With minor modifications, I think this has to be my favorite new slogan: This sign can be found in the bathrooms of Jinan airport in China.1 A loose translation of the Chinese might go something like this, “Support the protection of the environment, use only what [toilet] paper you need.” (or “be economical in your [...]
I went to 춘천 in Kangwon province this past Monday to scout out what the state of local history was in the province and what materials I might be able to find on life there in the early postwar period (1945-50). The city library’s reference room was closed (how did I miss that when writing [...]
Some notes from my recent trip to the United States for Christmas from Seoul: Transitions – When going to and from East Asia, I love passing through airports like San Francisco and LA (one gets a similar experience passing through London when I visit Norway). On the way back to the US I transferred in [...]
After my family acquired a “family pack” license, I installed the Mac OS X Leopard operating system on my machine last night and everything went smoothly with the installation. I did a clean install on a new larger hard drive and migrated over my user files using the migration assistant. Things seem to be going [...]
Communicating with my 16 month nephew Loki (I have recently all but abandoned his name at birth, Liam) is a challenge. He doesn’t seem to understand my attempts to discuss abstract metaphysical issues with him, or even the more concrete banalities of contemporary politics. He is probably experiencing a certain degree of confusion as well [...]
I confess that I’m one of those Orientalists who really loves the characters used in the Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. There have been many voices (e.g.) over the last century or so who have argued for the complete romanization of East Asia’s languages and Korean nationalists (as well as those who claim they only oppose [...]
Catching up on some newspaper reading, I came across a piece (Korean) by Scott Burgeson, of Korean Bug fame, in the September 15th opinion pages of Chosun Ilbo. In the article he describes a phenomenon familiar to most non-Asians who have lived in places including Japan and Korea: a paralyzing shock exhibited by natives of [...]
While descending some stairs into the Shinchon subway station here in Seoul, Korea this evening, I was stopped by a boy perhaps five or six years old. Blocking my path, he smiled brightly and said, “안녕하세요” (a Korean greeting). I waved to the kid and replied with the same, “안녕하세요.” Hearing my reply, the boy [...]
Apple’s Macintosh operating system and the Chinese language have a long history. Many years ago, when I was an undergraduate college student, well before the advent of Mac OS X and the rise of Unicode, I was already happily inputing Chinese on my Mac and delighted in amazing my friends with the Apple Chinese voice [...]
I’m sure it is hard to make language textbooks. On top of introducing grammatical patterns, vocabulary, and maintaining a certain level of appropriate difficulty, the writers need to try to make the contents of the readings interesting and hopefully educational. This is something I can appreciate in my last summer of formal language study, here [...]