March 28th, 2009
Things are a bit different around here because Earth Hour is going on tonight–and yep, I’ll be turning my lights off at 8:30 and doing my organometallic problem set by candlelight. Or something. So… this blog will effectively shut down for an hour, too. Get off your computer. 🙂
I could throw in some cynical stuff here about how it’s really just a token gesture and that my extinguished lights do little, but the point is just to raise awareness on the way to saving the planet. Worked for me last year, anyway.
March 1st, 2009
Over at Language Log there’s a post about being terrified at not being able to read in a foreign country (in this case, Hong Kong SAR). One of the commenters points out:
I had gathered that the “ideogram” thing was a myth — that Chinese script is really a syllabary, and that Cantonese speakers said to read “Chinese” are really bilingual, and reading transcribed Mandarin.
I don’t know how much I agree with the first part (written Chinese as a syllabary? You’re going to have to dredge up a bit more evidence for that one) but the second part is true, true, true.
Now I realize why I only learned to recognize characters in Chinese school, and not to write–I would have had to learn a whole other language.
That said, I admit to having the same fear (apropos de journal articles, for example). It’s terrifying to look at a page of text and realize you can’t read it and have no idea what it says.