h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Daughter El is going to teach English in China for a year, once she has finished her Master degree. She's got a post in the university in Chongqing (which some of you might know as Chungking). It's a city of 6 million people on the Yangste River, but quite far inland. It'll be an adventure heading off to China on her own, but friends of hers have done the same thing so she has plenty of support.

We might go out to visit her at some point, as I've never been to China. (I've never actually been to Asia, other than a 2-hour bus trip across the Bosphorus in Istanbul.)

I guess this isn't a thread about Old Country Roses or Blue Willow place settings.

I was in Taiwan and Hong Kong in 1989. I bet those places have a bit since then. The best coffee I ever tasted was in the Hotel Radisson ion the Causeway in Hong Kong. I was in another Radisson [in Saint Petersburg] in 2013, but it was nowhere near as nice.

I don't speak Chinese. I learned to sing some Chinese song lyrics, and it took six months just to master those. If you form your mouth in a perpetual grin, it's easier.

The Yangtze River was in the news the other day, something about extreme flooding or s capsized boat.

She'll have a lot in common with WS.

The daughter of a friend of mine originally wanted to go and teach English in China, but she changed her mind and now she's in Italy teaching.

How wonderful! Do save up and go and visit her. I had three and a bit great years in Shanghai where I taught the market traders to count in English rather than trying to learn Shanghainese and the last ten years of my teaching career were spent in Hong Kong. My sons (and subsequently their lovely Irish wives ) came to visit me several times in both places and we had some great holidays. Both places have changed almost out of all recognition since I first visited but are still fascinating and the effort of learning even a little Chinese repays itself almost immediately (despite what I say about the Shanghai market traders)

to her.

" the effort of learning even a little Chinese repays itself almost immediately ." [Wand'rin Star]

I visited the usual tourist traps when I was in Hong Kong and had my picture taken on that Jumbo floating restaurant. Then a bus ride to the top of Mount Victoria, and a visit to the diamond-setting district and shopping in Kowloon. I swam in the swimming pool in Victoria Park on the causeway. It was huge pool, capable of holding a thousand swimmers, which seemed like the number that were actually there... I loved the Dim Sum in a little shop around the block form my hotel. I tried to recapture that experience later when I was in Chinatown in San Francisco. Great dim sum both places, but very different.

On re-reading the first post, I must ask: Is she teaching English as a foreign language, or will she be lecturing/tutoring students who already have a good knowledge of English and are delving into literature, politics, or similar?

Teaching English as a foreign language. But with degrees in Music, Irish and History she could probably do either.

What does a degree in Irish consist of? The Irish/Gaelic language? Irish history? Irish literature? To compare, I was a French major in college, so I studied the language and the literature.

Yes, a degree in Irish involves language, literature, folklore and a short course in the related language of Scots Gaelic.

She could teach them Irish instead - they'd never know

Sounds like a great adventure !

Wow! Has she started learning Chinese (need I ask)? How does she find it?

Well, she's learning the symbols. From what I've seen, each symbol fits inside a square. You can combine two symbols together in the same square to get a new symbol with a related meaning. You can also combine two symbols side by side to make a phrase. So there are quite a lot of combinations.

There's also the complication of the four voice tones (high, rising, falling and low scoop with gravel voice) and the fact that the standard Romanisation of Chinese wasn't invented to make it pronounceable to Westerners but to help people who already speak Chinese to learn to read.

So it's quite a learning curve.

Too bad Duolingo doesn't offer a Chinese course. I'm using it to study Spanish.

I think she has a number of online courses in the language. El is good at languages. Earlier in the year she was learning Danish, Italian and Chinese in her spare time.

Duolingo is brilliant! I'm doing Spanish, and refreshing my French German and Irish too. Alas the Irish course is the least well-thought-out. Still, it's amazing it works at all.

Danish pronunciation is weird.

That's one thing I struggle with in the Spanish course. It would be nice if they had options for regional accents and dialects. I think their Spanish voice is using a possibly Castilian accent. A Northern Mexican accent would be easier for me to understand. "Y" and "LL" sometimes sound like "J" to my ear and causes me a bit of confusion.

I've been told that in modern Spanish, ll is pronounced like a j sound (dzh).