方纔歸來

. . .Whee. Just got back from lunch. And from a very filling lunch. I swear, I ate enough to last me 'til tomorrow evening. Booh... and I'm not exercising enough to make up for it either.. I'm just swelling up like a little balloon... for about $10 American, I had a small fruit salad, Bacon clam chowder, bread-with-some-cream-thing, some sort of ice fish, American pineapple pie (with icecream), and Ceylon tea with fruit tossed in.
. . .Class today... ... was... ... ... well, we watched this VCD that was talking a bit about some Chinese philosophy thingy... ... Mencius and the other guy... something-zhe. One felt that humans were inherintly evil and therefore needed education to become good. The other guy felt that humans were inherently good and were corrupted by the world, and that's why education is needed in order to remain pure. So in either case, education was placed at the highest importance. (this is during or after the 'first emperor of China' of the Chin dynasty -- 秦始皇.)
. . .Yah... gotta get around to finishing those essay questions in Chinese.. it's sooo evil... ...and uhh.. evil. Well, no, that's not entirely true. It's actually quite interesting, and EXACTLY the sort of thing I came to Taiwan to learn. Yes. The literary mathie. *sighs*. I still can't forgive my calc. prof. for not knowing the difference between an adjective and an adverb. (This happened when the prof. was explaining why the term 'uniformly' in the term "uniformly continuous" was an appropriate "adjective".) Yarg. And it's not like the other mathies noticed either. Thank God I was taking two language courses that term or I would have seriously gone insane.
. . .So yah... Train ride to uncle-in-law's workplace was uneventful. I think I've finally figured out the most effecient means of getting here from class. If I didn't have to transfer all the time, I so could do some studying on the way -- cram in an extra hour or two of studying. Speaking of which...
. . .According to www.clavisinica.com, I know about 1000~2000 Chinese characters. However, to be considered functionally literate, one is estimated to know between 3000 and 4000 characters. So I have 1000-3000 characters to go. So, in an insane attempt to kick my memory into high-gear, I've proposed a goal for myself of learning 50-100 words a day. How much I actually remember is another thing... but the idea is that by the mere exposure to all these other words, I'll have an easier time getting the gist of any given sentence.
. . .Oh yah. And the other screwy part of the Chinese that I do already know is that while half of it is modern conversational Mandarin, the other half is derived from a 400-year old novel which I'm working through right now. which is to say, it'd come across as something like this in English: "Whither are ya at, yo?" Ahaha. People here are getting a kick out of my writing style since they find my strange hybrid style both foreign and entertaining. (Not like I intended it to be funny, but... meh.)
. . .What else? To the observant reader, one may have noticed that there's a new name under the blogs I read section. Thanks to the new alliance between ICQ and AIM, I'm able to contact people in the states! (yay. That makes.... three people.)
. . .Trying out something different with my hair; gonna see how it is at the end of the day. Basically, tossed the upper part of my bangs all off to one side, tucked it behind my ear, and had the rest of my hair tied up in a loose bun. Nothing too fancy, but a severe deviant from the routine bangs that I usually sport and by which I'm most often recognised.
. . .Apparently, I have this weird ability to learn the meaning of Chinese characters without necessarily having the pronunciation down pat. ... or it's overriden with the Japanese way of pronouncing it. And it's SOO not my fault; some vocab I learned in Japanese first before learning it in Chinese. Ahaha... so yah. I'll be able to read Chinese, but I won't necessarily be able to read it outloud.
. . .Well, nobody's online (or they're too busy/tired to talk to me), so I'd best take the advantage of this time and start studying my new batch of chinese words/phrases. Whee...