What ever sky's above me, I've a heart for any fate

Do you believe in free will?

Do you believe in free will? I do -unreservedly. I believe absolutely in my own free will and my own power to accomplish- and that is the belief that moves mountains. Watch me realize my lifelong ambition to retire at 45 age in no worries about future living and have lots of time to travel with my husband(interspersed with nourishing meals and beautiful sceneries)

Scottish Ceilidh Dancing

Well strictly, it was not a really true dance, we dress in no evening gown or kilt but jean. However, I do enjoy it. The dancing easy to learn and fun to do! We were arranged with one "caller" who explained the dance and walked it though before music stars and then will call a few helpful instructions the first few times through.
All dances are made up of a number of formations- for example "walk foward for 4 steps" or " circle aroun and back" and each dance is danced a number of times (often eight). At a ceilidn, dances are often walked through slowly before being danced but then, the dancing is faster and faster, livelier and livelier...I was astonished how hard it's not be end up dancing!

Crab Day - How to cook crabs

You will not believe it. One crab is priced at one pond only here. So we bought four weightly crabs. Then found it's not easy to handle them. They are too big (bigger than any crab I have seen before) and still alive. I know there is no need to panic, but their claws are really threatening.

Cooking crabs is easy, have one inch of water in the pot in which crabs are to be cooked. Add spring onion, 3 tablespoons of yellow wine, ginger and vinegar and 2 tablespoons of salt to this. Leave crabs cooking for 15 minutes. Then the exciting monent was coming...

Do speakers of different language think in different ways?

Compare and contrast three grammatical features of Chinese and English. Using these as evidence, state whether you agree with the opinion that speakers of different language think in different ways. Justify your opinion.

This question will be approached from two aspects, first to elaborate the similarities and differences on some grammatical features of Chinese and English, and then to justify if there is a systematic relationship between the grammatical categories of the language a person speaks and how that person both understands the world and behaves in it.

Comparing and contrasting languages is not easy task. This essay will look at the two languages from their tone, sentence structure, and grammatical tense.

To begin with, Chinese is tonal, i.e. different tones distinguish words otherwise pronounced alike. The number of tones varies in different forms of Chinese, but Mandarin has four tones: a high tone, a rising tone, a tone combining a falling and a rising inflection, and a falling tone. However, English is a stress-timed language, i.e., certain syllables in each word get a relative loudness during pronunciation while the others do not.
Furthermore, Chinese is analytic. Analytic languages often express abstract concepts using independent words and have stricter and more elaborate syntactic rules. Comparing the Chinese to the English, one sees that while English itself is fairly analytic, for example,

"My friends all want to eat eggs."
我 所有 的 朋友 都 要 吃 鸡 蛋
wǒ suǒyǒu de péngyou dōu yào chī jī dàn
I all possessive friend(s) all want eat chicken egg(s)

Lastly, English use a grammatical tense to express the time at which an event is described by a sentence. However, Chinese lacks inflection to indicate tense, i.e. tense is not expressed anywhere in the verb. When needed for comprehension, suffixes may be used to denote some of this feature. For example, the suffix –le is a sign of the perfect tense of the verb.

Now the differences have been shown between Chinese and English, whether it affects speakers’thinking way will be discussed next. Language is obviously a form of communication. But what is it exactly? Communication, by definition, involves two participants at least, i.e. two brains. Thus, it is a process between two brains with a purpose of transmitting a pattern. The pattern could be a scene or a story, if we are “telling” something, or it could be a brief, if we are trying to “convince” of something, or a concept, if we are “explaining” something, but anyway, the pattern already exists in our brain. Language is just a tool which is used to transmit the pattern and with grammatical features for clearer expression. So that’s why all people have occasional difficulty expressing themselves due to constraints in the language (constrains of “tool”), and are conscious that the language is not good for what they mean. Perhaps they say or write something, and then think “that’s not quite what I meant to say” or perhaps they cannot find a good way to explain a concept they understand. This makes it clear that thinking way is not a speaking way, because one can understand a concept without being able to express it in words, and language cannot change thought. In one word, that speakers think in different ways is not because they speak in different languages. It maybe because of the different personal experiences, or knowledge, but it’s beyond the scope of this essay to discover in depth.

Bibliography

C. C. Chu (1983), A Reference Grammar of Mandarin Chinese for English Speakers; http://www.answers.com/topic/Chinese-language;
J. F. De Francis (1984), The Chinese Language, http://www.answers.com/topic/Chinese-language;
English grammar, http://www.answers.com/topic/english-grammar;
Piero Scaruffi (1998), Thinking about Thought, http://www.thymos.com/tat/;
Jim Waldo (2004), Thinking about Objects, http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=85308

Blue Mood - Monday, 11st Sept 2006

Dear Diary,
Except for my cooking skill, there is no improvement , especially for my English :(
it isn't the work that is going to be hard here. It's the play. Half the time I don't know these whites are talking about. I am a foreigner here and I don't understand the language. It's a miserable feeling!
I always believe the learning is more out of the class/school than being in. By the end of the day, learning a language is to learn a culture, the culture you are learing happen to be consistant rather than broken likeours. On the contrary , I am afraid culture shock will be hitting me slowly although I felt I are well prepared, my decison will lead me to re-evaluate my perceptions, values,philosophies and religions.

P.S. I've just been reading this letter over and it sounds pretty uncheerful. But you see today is blue Monday.

We are tomorrow's past

There is a term called "the moment of truth",the moment of truth in our life is the present, as the past has gone,it is dead, and the future is not coming,which is unborn, in our world of mind, we always go back and forth to what has happened and what is going to happen to ourself which in fact is meanless, while we often skip the moment of truth in our life, in this way we lost the true lifelyhood, the truth lively life is just here and now in you, and you just do not feel/enjoy it and simply waste it by keep investing your the energy of your life into the future which you thought you can manage through, such future becomes your hopeless hope to keep you going and for you to live in, and such attitude will only leads to either the vanity of being "sucess" or the "failure", while you lost all and only lively true rich moment of present of your life, you just simply ignore it.

The moment of truth for you NOW is when you read my BLOG, you feel, reflect, sense your own feelings...

we are so far apart , we can not see each other, we do not know each other, but we can feel each other when you reading line by line, reading between posts, feel what you feel at this second, the whole world is yours and your are the whole word, in this world, Just feel what you feel at this second!

Fire Alarm - 6th September 2006

Dear Diary,
As we are approaching the end of the pressional program, you should see the way this college is studying! We are required to finish a 1200-word essay by this Friday and make a big presentation Next Wednesday. No less than 15 minutes' ( 30 slides at least) PPT need to prepared in the next 5 days. I plan to write what I want to introduced down, in the slides directly. That's much easier and accurate than trying to keep it in my head. :P

So... nothing occurs to me at the moment but studying

Oh, dear! there's a fire alarm.
......



I am back...We waited in coldness and darkness for 15 mintures. Again, it was not a real fire.
Anyway, better than a real fire.


Good night.
Jessie