Self Introduction

Hi, everyone, I'm Yiran form China, a visiting scholar from Guangdong Academy of Social Science. This week on Thursday, I will come back to China, It's a pity that I couldn't finish this class with all of you.

When I come back to China, I still need to learn English. The biggest challenge that I have with my lecture learning is understanding, cause I couldn't combine the words I already know with the sentence, maybe I should learn how to use those professional words efficiently. Before class ,I usually read the assigned material and review what I already know about the lecture topic. Sometimes, I will read English books and watch English Videos such as TED talk to put myself into an atmosphere of English. During the class, I'll take notes and use visual cues to aid comprehension. After class, I'd like to review and read the assigned material. Through that, I can find out areas to improve.

This blog is more like a farewell letter than self introduction, Six months, half a year. When I look back, bad things happened as well, however, what doesn't kill us will make us stronger eventually. I have a lot to say but don't know where to start, this may be my last blog in Hawaii and I still don't know whether I can use it in China. If not, I will keep on writing English Blog through other ways cause English learning is a lifelong work. it's lucky for me to have the chance to study with all the ELI080 classmates. Best wishes~

New Words

Have you ever watch the movie "Slumdog Millionaire" ? One of my new words came from this movie, the word is "Slum".It means a house or building unfit for human habitation, or lower social lever. Actually, this was not the first time I met this word, last week I heard a song named" A flower booming in the slums" , the name of this song is so beautiful as well as the melody. When I saw this film and met the word the second time, I made up m mind to choose slum as my new words. When I use Corpus to learn more about this word, It's usually used with dwellers,  SLUM DWELLERS means the poor. DWELLERS alone means a person who inhibits a particular place.

Another word I learned this week is "Neptune" ,it has two different meanings. One is the eight and farthest know planet from the sun in the solar system. The other seven planets are Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus. Another meaning is the god of the water and the sea. It's said that Neptune is a blue planet just like the sea, so people named it as the name of  the king of the sea. Without doubt, it usually goes with Uranus because they are neighbors. The second meaning connected with "king" when people describe the god of the sea as"king Neptune". This word came from another song produced by Bandari in 1999, the album called "Mist". As for me, this word is easy to memorize but hard to pronounce.

I have another word "pride",the teacher in Junior high school told us that it means be proud of something. However, when I watch a documentary called" The Big Cats", I found that they call a group of lions "pride" which is new to me, I do hope that I can show this meaning to my classmates in Junior high school.

On the surface, I have leaned two new words last week, besides this, I enjoyed a film, several beautiful songs and the eight planets in solar system. Words have the power to connect things together as long as we use our imagination and logical thinking.

Pronounciation

Actually, I have problems in speaking Chinese. You may not believed what you see because I am a Chinese and also a native speaker. However, most of us have pronunciation problems more or less cause we have fifty six ethnic groups and one hundred and twenty nine dialects. Date back to the beginning of ancient time, people have difficulty in connecting with others in other part of China and they owned their unique pronounce of the same item. With the development of centralization and the encouragement of the government, mandarin became the official language and we all used to use it. In our daily life, it would be more comfortable to use dialect when we talk with our parents or neighbors.
 As for me , I was born in Hubei province located in the middle of China, people there have difficulty in pronoun "L" and N" in Pingying ,sometimes we even can't recognize that we have made a mistake, if someone point the mistake out, we will mistakes next time we use it. It will be a life long problems because people in our hometown are used to the sound. that's why we have so many jokes about dialects in different Provinces.
When I started to learning English, teachers all have accent and as a consequence, the students will speak like the teachers until we can learn how to read from the phonetic symbol. When we learned how to read the words ,we usually don't use them in our daily life cause a lack of the environment of speaking so we usually have little chance to find the faults. When we have to speak English, we are to shy to open our mouth and fear to make mistakes. When a native speaker told me that I pronoun "the" in the wrong way, I felt very surprised ,he said I also can't tell tongue-flatted and tongue-rolled apart, and I said that I make this mistakes in Chinese ,too.
Habit is hart to change but we need to change it, and I am trying to make progress in Chinese and English pronunciation,which will take a long time but worth to try.

