Final Chinese Oral Presentation

Third-year Chinese had its final oral presentations on Friday. We were split up into groups of six, and had to give ten minute presentations on the topic that we’d written our final research paper on. Each presentation was followed by a five minute Q&A. I made mine on Powerpoint, which was a good idea because [...]

Bombed the last dictation of the semester

In third-year Chinese, we have to take a 听写 every Wednesday. The name is misleading because, unlike at Princeton in Beijing, where teachers would read out a few sentences and we’d have to write them down in characters, all we have to do here is look at sentences of pinyin and write out the correct [...]

Wang Keqin at Princeton. Part 2

Here’s my journalism professor’s explanation of what happened at Wang Keqin’s lecture:
The argument between Wang Keqin, Wang Gang (the 28-year-old reporter from China News Week) and Professor Zhu, a retired Princeton physics professor, was perhaps the best part of the lecture.
Basically Professor Zhu said something along the lines like these: I’m not going to ask [...]

Wang Keqin at Princeton. Part 1.

I just got back from Wang Keqin’s lecture and must admit that I feel pretty overwhelmed by the experience.
Some sort of massive argument broke out between a Princeton Chinese professor and Wang Keqin during the Q & A session. Because of the chaos and accented Chinese, no one in my journalism class knew exactly what [...]

4th year textbooks

I just got the 4th year textbooks I’ll be using at PIB this summer. They are many. I am one. I am scared.

Perry Link on Censorship in China

Professor Link taught me first-year Chinese, and I took his course on 20th century Chinese literature last fall. Although the Chinese government isn’t his biggest fan (he’s banned from China), we all love him here at Princeton (even though he intimidates the crap out of most of us). RFA Unplugged has a link to his [...]

Which type of Chinese language learner are YOU?

Looking around my Chinese class today, I started thinking about why each of my classmates was studying Chinese. This question isn’t new–I’ve been thinking about it off and on throughout my six semesters of Chinese language study. It comes up when I have to explain myself to friends and acquaintances, when talking with my fellow [...]

Essay series #1 Comparing Chinese Blogs and Big Character Posters. Part 2.

Continued from Part 1.
Unlike dazibao, not any literate person can blog. Blogging requires one to have sufficient technology, and, more importantly, because accessing the Internet (and all of the information that it is compromised of) is a prerequisite to blogging, a blogger is likely to be, on average, less parochial than the dazibao writer. Finally, [...]