American VS Taiwanese (I)

I have lived in the USA for the fourth year, the first two years I was living in Florida, and latter I moved to Houston and stay here untill now. 

However, USA is not the first foreign country that I have ever lived with.  I lived in the UK for two years for my study, I did a master degree in bussiness over there, I will say British culture and American culture, they are completely different, I personally more preferred British culture I feel more like me.  So when I first came here, I need lots of time to adapt the culture.  Here are what I found some of interesting culture difference:

Teavana--Telling something about American Tea Culture

Drinking Tea plays an very important part of Chinese eating habits.  We normally drink a hot tea after eating all the meal for helping digest or just have a hot cup of tea in the afternoon tea time. 



Tea is better than Coffee in some research, it shows that it can prevent cancer and anti-aging. So it is a very good stuff and I encourage all the American or the whole world can drink more tea.  Tea is cheapter too. in Starbucks, an iced coffee is like $3 or $4, but a big cup of tea of $0.99 and it is healthier. 

From Kung Fu Panda to know chinese cultures

I like Kung Fu Panda this series, right now it has already panda 2 comes out.  In every Panda movie contains rich chinese cultures inside, and uses an interesting element which is Chinese kong fu to let American or the whole world know about Chinese culture.


Start from the Panda 2, I watched this movie twice.  I like it. This movie talks about " inner peace" this time.  " Inner peace" is a very chinese philosophy stuff, which is hard to understand.  Even me sometimes dont know how to reach "inner peace" or how to get" inner peace".  From this movie, we can see how Po gets inner peace in this story. 

Introducing a new learning chinese website--BBC Learn Chinese with free lessons

Well untill now I don't feel a lot of people interested in learning chinese.  So I will bring up more interesting stuff in terms of culture background or just write something is totally different.  Write more my personal life so you will know chinese culture better. 


Anyway, today I am going to introduce a new website, Learn Chinese with free lessons from BBC , well BBC learning series is all good quality, and I think that's the best learning a second language programme.  They have 10 short videos intorduced to learn a little bit vocabulary, grammar. They also have stuff for kids to learn, stuff for culture background, stuff for writing and etc.  So I am trying to do is to give you variety of websites for you to choose and see what others explain and teach you.  It gives more tools to try which one suits you best. 


I will say learning chinese series  is now stop.  My next article I will try to write something more different and more interesting. 


Kai

Introducing Taiwan (I) Knowing Taiwan from Podcast!!

Today, I would like to introduce two interesting podcast related to Taiwanese culture.  I would like to give u a little bit cultural background for the people living in Taiwan now. 


The first Podcast is called "What's up in Taiwan", and it's produced by Kuang-Chong Yu. Right now he is living Taiwan.  He is actually a very famous music producer in Taiwan. He came up with this idea is back to 2007, he said that " One day I watched a foreigner being interveiwed by a television news reporter while exiting customs in CKS Airport; she said she couldn’t find any tourism information about Taiwan in all of the traveling agencies in her country. That’s when I came up with the idea of doing this podcast, I like to introduce this interesting island, especially from a foreigner's perspective".


So there are totally 21 Episodes, and in each episodes, they interview travellers in Taiwan from different backgrounds, might be a students who wants to learn how to speak in Chinese, or a business man has business in Taiwan, they all share their lifes and struggles in that episodes. Even though they already stop interviewing new people,  it's great tool for you to get to know an insight view of Taiwan.  All episode you can find on itune or from their website.   


The second Podcast is hosted by a linguistic student in Taiwan,  He is doing his Phd study right now.  In his profile picture, he looks like an American to me or from Australia, anyway, he is not Asian that's for sure.  I believe his mother language is in English, just happen to him that he is really interested in learning a new language.  He is mainly in Chinese Mandarin. 

His podcast called " Forever a student" (I guess he has been a student for a long long time) and right now he is in Taiwan and he has this blog " Forever a student".  Even though in his podcast, he only has 8 episodes, and mainly is introducing learning a simple language or a difficult language, (Well, in his opinion, he thinks Mandarin is a difficult language but you can of course listen to his explanation).


In his blog, there are more stuff you can see, he shares his learning journey of learning in Mandarin, and it's fab to see this from a linguistic student website, I think that will really helps you guys learning in Mandarin.