This post is actually a distraction from organizing my Chinese notes for the week. It might be a bit weird.

My new bifocals are wrong. Not a wrong prescription (though how could I tell?), but wrong in every other way. I imagine the eye doctor chuckling to himself while scrawling "Give her bifocals so she'll suffer" on a tiny sheet of paper. Pale ( Read more... )

One of my favorite things to see in a story is the ways people look out for each other and show loyalty to one another. Conflict can be very interesting to watch, but even better is seeing a powerful bond between several characters in the middle of that conflict. Actually without this I can have trouble. A story with no such connections, in which ( Read more... )

I was telling Tingting that one of the things I love about the Fourth Prince, and his relationship with Ruoxi, is their directness with each other.

(from my poor memory)
"I could pretend, like other people, but I think you'd rather I just be honest with you."
(and)
"Always tell me the truth. Like you, I'd rather hear an unpleasant truth than a happy ( Read more... )

This is definitely one of the best historical dramas I've ever seen. On the surface, there's a lot to love: costumes and colors and sets and startling beauty in every scene. And the performances are consistently subtle yet rich and wonderful.

But underneath all of that is a story that keeps me focused and involved. Each episode passes far too ( Read more... )

This week, Tingting and I talked about the show, mostly… character personalities and Qing Dynasty language. I did okay, I think -- especially considering I was using some Chinese words for character and temperament and I wasn't completely sure they meant what I thought they did.

We always follow strange roads through different topics, and somehow we ( Read more... )

I'm pacing myself with this show. Somehow streaming makes this easy; if I had this on disk, I would probably watch it all in one weekend. (And cry for days after.)

Episode 13 was stunning. Shifting moods, a slowly rising sense of hopelessness, of choices closing in and disappearing until very little is left. Normally I have trouble watching a show ( Read more... )

The man from Beijing who sometimes works in my office came in today to tell me that he'd told his wife what I was saying about Bu Bu JIng Xin. She ended up marathonning the whole series in no time. He says it's really hot on the Chinese facebook right now.

Anyway, he told me that most of the time they're speaking normal modern Mandarin, other than a ( Read more... )

Sometimes my suspension of disbelief is pretty solid. I can watch scarf-wearing dragons dance by singing folk songs in Finnish and be all "Okay, I can see how that would happen in this story." But then a human character will behave in a way that I just can't understand and I'm suddenly thrown out of that world. I realize that I often have trouble ( Read more... )

Since the stream I was watching froze during the wound dressing scene -- possibly Firefox overheated from the UST between Ruoxi and Eight -- I guess I'll write something about the last couple of episodes.

Though the more jaded viewer in me was all "Of course he galloped out of nowhere to rescue you when your horse was out of control," I (or my Id) ( Read more... )

Lately I'm hung up on the thought that I should really be better at this language after sixteen months. Tingting says I'm doing fine and I just need to keep learning a lot more words to communicate better. The guy in my office tells me my pronunciation is really good (and as lovely as it is to hear that, I can't imagine that it is). But sometimes I ( Read more... )