Bad Chinese strategies, photos and an update
My experiment with learning Chinese was more or less a failure – I’ve definitely made some improvement, but squandered the opportunity by not putting enough time and effort into it outside of the lessons. Partly laziness and partly the constraints of having to live a busy life. (Apologies to my teacher, Elaine.) I’m not giving up, but I’ll have to really think about what strategy I will use in the future. So I can add to the list of Chinese-learning strategies that don’t work:
- Doing nothing and feeling guilty about it
- Living near Chinatown
- Getting a Chinese-speaking girlfriend and hoping for the best
- Watching Crouching Tiger and Gong Fu over and over
- Having daily lessons but not doing the homework and vocab review properly
Water calligraphy at Lu Xun Park
Crowd Control
In Australia, the Army is pretty invisible. While you might expect to see the ADF out if a hurricane blows down a town, otherwise you’re pretty unlikely to see a uniform let alone on-duty. It’s a different story here, though. Recently, I made an ill-fated trip to Hangzhou and saw this in person. After a hiatus of several years, an annual fireworks display was scheduled for the Saturday night that I visited. Such was the interest in securing a good view of the fireworks by the side of the West Lake, that almost the entire area was sealed off. By mid-afternoon, trucks were pulling up and disgorging units of young soldiers to keep the crowds under control. It was quite a display – just what sort of trouble were the authorities expecting? Clearly more than the handful of drunk & disorderly Australians that would cause problems at an event in Australia (or anywhere else Australians and alcohol are allowed simultaneously).
Army on patrol in Hangzhou