David on Formosa

Today I went to check out some of the campaign activities for the 2008 Taiwan Presidential Election. My first stop was the tent which had recently been set up on a vacant block near Xindian City Hall to promote Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), the KMT candidate. I was told KMT Vice-Presidential candidate Vincent Siew (蕭萬長) will [...]

I saw the characters of 大中至正 taken down from the main gate of Taiwan Democracy Hall last night. Then tonight at 6:30pm the final one of the four characters 自由廣場  meaning "Freedom Square", was put in place. They seemed to spend a lot of time adjusting the right hand part of the 場 into position. [...]

9:37pm, 6 December 2007

4:52pm, 7 December 2007 

5:26pm, 7 December 2007

5:28pm, 7 December 2007
Just before darkness fell on Taipei City this evening two workmen completed the removal of the four characters 大中至正 (dàzhōng zhìzhèng) from the main gate of National Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall (國立臺灣民主紀念館). It was the latest step in the [...]

The Concise English-Chinese Chinese-English Dictionary has been a constant companion on my Chinese language learning journey. The first copy I had of this dictionary was a cloth bound edition that I inherited from my sister (who studied Chinese in high school). It had a price of 8 RMB written inside it. I bought a newer [...]

The sign in the picture above says 豬事如意 (zhūshì rúyì). This sounds the same as the common New Year's saying 諸事如意 (zhūshì rúyì) which means something like "May you get everything you wish for." Except the first character on the sign has substituted 諸 (zhū), which means all or every, with the character for pig [...]

A while back I wrote about Chinese characters, or more precisely the Mandarin pronunciation thereof, being used to represent the Taiwanese language (台語). I recently discovered another interesting example of the reverse: the Taiwanese pronunciation of a character being used to represent a word in Mandarin. 
First, here's a brief language lesson. The word for internet [...]

In Taiwan the English language (英語) is often referred to as Mĕiyŭ (美語), meaning American language rather than English language. Most language schools will use the term Mĕiyŭ in their name rather than Yīngyŭ (英語).
The name of the school whose sign is shown above is Yīnggélán Mĕiyŭ (英格蘭美語). This would translate directly into English [...]

In my Chinese class I have been regularly reading articles from the Guoyu Ribao (國語日報). I have always thought of the Guoyu Ribao as a somewhat anachronistic institution, dedicated to preserving Mandarin Chinese in a form that was spoken in China in the 1930s. This was reinforced during the time I was studying Qibai Zi [...]