Only in Malaysia: Send you back..

Only in Malaysia
By LYNNE MCGREADY

ALLOW me to begin this article by defining the word “mistake.”

Mistake - “An error or fault resulting from defective judgment, deficient knowledge, or carelessness.”

Language “mistakes” in Malaysia, and their causes, have distressed me during my eight years in this wonderful country.

Let’s evaluate the “causes” of these language mistakes, shall we?

Are these errors due to “defective judgment”.I think not! Are we, in this country, “deficient” in our knowledge? I can hear a resounding “NO!” from Malaysians all around the world. Well, then this leaves “carelessness” as the cause. Ah, now there is a “kind of hush, all over the world, tonight” ... But I digress.

I have made a list of words and expressions common to Malaysians. Sometimes, I’m not sure whether I should work myself to death to try and change these mistakes or simply start using them myself. I believe their use has become habitual.

I know that many a Malaysian language “guru” has taken up the gauntlet against these expressions and errors. I am simply encouraging them to persevere until a change is finally made.

Follow you home. My first encounter with this expression was in a small town in Perak. My host wanted to tell me that she was going to drive me back to my hotel. Instead, she said: “Lynne, don’t worry I will follow you back to the hotel.” Had our plans changed? Was I going with someone else? Would she be following us in her car? I asked: “Our plans seem to have changed. Who will I be going with?” I was reassured that our plans remained unchanged and I did not pursue the use of expression, (after all she was being kind enough to drive me around her hometown.)

However, eight years since this incident, I am still being “followed home” or “followed to the airport” or “followed to work” in the same car!

Send you back. A very similar experience, but this confused me even more the first time I heard it. This time I thought “not only are my staff going to ‘send’ me with someone else, but we are also going ‘back’ – but back to where? Was I going back to Australia, my apartment, back in time?” I had no idea, until someone explained that “back” meant, “Home of course!” (The face was reading, “Idiot Mat Salleh!”). Got it! So the word “back” in Malaysia means home, right?

Borrow me some money. Admittedly, a few people have “borrowed me” a few ringgit to buy a drink or lunch in the food court. However, wouldn’t they have preferred to just “loan” me the money? Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, can we please either: Lend people money e.g. “Ki, can you lend me RM5 please? I will pay you back tomorrow.” “No way, Lynne! You still owe me RM1 from last month.” Borrow money from people e.g. “Ki, may I borrow RM5 please? I will pay you back tomorrow.” “Sure. I can lend you RM10. I am feeling rich at the moment.”

Bring and take. (Let’s not forget “took”). I once had a conversation that went a little like this: “Lynne, if we go to the meeting this Friday, let’s bring our laptop.”

The sentence structure is wrong. When you are looking at or viewing the movement of something from the point of its arrival, use “bring.” e.g. When you visit my home this weekend, please don’t bring me chocolates. When we are looking at or viewing the movement of something from the point of departure, use “take.”e.g. Whenever I go to the Dewan Philharmonic, I must take my shawl. It can get very cold inside the hall.

Open and close the lights. I do understand the issue of language interference. For example, in Malay we say “buka lampu” and “tutup lampu” so a direct translation would be “open and close the light.” However, if we know that it’s not the same in English, shouldn’t we try and make the change? I think we should.

Last time, Kuala Lumpur was such fun. “It still is!” I respond, but what is this “last time” you’re referring to? The 1950s, 60s or the 70s? Let’s be more specific with the last times we are referring to.

“We want to spend you lunch.” Thank you! I would love to have lunch with you and you can spend your money to buy the lunch this time, but please don’t spend me. We spend money, not people. Besides, why would you pay for lunch with something as priceless as me?

“Do you take beef, Lynne?” “I’m sorry? Take it where? The zoo, perhaps?” Well, yes I do like to eat the occasional steak when I can, but I’ll eat it right here at the table, thanks.

“See first.” My first encounter with this expression caused my head to spin and I mean literally. I was in a meeting with my team and I asked one of them if they would like to lead a particular project. Her response was “See first”. I turned around to look and there was nothing or no one there! Well, perhaps, you wanted to think about it, dear friend, but please don’t wait too long, okay? Meanwhile, I’m changing my glasses so I can see first better.

In conclusion, I know that there are many books about the common mistakes made by Malaysians in speaking English. I have also often asked myself if I am being too pedantic about the incorrect use of “follow” being a standard in Malaysian conversation.

However, my fear is that many teachers not only continue to ignore these errors, but also inject them into their students, meaning there will always have to be folks like me writing long articles to tell them “not to say that.”

We all know every country has its own local expressions and slang for English conversation. Coming from Australia, I know this all too well.

However, I feel it’s also essential to know the difference between local and common English usage, or we risk not being understood or taken seriously by our foreign counterparts. In short, shouldn’t we keep our P’s and Q’s for international conferences, and save our wah’s and lah’s for the coffee shops? See first, and let me know ah.


