Students had standardized tests on Tuesday and Wednesday last week, which put me in an unusual position. I had to give a review lesson on Monday, followed by no lessons on Tuesday or Wednesday, followed by some different lesson on Thursday and Friday. Since not all classes would receive the Thursday and Friday lesson, I had to come up with something inessential, so that it wouldn’t matter to the classes that skipped it. Fortunately, I already had a lesson in my back pocket fo

Roughly half the time I tell people that I speak Chinese, they immediately ask whether I speak Cantonese or Mandarin. I often take this to mean they know little about China or Chinese. I don’t mean any offense; most people never had occasion to learn anything about Chinese dialects because that knowledge had no value to their everyday lives. That said, it is always better to know something than not, so I invite my readers to consider this article as their occasion to learn a

I often see praise for the first line of Samuel Butler’s translation of the Iliad: “Sing, O Goddess, the anger of Achilles.” I have to admit, it sounds pretty badass. However, it loses an obscure element I find interesting. In Greek epic poetry, the first word of the text is often the theme which encapsulates the whole work — for example, the Odyssey is all about humanity, and its first word is “man.” I took inspiration from this for my own navel-gazing creative writing proje

I’ve been studying Chinese for a pretty long time. I first told my parents it interested me in middle school, and they signed me up right away to attend Chinese classes at my local Confucius Institute. I went to these classes once a week for a few years before moving on to classes at the community college. Chinese became an official part of my high school curriculum when I moved to Utah, and then I went on to minor in Chinese in college. I expect that many people are interest