So for a long time, I was taking lessons on Italki. During Covid I took a Chinese lesson every day and I remember at that time I was paying around six dollars or seven dollars per hour so it was very affordable every day. But recently, I have found the prices on Italki to be…
This was one of the slides at an event I attended last night. Everyone spoke Chinese, and the speaker gave a lecture for more than an hour about motivating yourself, and then he went on to talk about making money selling Life Insurance which I was not interested in, but great speaker! Here is the…
It’s been about 3 years since I became the organizer of the Irvine Chinese and English Meetup group. Not only do we have a Meetup.com group with about 1400 members but we also have a WeChat group with 250 members. You can see our picture from this week. It looks like we had about 22…
I had a great time hiking with Volodymyr and Julia to a waterfall near Yaremche Ukraine. The night before we spent the night at a resort in Bukovel. It took us maybe 20 minutes to drive Volodymyr’s Jeep Cherokee down the mountain road to get to the trail, and then another 20-30 minutes to get…
A Welcoming Blend of Cultures and People The United Arab Emirates is an amazing place, and surprisingly open and free. of course it’s two main economic drivers are oil and tourism, as well as an ever growing tech sector. But what surprised me the most was the people. Think about the countries you have heard…
Balancing Respect and Sharing Experiences When it comes to posting about my travel experiences, I feel like sometimes there’s a balance I have to maintain. I want to be respectful of the people that I encounter while also talking about what I see. I think it can be hard for outsiders to understand other cultures,…
I always try to keep one fun project for myself that consumes around 10% of my time. Over the years I have dabbled in many different software development projects, and occasionally I hit on something that is really useful and worthwhile, while a good percent of the time I am just having fun. 🙂 But…
Mostly I write here simply to document my progress in Chinese. With each book I read, I look up fewer and fewer characters, but it still requires a lot of concentration. 骆驼祥子 (LouTuoXiangZi) is about a rickshaw puller in Beijing back in the 40s when the Japanese had invaded, and life was really hard. He…
Well the name doesn’t translate very well (Amazon books uses this translation as well), but I just finished reading this book. It the second full length novel I have read in Chinese. The Chinese name is 忧确杂货店, and actually it was written by Keigo Higashino, a Japanese mystery writer, and then it was translated into…
So with that exciting homepage where I told you I speak Chinese, you probably were curious to hear me speak Chinese, or else you wouldn’t have clicked the link and arrived here, right? 🙂 You are the curious sort! Ok, let me see what I can do…