21 octobre 2007
八年
Well, first of all, congratulations to South Africa. It's good to see the World Cup back on the right side of the equator.
But more importantly: Today is my eighth chinaversary. Eight years ago today I arrived in China for the first time. In Changsha, in fact, as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as the jetlag would allow.
Of course, you have to subtract from those eight years the six weeks I spent in Norway and six months in New Zealand to get the actual amount of time I've been in China, but still: Eight years. Somehow that makes me feel old.
27 juillet 2007
pictures?
Let's see if Live Writer will post pictures to canalblog. So far so good,
but the key, of course, is whether it'll post. Alright, so I know pictures don't have a hell of a lot to do with Chinese study, but I just want to see if and how this works. So the picture was taken from Jingshan last summer. Yeah, I know, if your only experience of Beijing was this summer, you won't believe me. How could such a picture be possible in grey, murky Beijing? Well, every now and then, and normally a hell of a lot more often than has happened this summer, the clouds and humidity disappear and the air clears and Beijing can suddenly become amazingly beautiful. I assure you that that picture is one hundred percent genuine, no trickery involved.
Right, now to see if this will post...
Ah, excellent, it works.aha
Aha! So I can use Live Writer to post to my canalblog account! My much neglected canalblog account.... Can't see the canalblog style, though, but I'm assured I can post there.
12 juillet 2007
inactivity
Sorry for the lack of activity here. This is the first time in ages I've had reasonable access to canalblog. I'll try and get something going here again soon.
23 mars 2007
blocked
I'll continue to use this as a specifically focussed Chinese study blog, but because canalblog has found itself on the wrong side of the Great Firewall, I'll also be posting my Chinese study posts at wangbo.blogtown.co.nz. More to come, but I'm kinda busy doing other meaningless stuff right now.
21 mars 2007
grrrrr
It seems Canalblog has found itself on the wrong side of the Great Firewall, which is really frustrating because I just started this blog and I want to keep it going to motivate me to study Chinese. I'll see how things go, if this really is a block or just a temporary glitch. For the time being I'll keep this blog live via proxy until either it opens up again or I find a more open place to put it.
Post on last night's Chinese study coming up, don't go away.
19 mars 2007
开始
This blog is an attempt to make me get back into the habit of studying Chinese. I hope I can keep this going. I'm not sure exactly what will go up here, but so far I'm thinking:
- My own attempts at writing Chinese.
- Questions, comments and musings on my textbooks and 余华/Yu Hua's 活着/To Live (the first novel I'm attempting to read entirely in Chinese).
- Other random thoughts, experiments, conundrums, random bits of beauty, fun and games, and perhaps the occasional coherent observation on studying Chinese.
So first a brief introduction: I'm Chris, I'm a Kiwi, I teach English in Beijing. I already speak reasonably good Chinese, but my reading and writing skills are woefully inadequate, so I intend to focus on those two aspects of the language. And the 'wangbo' in wangbo.canalblog.com comes from an attempt by my wife and I to come up with an adequate Chinese name for me. She's a Beijinger born and bred, by the way. She'll be the one who proofreads my attempts at writing Chinese, as she has done in the past.