Last Friday was the St. Patrick's day and I was just at Gongguan, where there are lots of foreigners because NTU is nearby. There was a pub called James Joyce Irish bar also was packed up with Irish people. I was very surprised to see that and I felt very lucky for myself! Below is a photo:
Recently I made a decision that I want to learn Spanish first instead of Italian. Because I have learned French for months and Spanish has many similar grammar and vocabulary rules as French. But I'll still finish my French class until some higher level and then take Spanish courses. I hope I can fit in well. And on the other hand I also want to learn Japanese. I already have the ability of recognizing and pronouncing Japanese Kana, which are Japanese syllabic Japanese scripts and I can read some Kanji (Chinese characters) now. So I may not attend courses, instead, I will buy some language learning books and read them.
We had also finished our linguistics class this week. We had like six or seven weeks for this class, and it was very interesting. We learned about morphology, phonology, syntax...etc. I've always have interest in linguistics, but these studies are actually very difficult so I had to learn harder. Due to time issue we didn't finish our course, but our teacher, Benjamin, had suggested me to read some related books he recommended.
As for picture of the week, I'll write about Shanghai World Expo 2010 for this week and next because there is a lot to write about. What I'm going to talk about today is the most special pavilion that I'd ever visited in the Expo, the Africa Pavilion.
This picture is from Wikipedia.
This pavilion consists of 42 African countries, which interested me because we have little chance to visit these countries in person. Below are some photos taken by myself. I was only 9 years old then so my photography skill can't be worse.
Another reason why I like African countries is we barely know these countries, which means a few of us know about it. And Africa was called as the Dark Continent before because it was very mysterious and dangerous. Take language for an example: Many languages in Africa are pronounced in ways you can't see outside Africa, such as "click consonants"(Google it in case you don't know about this because this is very interesting)! Furthermore, many of the African countries are poor and traditional so it was a very precious chance to see the cultures from these countries. Though I was just nine then I still can tell these countries really did a lot of effort on participating this global exposition. Below are more photos about more countries that most of us haven't heard of! (There's a little many of them so please be patient)
It read "Democratic Republic of Congo"
Many of the countries' names were written in French.
All pictures above were taken 06/09/2010, at Shanghai.
Sincerely,
Melvyn Chou, 23/03/2017.
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