An Expatriate in Taiwan

Small victories

One of the greatest and most underrated joys of learning a new language is have small victories. All too often, big victories are emphasized – especially here in Taiwan and especially when learning English is the topic. However, I find so much more satisfaction in small victories. Learning new 漢字 and recognizing them on

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Someone wants us to have kids

In Taiwan, it is common to eat sweet foods on and after your wedding day. It is thought that eating sweet food will help the newlywed couple have a baby boy. The reason is a Taiwanese proverb:

吃甜甜，生兒子。 (chī tiántián, shēng érzì)

It doesn’t sound as good in Mandarin, but it rhymes in Taiwanese

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Speaking in numbers

Laowai Chinese recently made a post about numbers in everyday Chinese language in mainland China. I thought I would take the concept and apply it to Taiwan.

Most of these are used when instant messaging friends or sending text messages. A few of them, like 4, 6, and 8 are pretty well integrated

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Transformers 2 comes to Taiwan

Transformers 2 came to Taiwan this past week. It started on Thursday, I believe, but we didn’t get a chance to see it until yesterday, Saturday. We tried reserving a few tickets, but were repeatedly shot down by the theaters: they were sold out or weren’t selling tickets over the phone. Finally, we had a friend go purchase tickets for us at a smaller theater in Taichung so that we could watch the movie. This turned out to be a rather good idea, because apparently Taiwanese people love horrible movies with lots of explosions. The line at this smaller theater was quite long:

People waiting in line

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I think I’m speaking Chinese

I check in on the Forumosa Forums every now and then. If you can manage to get past all the threads where people just bitch about everything that’s wrong with Taiwan and how it should be fixed, there are some interesting threads there.

One of the threads I’ve been reading lately is the “Ways

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Zoo Engrish

This Engrish picture today comes from Forumosa, a popular meeting and discussion place for expats and Taiwanese.

At first it seems rather incomprehensible, but thanks to some of the Chinese speakers at Forumosa, it was quickly decoded.

The first sentence means “No destruction of property.” The second sentence is really odd, but it’s

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President shoes

I learned something new from one of my students the other day. She was wearing Crocs shoes, and I asked her what they called those shoes in Chinese. She replied that they were called 布希鞋 (bùxīxié) or Bu Shi Shoes.

You see, ever since W. was caught wearing crocs, the Taiwanese decided to

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Learning Chinese

Chinese is a very difficult language for most to learn. Among the factors include certain sounds which are foreign to speakers of English and most European languages and the writing system, in which complex strokes are used to create characters. These characters must simply be memorized. No ifs, ands, or buts about it and

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English speakers have it easy…

At least as far as dictionaries are concerned. We can organize all the words alphabetically and it’s quite simple to look up the appropriate letter, narrow it down by the 2nd and 3rd letters and eventually arrive at the word you are looking for, complete with phonetic pronunciation guide, definition, etc. It’s not quite

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An interesting encounter

So Miss Expatriate and I went out to dinner the other night. We chose one of our favorite budget restaurants, which happens to specialize in Turkey Rice, sat down and were engrossed in our food when we had a visitor.

A mother had come in with her son, approximately 7 years old. He immediately

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