teaching & learning

A very good friend of mine who I got to know two months ago is working and learning with me right now.

I guess i've given him some hard time when it comes to fix certain problems. I hope that we can both learn together... i am learning how to better teach or rather coach.

Listening is so important and speech is, on the other hand, the most important. I need to express myself clearly and there are so many ways to convey the same message to achieve better results. Teaching is an art and learning is an art, too. I guess I've picked up little on the latter and there are still lots to be picked up.

My aunt-in-law phoned my yesterday and talked to me about not going back to school this semester... my cousin fell ill badly a few years ago and he had to take leave of absence from school for almost two years and he just started his high school in IM. If not, he should have gone to university already, which I have not completed yet. =p

I know what I am doing here in wenzhou and things are different every single day. it might appear boring... i don't find it boring at all lately... the students are coming back to school and it's getting crowded here in no time. over 65,000 students in this university town are crowding around like ants soon! fight for food, fight for boys/girls, compete with appearance and coolness.
oh man, lots to update later.

have fun!

Beijing Olympics is Over

Great 16 days!
I wish i could be in the stadium to watch the Olympic athletes to compete and pursue their dreams in Beijing.
I love two songs from the Beijing Olympics.
The theme song You and Me,
and Beijing Welcomes You!
I love the melody and rhythms of the song and find the lyrics of both songs are very simple and very meaningful. Many many great celebrity singers sang in the beijing welcomes you song.

beiijing hua ying ni
xiang yi yue gang dong ni
rang wo men dou jia you to chao yue zi ji

beijing huan ying ni
you meng xiang shui dou liao bu qi
you yong qi jiu hui you qi ji
*(Chinese Pinyin)

Somehow I find the closing ceremony not as great as the opening... though it was fantastic... perhaps I watched the one without narration online... seems it was so quiet and did not know what was going on. Maybe the narration was too boring to catch my attention.

Now looking forward to 2012. I've talked to some friends about going to visit London in 2012 and enjoy the Olympics again there!

I was born in the Olympic year... I fell in love with the Olympics almost at the first sight... I remember very clearly that I have watched all the games in 1988 (if i could still remember), 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004 and now 2008. 2008 is also a very special year to me...

you and me
from one world
we are family

travel dream
a thousand miles
meeting in beijing

come together
put your hands in mine
you and me
from one world
we are family

Go Beijing Olympics!

finally I got to watch the Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony at my friends place last night...
There weren't many songs... somehow, I expected to listen to more singing than just instrumental and dances...
The theme was great... very Chinese... but Dir. Zhang has done a good job in squeezing the 5000 year history in the 2-3 hour programs at the opening ceremony... the great four inventions....
the Chinese volume (roll) has planted seeds deeply in the heart of the audience in China and from the rest of the world... fantastic! really awesome!

Ning LI has done such a fabulous job 'flying and walking' around the bird nest stadium and finally lit up the Olympic Fire... We watched a special program introducing the story about Li's though training and exercise behind the few minute world-wide attention.

I thnk what really impressed me was the painting... very focused... it was so nicely done in every single chapter of the programs. the most impressive program, i think, was "movable type“ performance... nice! pretty!

FunInputToy

I am a little frustrated using FunInputToy these few days, because the version I am using (1.93 for Leopard) does not memorize the phrases that I frequently use. 

I don't know why it does not memorize.  According to the website, it is still part of the promised feature set. I tried importing the customized list on my own but it just did not import... maybe it is the encoding issue. if I save Chinese, it has to be unicode. but it seems that FIT only recognizes Windows (Roman)... I cannot even add one by one using the customer dictionary. 

The ITABC provided by Mac system itself works better when it comes to memorizing my frequently used phrases. I had to switch between the two very often nowadays... 

another annoying issue is that very often, the Pinyin input does not work on an application... meaning if I type pinyin, FIT does not pick up my command of inputing, i.e. FIT is not launched properly on that application. What I did was to always open the Texteditor and whenever it failed, i just typed out a few random phrases to make sure FIT works again. Then i can go back to the application and type Chinese again. 

well... i've been typing a lot these few days because of all the Chinese conversations going on. i still like FIT a lot but hope it will become a great efficient tool. 

FIT is great! and there are areas of improvement... Has FIT gotten any funding yet? maybe it can become one of the pre-installed input method for Mac!