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misslinguistic

Founder: Meridian Linguistics (Asian Language Data Services).
Spare time: Learning languages, 📸 my drink
Current📍: China
Links and bio ⬇️

Just a little Korean street dog, once abandoned in

Just a little Korean street dog, once abandoned in a cardboard box at a small-town Korean police station, looking out on the Chinese countryside from her perch on the wild Great Wall.

After our hike, she retired to a pillowed seat at a rooftop restaurant, where she drank purified water and nibbled on chuanr.

#workhardtogivemydogabetterlife

A departing friend's bucket list item: to walk the

A departing friend's bucket list item: to walk the central axis of Beijing from the Temple of Heaven to Jingshan Park. We walked through the Forbidden City and Tian'anmen Square, and up to the peak of Jingshan before tucking in to a meal of beer and chuanr (kebabs).

This is for sure a walk to replicate when we can finally have visitors in Beijing! There are way more goodbyes than hellos these days. Hope to see that change.

If you zoom in on the lion doorknocker photo, you will see the following warning scrawled in chalk: "外人禁入，狗咬自负”. Essentially a more poetic "Beware of Dog".

I DISTINCTLY remember my college boyfriend saying,

I DISTINCTLY remember my college boyfriend saying, after I came home from a full Saturday in Butler library studying Russian conjugations, "but what are you going to do with Russian?"

Well, it turned out, what I was going to do was going to study it for two years in college, win a national essay competition for foreigners studying Russian at the intermediate level (dusts shoulder), spend the next decade forgetting almost everything I learned while I focused on Mandarin, decide to revive it by spending a month in Ukraine, fall in love with Ukraine and meet people who turned out to be very inspiring and influential to my career, forget Russian for another two years while I focused on Mandarin, then finally decide to come back to Russian seriously with the sole goal of improving my reading comprehension in order to read the news.

By the way, people often overestimate the time needed to learn to READ another language, compared to learning to SPEAK another language. There are several languages I can now read at an intermediate level but not speak at even a beginner level, after about 1 year each of casual study (although of course Chinese was a glaring exception..it took me many years to learn to read!)

So if you're interested in getting access to another language and culture, don't be put off by the size of the task of learning to read! In my opinion, the ROI on just one year of learning to read a new language is well worth the few hours a week away from Netflix.

Do you read the news in other languages? Has it helped you to understand the world in a new way?

Since it is now irrevocably Spring in Beijing I sh

Since it is now irrevocably Spring in Beijing I should probably hurry to post my pics from two weeks ago in Tianjin. It was a gorgeous snow, so peaceful to watch from the coziness of our hotel room.

We were taking it easy, I read a gripping book about the China-Russia border (The Amur River, by Colin Thubron) and finally watched Sky Castle (Korean drama about elite families engaging in intrigue to get their children into a top medical school - not all kdramas are about romance!)

What are you reading/watching these days?

A photo dump from recent Beijing days (but not too

A photo dump from recent Beijing days (but not too recent, because you know I like to keep stalkers on their toes 😇)

This is Beijing: worshiping at the altar of Eileen Gu, ubiquitous red banners reminding neighborhood residents to be harmonious, a packed Ukrainian restaurant, a night out dancing to Chinese 80's music, city lights after a great night of jazz, and accompanying 小福 as she makes her social calls around the city.

What does your city look like these days? I miss traveling (outside of China!)

How do you know when you are fluent? Having grown

How do you know when you are fluent?

Having grown up among many immigrant families in the United States, I have always been fascinated by people who can understand a language but not speak it ("sik teng m sik gong" in Cantonese) or who can write a language but not speak it, or who in general have very uneven language abilities across the main linguistic skill sets.

The more I studied linguistics, the more I realized that having uneven linguistic abilities is the norm rather than the exception.

We all demonstrate this unnevenness, and the more you think about it, the more it seems obvious that it would be so.

I wrote a post in Medium about how this works. Link in bio.

I'm curious...what does fluency mean to you?

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