like when something happens, something else happens or something had already happened.

当我无聊的时候，我都会上2p2troll一会儿。"When I'm bored I get on 2p2 and troll for a while."
当我接到你电话时，我已经不离开公司了。"When I got your call I had already left the company."


But it can also be like "when something happens, I am xxx"

当我依偎在我小狗狗身边的时候，是我最开心的时候。“I am happiest when I am snuggled up with my dog."

好像问题消除者把这个论坛给忘了。(把字句）"It looks like ProblemEliminator forgot about this forum."

I'm not pro with Chinese language but I'm pretty sure you can't say 好像PE把这个论坛给忘了 . It just sounds so weird to me. Also I never used 当 much outside of 当朋友

Assuming you're talking about the "给忘了“ part?

https://zhidao.baidu.com/question/37...727528004.html

当 has quite a few uses, according to pleco there are 16 different ways to use it, the most common is probably "to be" or "to act as" like in your example. I'm not sure if it is a regional thing to use it as "when", but I hear it around me relatively often.

https://zhidao.baidu.com/question/20...107563068.html
https://www.zybang.com/question/3d71...7e6da171c.html

Been watching videos on youtube recently and just stumbled into this one:

Bottom right girl is hot

I think the top girl is Korean, or at least her accent sounds similar to Koreans from my class, bottom girl is the teacher. Go onto that website and sign up for your free trial.

You should remove the "不" from above.

There are also some subtleties with using "当" that I will post in a longer post.

This only refers to using 当 as "when".

Most of the time, this word can be spared especially when you add 时候 or just 时.

In the vernacular, i find it most often spared in the "when I am bored, i go on 2+2" case. Cases in which when can be replaced by if.

给 in the above context is wholly correct but acts mostly like a flavor word and can be removed if so wish.

打错了 :hammer:

Are you Chinese? Anyways, anything you have to teach us will be appreciated.