happy singles' day!

[amw]

Hello everyone, it's the ancient Chinese festival of Singles' Day. Many years ago, back in the 1990s, a bunch of student bachelors decided to have a party to celebrate/commiserate their singleness. The tradition spread over the next couple decades, and was eventually adopted by local e-commerce companies as an excuse for an epic sale. Nowadays the

Comments

[tsuki_no_bara]

happy singles day! i love that one of the nicknames for a single person is "just a stick". i hope you bought yourself something, altho i guess beer and food counts. :D

and congrats on the job. i guess? i'd think that if you patronize chinese-speaking places in your off hours, that might help with your language skills, but i don't know how much it can counter speaking english all day at work. could you take classes on the weekends?

is there any kind of chinatown in ontario? like, are there places to hang out while you're there that will be full of chinese speakers? being able to eat poutine sounds like a positive, anyway.

[amw]

From what i understand of Chinatowns, Standard Chinese (aka Mandarin) is not the lingua franca. I guess since so many migrants came from Guangdong province and (later) Hong Kong, Cantonese is still very popular, especially in Canada. A lot of the Chinese words we use in English are actually Cantonese - stuff like kowtow, sampan, wonton, dim sum, bok choy etc

[tsuki_no_bara]

i am such a western white person that i totally forgot that "chinese" encompasses like a thousand different dialects, and the one you're learning isn't necessarily going to be the one spoken by lots of people in any given chinatown. >.<

a friend of mine is teaching herself norwegian, and since she doesn't have actual norwegians to talk to, she watches the news. so, local chinese news! can't hurt, might help.