Aka Dogbait Junior, is off to China in a few weeks in an attempt to instil the Queen’s English into students in the city of Wuhu about 300k’s west of Shanghai. Hopefully his graduates won’t end up on this blog!
I visited him this week at his hideaway in Apollo Bay about 2 hours west of OG where I helped him setup a blog so that he can chronicle his exploits to family and friends over the next year or so. His literary skills are far better than mine and I would recommend his missives to all and I’m sure we will be entertained with his usual wit and humour.
His blog is still in development stage but I’m sure my efforts won’t be in vain. Stick him on your reading list and give him some encouragement.
Well… If he would just become Johnny Wuhuhoo! then I might tune in…
Speaking of troblems. My brother had some troblems once with his underpits… Seems his deoderant wasn’t up to snuff.
And then he once lost his gription in a game of B-ball… All that sweat on the court…
I grew up with a Mother that was trying to learn English as a second language, and I remember the day she explained “Oh, I got troblems!” No, Mom, you can’t have troblems, you can have trouble or you can have problems, but there is no such word as “troblems.” Or the day she was having a conversation with a friend about hose. She explained that Sears had hose on sale. Her friend said “Good, I need new hose!” So my mother went on to explain that the hose come in 50 foot lengths, but you could cut them to size. Her friend looks totally confused since she’d never seen stockings that could be cut to length. It was only then she realized my mother was talking about garden hoses, and she was talking about stockings.
I also remember being afraid to answer questions in school because when you grow up in a family that speaks three languages, you never know if the word for something familiar was English, Spanish, or Japanese. My sympathy goes to the Chinese students who are going to learn a very difficult language, and to your brother who is going to have to explain away all the meanings to words that sound identical, but have different meanings.
Nothing wrong with “troblems”. I might be using that one in future. We had a Polish lady as a neighbour when I was a lad and she was telling my mother that she went into town and got the “shits”. My mother eventually worked out that she went into to buy some sheets. Mum ended up rolling about the floor in hysterics.
You get to understand how difficult English is a language when you are close to a 6 year old who is learning her ABC and you try to explain why one word can have several meanings and that can depend in what country your live.
Please inform him that he may have trouble accessing his blog from inside China. The gov’t controls the internet and block’s access to servers like blogspot and wordpress. A known “work around” is to have him use an anonymous proxy.
I don’t think I’ve mentioned it anywhere but in the wee hours of my mornings I teach English over the internet to students in Korea using Skype. I am employed by an English Academy out of Seoul.
BTW- Skype is an excellent method for him to remain in telephonic contact with his friends and family back home. It also allows video calls to other Skype members if you are using a high-speed connection. Skype-to-Skype calls are free and are extremely cheap if you call a landline. Not trying to spam for Skype but it is a good service and a good value.
I’d forgotten about the China censorship. You spoke once about going to teach English in Korea but I thought it fell through. I know about Skype too.
Thanks for the heads up on Johnny Wuhu
Not sure if he can blog in China. Ways and means, of course.
Well I am the first none family poster on the new blog. When you’re in China you now have a place to stay.
June – Good on you. We’ll be travelling with a group and will be a long way from where Johnny will be living so won’t catch up.