My day started by noticing I had a missed call from a really nice guy we met yesterday. We had planned to go for a run, but I hadn't noticed my phone had run out of battery. It's hard to answer a phone that's off. Promptly replying with an apology for missing the call, and hence missing the chance of going running, I received back what can only be described as the very best way of saying 'no worries, it's fine' I have ever seen. So remember, next time you want to say 'no problem', instead say "imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it's better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring"

This guy said he was bad at English. I'm not sure i agree.

I'm slowly being led to believe the Chinese have a strangely poetic way of speaking and even thinking, and I thought that this text was the best example i've had so far. Perhaps it's the influence of confucious, but honestly, I have no idea why.

All you need to do is look at some of the best Chinglish to see that a Chinese way of thinking results in things sounding rather poetic. Take for example part of the text from my birthday cake box, which was for "you and your family, the warmth and sweetness". Now you don't end up with something like that on a cake box by just doing a bog-standard translation.

Even my school is plastered with poetry at every corner. Dotted about the walls of the school are stories with moral messages and inspirational quotes to do with learning (naturally all written poetically). As there is a visit from the local education authorities tomorrow, the school has even more moral bits of poetry hung from the ceiling as decorations.

What then, did I mean by a poetic way of thinking? I now firmly believe that, at the very least the younger generations, the Chinese are all dreamers in comparison to the West. Many of my students want to travel to England or Canada, and that is their driving force to learn English. America, interestingly, is not such a popular place and so I think only one of my 600 students have said that they want to visit America. Yet that is not particularly more dreamer-like than many students in the UK.

It is more the answers I get from students to questions, and the results of written tasks that make me feel Chinese students have poetry as an essential part of their existence. Students seem to like English words that sound nice over harsher words, for example. There is also no topic they like writing about more than what their dreams for the future are. In today's lesson, where I tried to get students to write some short stories in English, one student instead wrote that she couldn't write a story, and wrote about her dream to move to Korea and why Korea was so amazing.

She also wrote something that i'll leave for a blog on social expectations. It wasn't the first time I've heard this particular thing, so it's worth a blog on it's own...you'll have to wait to find out what it is I think.

Another student's story ended up sounding more like his own (possible) hopes for the future. The character the students created ended up being a smart, beautiful girl from China (just to show Chinese creativity, the class yesterday came up with exactly the same character...), and this student's story essentially ended up with the student himself marrying the character.

Interesting I guess...

These are only examples, and perhaps they aren't convincing, but I definitely get a sense that many Chinese have a very romantic outlook on life and the world. It's almost certainly present in the Chinese language itself too, but right now I can't think of a good example. i guess there is a sort of neatness to Chinese grammar, but nothing like the wonder that is German grammar. Oh I sound rather nerdy there. Nevermind.

That is probably enough for today, the long march of blogs continues tomorrow.