Thursday, November 6, 2008

Tuning my djembe

My small adventure partially restringing my djembe drum is coming soon...

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Great Chinese Expectations

Yay!
I recently finished reading Great Expectations!
In Chinese!
Sounds impressive, huh?
Fine, it's a 5th grade level version, with pictures, and bilingual.
So it's not so impressive, but for ME it's great. I've been working on it on & off since I was in China; it's been one of my bigger goals in Chinese.I'll give you an example in English of how much I understand. Blue is words I know, red dashes are words I don't know.
You can click the picture to read the 'real' English words, or see which Chinese characters I know. Red underlined means I don't know that hanzi, yellow means I know them individually but don't know what they mean together used that way.
And here I'll type the literal translation though it'll sound funny. Do you like the anime-like illustrations? Pip with big cartoon crying eyes...

"No, I don't agree, Pip," she said, "You should __ a __."
So I ___ played, while Estella ___ me. Finally, Miss Havisham __ should let me go home.
[Hey, this is like Mad Libs, maybe you can fill in the blanks with your own words and put it in the comments or send it to me for fun]
"I want you within 6 days come back." she said to my back (as I walked away), "Before you go, Estella will give you some things to eat."
Estella gave me some bread and a few pieces of meat when make cow ___?" [some kind of beef I guess][HAHA! edit: I got "cow" mixed up with "afternoon"; they look similar! So it's not "when make beef.." it's "for lunch", LOL...] But there was no way ___ this food. I felt myself was only a small dog, because __ __ __ __. I felt very __. Eyes __ not stay tears come.
When Estella saw me cry, she was very pleased. She smiling brought me to the gate.

Cold Pizza

I was reheating a slice of pizza in a frying pan, and wondering why it wasn't sizzling yet, feeling it, still cold....
I turned on the wrong burner.
I have an electric stove, so you can't see a burner on. A back burner was busy heating the air while my pizza was staying cold in the pan.
Duh.