A new tradition: yellow card questions

So, today I'm missing my third estimate of when I would finish grading exams. If I lower my standards, I may still finish tomorrow. In celebration of that realization, I am blogging.

You may recall that I have recently started a couple traditions, which seem to be suffering some continuity problems. Well, in the spirit of lowering my standards, I am starting a new tradition, and this one is easy, so if I can't do this one, I will officially be a failure, and you can banish me to Hainan forever. (Pretty please? Seriously, that used to be a not uncommon punishment, back in the good old days.)

And now for the show! In this activity, I draw a random question from the stack of conversation question cards that I use for my oral English classes, and then I answer it! Isn't that exciting!

So, the "yellow card" question for today is:
"If you could have any car you wanted, which car would you choose?"

Well, that one's a lame question. Especially here, since a car would be pretty pointless. (Where would I drive it? Where would I park it?) Oh, and apparently I'm not allowed to get a driver's license, since I'm color blind, and according to the legal code here, color blind drivers are unsafe, perhaps because (it is said) they can't tell the difference between the red and green lights. (1) I can tell the difference between red and green lights. I've never had a problem with it in the US. (2) People here don't pay much attention to the lights anyway.

Um, so where was I. Oh, if I could have any car... I would want a car that is clean enough that I wouldn't feel wasteful driving long distances, and small enough that parking wouldn't be too hard. The main reasons I might prefer a car over a moto is for long drives, or in bad weather. Although the convenience of being able to carry around more than a backpack amount of stuff would be nice too.

In view of these factors, I think I choose a Smart Car. Plus it's super cute, isn't it. I would like to show you the picture of Slowlane and Jeorge with one we saw in Berlin, but that photo is not digital, and is sitting in a box in San Diego. Please imagine it. Thanks.

Tune in next week for the next episode of The Yellow Card Question!

新的习惯

我是英语老师，我的英文课之两门是写作课。我告诉了那个学生，常常用英文为交际写是很有用的习惯。还有，我让他们日志的作业，每个星期用英文写一页。

我的中文名字是“力行”，有“身体力行”的意思，是说，内容说的话努力实践。因为我应该练习写汉语，所以我每个星期用中文写一件文章。因为我的中文很差，我不能写那么长的文章，但是跟小的开始，越来越长，我希望能学会写不错的中文文章。

我家人都不会看中文看得懂，我要让他们看得懂我的话。所以我翻译到英文。因为我也想练习西班牙语，我也到西班牙语翻译我的文章。这样可以做平行的语言资料库。

Soy profesor de inglés, y dos de mis clases de inglés son clases de escritura. Les dije a aquellos estudiantes que escribir en inglés a menudo por communicación es hábito muy bueno. Además, les di tarea de escribir un diario en inglés, una página cada semana.

Mi nombre chino es "Lixing", que refiere a un modismo "cuerpo trabajar duro". Es decir, haga esfuerzos si mismo según lo que predique. Porque yo tambien debo practicar escribir chino, voy a escribir un ensayo en chino cada semana. Porque mi chino falta mucho, no puedo escribir un ensayo tan largo, pero con empezar pequeño y lentamente seguir mas largo, espero que pueda aprender a escribir ensayos buenos.

Mi familia no pueden entender chino, y quiero dejarles entender mis palabras. Entonces, voy a traducir a inglés. Porque también quiero practicar español, voy a traducir mis ensayos a español tambien. En esa manera puedo hacer un pequeño corpus lingüístico paralelo.

I'm an English teacher, and two of my English classes are writing classes. I told those students that frequent writing in English for communication is a very good habit. In addition, I gave them homework of writing a journal in English, one page a week.

My Chinese name is "Lixing", which refers to the maxim "body work hard", meaning diligently practice what you preach. Because I also need to practice Chinese, I'm going to write a post in Chinese each week. Because my Chinese is pretty limited, I can't write a very long essay, but by starting small and slowly writing longer, I hope I can learn to write decent Chinese posts.

My family can't read chinese, and I want to let them understand my words, so I will translate into English. Because I also want to practice Spanish, I will also translate into Spanish. This way I can make a small parallel linguistic corpus.

Spring break?

How about a Spring break. Is it time yet?

That word again

I'm sure there's a good word for it. It kind of feels like you're saying weltanshauung or bremsstrahlung, but not meaning either of those things. Something like foreboding, but scarier.

Teaching college kids is like giving class presentations three times a week. With grading. And when the class is boring, or the explanation unclear, or the assignments too difficult, they're frustrated or angry at you their instructor. And that's not very fun for anyone. And linguistics is supposed to be fun. At times like these I want to return my contract and 85 bucks a week, and return to my garden on the slope of South Mountain. The students deserve better than this, and I can't deliver.

What's the word for

that vague premonition of impending utter calamity?

A linguistic puzzle

I gave my students the assignment of find Google search strings with one asterisk (like '"the * ran"') that would catch results where all the words in the wild card slot were of the same part of speech. So for example, many students used something like '"the * ran"' for catching nouns. (There is a wrinkle that recently Google changed how they interpret the asterisk, so that now it can match more than one word. Please ignore those results.)

Well, one student came up with the pattern '"he talked *"' for catching adverbs. Now, of course that slot could be filled with an adverb, but always? or even most often? I had expected 'about' or 'with' to show up most, but if you look at the results, in nearly all the results, you do indeed get an adverb in the wildcard slot, and 'about' comes right after. What gives? Why do people so consistently slip an adverb between 'talked' and 'about'?

I'm baffled.

This just in from the front

I have survived my first hour of teaching college students. I did not have to send any of them to stand outside.