Enjoy the Halloween

This is my first time to addicted to a western festival and I have much to share with you.
Actually, in the middle of October,I began to thinking which character should I make up,I try to choose from Little Red Hiding and a witch and finally made up my mind to dress up like Kiki (a Japanese fantasy anime produced by Stubia Ghibli) .I bought the dress on Amazon and joined the Halloween costume parade in Waikiki.During the parade,we saw many kinds of  ghost and many mad and crazy costume and everyone seems to enjoy the big parade.I saw a person without dressed up but have a T-shirt wrote"404 error, no costume found " ,a mother with her little child dressed like a pumpkin, zombies and also different kinds of food such as pizza and hot dog which beyond my imagination.They get together to have fun and I walked with the crowd without taking photos because I want to fully into this kind of culture that I never experience before.
This festival make me thinking about the different attitude toward traditional festival between China and American.
Compared with China,American shares a more casual culture,they celebrate for what they want to celebrate ,they don't mind other's opinions and do what they want.They have festival to make fool of others(April Fool's Day),just for fun ,they also enjoy big days such as Christmas to get together with family.Another experience also give me that impressive. Once I went to The Byodo-in Temple to visit one of Chinese General's tomb,I saw people nearby were having a picnic there and this will not happen in China.And their tombstone looks different, It's not big but enough to memories.
Things in China are different. Our traditional festival are more formal,and we follow the old ways that our ancient may do to celebrate,such as Chung Yeung Festival(Double Ninth Festival) in Chinese calendar which passed by last week,It's a kind of ghost day but we spent our holiday in a different way.We visit the grave of our ancestors to pay our respects.Also,many Chinese festival try to express the homesick and miss our relatives, bacause we are a country to encourage filial and respect the older.
All in all,different culture have the same magic to attract people to learn more and try to respect it in our daily life.

different greeting ways indifferent country

I am a foodie and I was lucky to met a friend who wants to eat outside with me.It's interesting to eat in different kinds of restaurants and experience different greetings,so I wondered how people greeting with each other in a restaurant. There are moments that we need to eat outside for entertain or relax,and we want to enjoy the leisure time with our friends,so we go to a restaurant to eat.we enter the restaurant, the waiter greet us with"how's your day"or "how can I help you"to start the conversation ,they usually smiling and give us an eye contact,nodding their head to show respect.We appreciate the waiter's body language and the neat cloth and clean hand ,we decide to eat here and the food taste good ,after we finished eating,we will give some tip for the service.
That's the situation we will face ,however, things will change through the size and location the restaurant is.The difficulty is that we talk about restaurant but we have variety of  situations,we need to find the common phrases.However, we enjoy share different greeting ways in our own country.
In China ,we usually use two kinds of phrases"Have you ordered yet"and "How many people do you have",I guess maybe we have a large amount of population and the restaurant usually very busy,they need to make full use of the space to make big money.In Guangdong, besides this two greetings,they will ask"which kind of tea do you prefer",Cantonese love drinking tea while eating,and the first cup of tea is for you to wash the dishes and chopsticks you will use later,and the younger generation or host will do it for the elder or guests. The first tea usually called wash the tea to get rid of dirty and then you enjoy the second ones. Considering this situation ,we usually need to pay the tea fee in our bills,usually one dollar per person.In Japan,Rina said they usually ask"Do you smoke or not" because they have smoking room for people who smoke,It's very different from China,because in China, it's impolite to smoke among people, we usually have areas for smoking but not on the table.
During this research, we find that every little thing can have a big meaning if you are eager to find the deep significant of it.

Something About the Presentation

I was in group one and our topic is"How to greet people in different countries" and Rina is my partner.

There are several reasons to choose the first one to give this presentation . Firstly,I am a person who don’t want to worry about something for a long time, as a saying goes ” It’s better to suffer short-term pain rather than long-term torture”. Second, I do think that we will do a great job in a short time. However, after we finished the speech and heard other’s work, I don’t think it anymore. 

We have advantages and disadvantages.The advantage is that we do the speech fluently and didn't use the mention card.And disadvantages are much more than advantages.Our presentation is simple and short,and we didn't have attractive pictures which looked a little boring.At the same time, compared with other groups, we only chose two different countries( China and Japan), we should find more to strengthen our talk and make things clearly to understand.If I need to score our presentation,I will give only seven points.All in all ,we still have space to improve.

During this week's presentation ,I learned different cultures and unique lifestyles about food, clothes, weeding ceremony and traditional festivals in Korea, China,Japan and American(Hawaii). And if we have time, we will have a lot of interesting things to share with each other,because culture is defined as the social behavior and norms found in human societies and we still have much to talk.Through this way, we can learn language with a high interest which will help us better understanding each country.

An English Class in International Ministries

After ELI class on Monday,I had a short talk with Mary.The topic was about how to make chance to talk with native English speakers,she recommended me to go to the International Ministries to have a try and I did it on Tuesday.
I was there a litter bit early,and the "teacher" gave me a warm welcome. Cause this was my first time in the class,all the participants introduced themselves and I need to introduce myself,too.After a short introduction,we started the class with a story in Bible.Although I have difficulty to cover all the details, I can understand the whole story.Then ,we focus on the topic of emergency events, learned several new words and had a free talking about the emergency event we have met and what we should do to keep ourselves safe.The class lasted about one and a half hour and we were enjoyed it.
The teachers are a family, they offer the opportunities for us to improve our oral English.All the classmates are from different level and occupations, there are housewife, students and visiting scholar. We are all Asian so we may share the same culture but we still need time to adjust to accent.As for me ,I found that my vocabulary is very poor and they need to explain the words so I can understand,sometimes I need to use my phone to translate it into Chinese.During the class, the atmosphere was pretty good and we have snacks and drinks to share with each other.All in all ,it's a good experience with learning opportunities and challenge,I'd like to try the advanced English class someday.