Dan Chan Magic Man’s Neighborhood

Waiting for the concert to start now. :-P Θ and intermission now Θ so far the city tunes are good. :)

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The holidays are in full effect, so tell us: What's your favorite holiday song? Bonus points if you share it with us!

Here's my top song for the year. I just love it in the old school Xmas style best... ;) 

After so many months of trying to not paint my nails and hoping to let them grow nice and healthy to no avail, i decided to give up. Cuz my big toe nails were still growing 'crumpled' anyhow. :( no amount of buffing made them grow nice anyway. :(

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First attempt at tea egg. I'll need to boil them longer and break the shell more! They turn out more white than tea color!

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Been following the massive furore about the way Chinese is taught in school as our Mother tongue. 

Looking at the drastic ways that parents and kids themselves have taken to learn / avoid Chinese is certainly an eye opener. There are those who:

• Copy in class
• Emigrate to avoid Chinese
• Skip their exams and Chinese classes
• Rote learn and memorize 

Mind you, parents are the one who claimed to have done all these or encourage the kids to doing so, to lessen the kids' misery in learning such a difficult language...

I didn't use to like Chinese this much, in fact, for a period of time in my younger years, I would say that I dislike the learning of Chinese. Thankfully, that was just a very brief spell of 1 year in my teens - which I put it down to studying for the wrong exam and getting very low marks - resulting in me scrapping a miserly pass. 

Growing up in a Chinese speaking family, there is just no way for me not to touch that language. My mother was an excellent "story book reader" and  I loved how we used to borrow books from the library and how there was this annual series of Chinese story books passed around by the school, that she would read to me and my brother. I sucked at recognising those Chinese characters then, and I ain't the best now either. But her reading the stories, especially the ones about ancient China and all the heroes made Chinese history so interesting to us. Subconsciously, I actually remembered them and they do come in very useful during TV shows when you need to know the timeline and dynasty changes. ;) 

Then there was my dad, who was a better dialect speaker, but a good "story teller". His yarns were always so colorful and his love for all Chinese programs meant that we got to watch copious amount of telly without being nagged (so long we finished our homework)... ;) 

The turning point when I really re-liked Chinese again was in my teenage years, about half my life ago. That was also the time my liking for it was the lowest. Then, my ECA seniors got into this manga craze, reading loads of manga at any free time. Their like for these manga got so intense that they decided to set up a locker to exchange manga with one another and they let us into this little world. I wasn't too keen then, but when I saw what my senior drew, copying the manga, I was hooked. 

This was that set of translated manga that actually changed my whole Chinese outlook and my grades. I went from D to A, all because of it, and it also made me started appreciating Chinese New Year (since I actually had the luxury of time to whack the whole series of translated manga then. 

Presenting... "Fushigi Yuugi" by Watase Yuu.

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Fy

Because the art work and the plot was so interesting, it made me actually started asking my mom about the words and also started me on checking dictionary. I actually got to learn how to read traditional Chinese because of this since the translation was done by the Taiwanese publisher. 

Then came the discovery of Chinese pop music, where everyone in class was singing or passing Chinese lyrics around to be copied. That was before the advent of internet and Chinese word processor software. So everyone of us would listen to radio hard, copy the lyrics of the songs as much as possible by hand, before bringing it to class to be corrected and merged with one another. I still have my old lyrics books to these days. 

By then, my Chinese teacher had noticed that I love to write journals, so she decided to just let me submit my journals in Chinese to get me writing fluently. I do not write as well, of course, compared to English, but there are nuances in Chinese that are just missing when one writes in English. The "feel" is just different. 

By and by, my Chinese got better and I actually started scoring and by then, most learning pains were forgotten till late when the newspapers started publishing the horror learning stories of so many.

I think, it is a pity for one to hate the language of their heritage and their Mother tongue. Learning anything is not easy, but really, it certainly will not help when people around you get you down and then make the environment harder for learning. I am glad that I met enough people who pushed me in the right direction in my early years. 

A good rainy day to be in front of the PC and planning a trip to Japan next year... for my bdae! ;)

After a whole morning of intense heat, it's finally gonna rain. So here's my tube of vegemite doing double duty.

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Though today isn't Thanksgiving for SG like in USA, it is still a public holiday, courtesy of our Malay SG folks. 

Fu (31)

Looks like a bunny to me. :) think it's time for a nap. I love a long restful weekend. :)

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