I was told that ad business is one of the easiest way for foreigners to earn money in China, but to get inside this business took shorter than I thought (but np money yet).

In the very late evening I sat in McDonalds with ice cream – always eat ice cream in the evening – and right away I was approached by a Chinese guy, later introduced as Steve.

Steve was asked by his boss to prepare an ad in English and it was a problem for him. The ad was about some skin medicine and he already had a draft. He asked to review it and we did with this final effect:

- Lately I really don’t feel very well. I’ve got pimple, ringworms and chapped skin as well.

Moreover, I’ve just got cut in an accident a moment ago.

What should I do?!

- Don’t worry! I have ABC oinment.

When we were sure that the ad will blow competition out of the water Steve wanted to teach me the following sure-fire dialogue in exchange, so I can easily survive in Chinese-only mainland (dialogue originally in Chinese):

- Where is hotel?

- xxx (some answer in Chinese)

- Do you speak English?

- No

- Who speaks?

Then it turned out that Steve was previously studying European history in Latvia and that’s why he can draw contour of Poland better than me.

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This I didn’t expect, that I will speak Russian sooner than Chinese here.

They were both Sevastopol and one even spoke some Polish because he worked here. Main topic – communism good / no good, Ukraine could be like China if it didn’t collapse, etc.

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With her small, black poodle, it was easy to recognize Sherly – at that moment it was the first dog I had seen in Hong Kong. Without a dog, it would still be little problem to recognize Sherly, for she is something like one of its kind.

I own her for seeing how living in HK looks from the inside, tasting first Chinese dish, and even taking some business lessons from her.

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The air-conditioned airport and swift airport train and clean air-conditioned central station hide for almost an hour what Hong Kong really is – a giant glass-house with over 30 degrees and 90% humidity.

Under a sky white like milky glass you start to think of fresh air as kind of luxury. It all sounded like an exotic weather forecast before, but you never know until you go.

And there is this specific smell in the air, like one of mold in the hot wet undergrounds of some buildings. Or maybe it’s smog?

My hostel exceeded the expectations i.e. they knew about Internet reservation and there was no problem to get a room and the room is more or less ok to sleep (but nothing else, so small).

Turned out a sleeping bag was no dead weight after all, for the sheets are hardly clean. But heavy trekking shoes are so far a joke in these conditions.

I need to meet Sherly today and then probably take a train to mainland tomorrow.

To think of Warsaw air to have nearly mountain quality and of my apartment as a luxiorously big space, not bad for one day.

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Ciao:)

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I should have a place to sleep, for the start, so there is one element of chaos less. All the hostels (I’m in backpacking-budget mode, of course) seemed more or less equally disgusting, judging from the reviews, and they are apparently all located in the same two buildings in Kowloon.

I picked Vincent Guest House because at least the service was appraised as friendly. I was considering taking a dorm to be 100% budget, but thought maybe it’s better to take it easy in the beginning, after flying for two days.

It was fun to read all the people coming before me, e.g. Myra, Agnieszka (funny internships they have in DaimlerChrysler).

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I received a visa. Spent some time reading Lonely Planet, too, and settled for this (preliminary) route:

Hong Kong
Guilin and the vicinity
Kunming
Chengdu (from here I count on having a plane)
Shanghai
Beijing

So I basically miss Xi’an, which some of my friends say is a must, and the others consider it touristic trap; but I will still have time to make up my mind.

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In a shape of Wenlin software, with over 10,000 characters and ca. 200,000 words and phrases. Features I find most exciting, from what is visible in the demo, include finding all related characters, displaying order of strokes for the character, and even presenting the evolution that character went through.

But it’s quite pricey! 249$. And again no sales representative in Poland. I will wait and see after return from China.

First found at Joan Biesnecker’s. I was also surprised to find that Supermemo has apparently such a broad international following.

Previous posts: Supermemo for Chinese

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I?m looking for some additional inspiration for China trip. So far the most inspiring is Gary?s story:

http://www.orientaloutpost.com/about.php

Nowadays Gary spends his life travelling China, finding out local artists and distributing their works to all the world by Internet. Before this, he came to China from the States to teach English as a ?break from America? experience. He seems rather happy with his current life, even if it’s not for the money:

It is a labor of love. I once did some math, and realized that for the time I spend, I am making the same as minimum wage in America. But in China, that puts me in “Upper Middle Class”.

That, and I am one of the few people that can say that I truly love my job!

I really love the personal context that his site gives to each of the things presented. That’s the right way to do this business imho.

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I need to use Supermemo for all the Chinese stuff, pinyin, radicals and characters, otherwise it would kill me soon. I had Supermemo 8 and it did fine for the last 10 years or so, but Chinese was too much for it. SM8 can handle just plain text Ascii components. Even Russian was a problem already for all its cyrillic fonts, leave aside Chinese writing.

I thought the newer version will do and I visited Empik and asked them to find me a Supermemo-powered language course. What kind of course? Any course will do. I knew they sell such courses and you can just throw away the course and keep Supermemo, and it will work as a standard stand-alone version. It took them 15 minutes to find it, German mini-conversations, on the bottom shelf. Supermemo seemed like some secret code, hidden away from the public.

German conversations went to the trashcan immediately and I ended up with “Multimedia Supermemo”. Even though name sounded nice, soon I found out that in fact it was not the best version. Not even much better than my previous one, and buggy too. You can compare different versions of Supermemo for yourself here.

In the end, I could type Chinese characters in the RTF component all right, but it seemed that only one such component got stored, no matter how many items I created. Multimedia Supermemo was a waste of money as a result, but not much of it, 20 PLN.

However, at least I knew then that Supermemo 2004 was the best of all Supermemos around and after short hesitation I bought it online here. 39$.

It requires a password to unlock it and register, and I do hope to obtain the password tomorrow, but in the meantime the application will work for some time even without it. It installed quickly, and I launched it. (read more…)

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And in brief, I enjoy it. It?s like discovering the whole new side of the world. Sure the writing presents a challenge, but everything is so different that it?s actually pleasure to explore ? so far.

Writing aside, the sounds seem similar, at least when you are starting from Polish (as someone said, every language is just a subset of Polish). Still we haven?t touched the tonal stuff yet.

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