Academic writing and my failure to grasp a learnable moment The question. My first job out of grad school was at a Chinese-Canadian partnership university. I taught academic writing, and for many of my students it was their first time writing essays in English. One day a student send
A love letter to public libraries One of my favourite shows, Fringe, is filmed in Vancouver, and one of the fun things about watching it is pointing out all the places I recognize. One of the most distinctive is the central library, which in the show acts as an alternate-universe Frin
Nostalgia and life lessons in learning to read Chinese Mary Leighton’s post earlier this week about feeling like a child when learning a language made me reflect on my own return to childhood through my learning of Chinese. One challenge of being a kid again linguistically is finding
Keetcha, Sungit, and Incidental Language Learning One day last year I came home from the library with the only Ukrainian and Tagalog language textbooks I could find. I had a very specific goal for those books: my boyfriend and I would learn each other’s heritage language and eventuall
Staying Excited About Language Learning I look at formal classroom learning as the training wheel stage. There comes a point at which those wheels are taken off and you make your wobbly way down the street by yourself. It’s been five years since I sat in a Chinese classroom, and two y
I adore old school paper dictionaries. They’re especially great for learners of Chinese because they force us to connect with radicals and stroke order. (Plus, hunting for that 16-stroke character with the obscure radical always gets the adrenaline going, no?) But, I know that the sto
One of the best things about teaching is realizing how much you don’t know. Every time I teach I’m asked questions that I don’t know the answer to. Sometimes I simply say that I don’t know. Other times I answer with confidence and then lie awake at night wondering whether I’ve led a s