-The Star

How To Improve Your English Language

Time and again... I've been asked this kind of question...
So... here are few steps to be taken to improve your English Language.


How To Improve Your English

Learning English (or any language for that matter) is a process. You are continually improving your English and the following "How to" describes a strategy to make sure that you continue to improve effectively.




Remember that learning a language is a gradual process - it does not happen overnight.

Define your learning objectives early: What do you want to learn and why?
Make learning a habit. Try to learn something every day. It is much better to study (or read, or listen to English news, etc.) 10 minutes each day than to study for 2 hours once a week.

Remember to make learning a habit! If you study each day for 10 minutes English will be constantly in your head. If you study once a week, English will not be as present in your mind.

Choose your materials well. You will need reading, grammar, writing, speaking and listening materials

Vary your learning routine. It is best to do different things each day to help keep the various relationships between each area active. In other words, don't just study grammar.

Find friends to study and speak with. Learning English together can be very encouraging.

Choose listening and reading materials that relate to what you are interested in. Being interested in the subject will make learning more enjoyable - thus more effective.

Relate grammar to practical usage. Grammar by itself does not help you USE the language. You should practice what you are learning by employing it actively.
Move your mouth! Understanding something doesn't mean the muscles of your mouth can produce the sounds. Practice speaking what you are learning aloud. It may seem strange, but it is very effective.

Be patient with yourself. Remember learning is a process - speaking a language well takes time. It is not a computer that is either on or off!
Communicate! There is nothing like communicating in English and being successful. Grammar exercises are good - having your friend on the other side of the world understand your email is fantastic!

Use the Internet. The Internet is the most exciting, unlimited English resource that anyone could imagine and it is right at your finger tips.


source: http://esl.about.com/library/howto/htimprove.htm

Your / You're

Your/You're

After a few text messages with a friend, I received one that read "Your funny". I wondered what she meant - Your funny face? Your funny smile? Your funny feet? Of course, what she meant to say was "You are funny". To use the contraction correctly, it should be "You're" (or in a text message, say "u r".

Remember, your is possessive. It describes the word or words immediately following it.

For example:

Your experience, your confidence, your hair, your nose.

You're is a contraction that means 'you are'.

For example:

You're the right person for this job. Please give me a call when you're next in Singapore.



source: shirleytaylor.com

A Hotel Made Out Of Sand

photo from photobucket.com

‘Made of’ and ‘made out of

By FADZILLAH AMIN


COULD you explain the difference between “made of” and “made out of”?

For example, should it be “The tiara is made of gold” or “The tiara is made out of gold”? What is the difference?

My second question is about the word “circa”. How should this word be used in a sentence or caption?

– Jessie, Kuala Lumpur

1. Both expressions – “made of” and “made out of” – mean the same thing, but “made of” is more commonly used. “Made out of” is sometimes used when something is made out of an unusual substance. Here are some examples:

“A hotel made out of sand in England”

(http://www.hotel-blogs.com/guillaume_thevenot/2008/07/a-hotel-made-ou.html)

“Fully recyclable, the bike made out of cardboard”

(http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article4221806.ece)

2. “Circa” is a Latin word meaning “about” or “approximately” and often used before a date. It is more often used in captions than in sentences, where one can use the English word for it.

An example of its use in a caption is given in the Oxford English Dictionary:

“A curious photograph of a rustic family at work, circa 1390” (1861 National Rev. Oct. 307)

Sometimes “circa” is just abbreviated to “c” or “ca”.

source: thestar.com.my

Was or Were?

None was or were?

By FADZILLAH AMIN


WHICH is the correct answer for each of the sentences below? Can you explain why?

a) Don’t drink the water unless it (is boiled/was boiled).

b) None of the men (was/were) there.

c) When the firemen arrived at the scene, the shophouses (were/had been) burned to the ground.

d) The train to Kuala Lumpur (arrives/is arriving) in half an hour.

e) Nothing but rain and clouds (is/are) in the sky.

f) He washes his hands prior to (serve/serving) his customers.

– Seng Kong



a) The correct sentence is “Don’t drink the water unless it is boiled.”

Here, “boiled”, the past participle form of “boil”, is actually an adjective and indicates the state of the water. So it is used with the simple present tense verb “is”, and the sentence has a similar form to “Don’t drink the water unless it is clean.”, for example.

You can also use “boiled” before the noun, as in “boiled water”.

If you want to use “boiled” as part of a verb in your sentence, you could use the present perfect passive tense, as in “Don’t drink the water unless it has been boiled.”, which doesn’t indicate when it was boiled.

You can also use the past tense passive “was boiled”, but you’ll have to indicate a time, e.g. “Don’t drink the water unless it was boiled less than 24 hours ago.”

b) In British English, you use a singular verb in “None of the men was there.” in a formal style, and a plural verb “None of the men were there.” in an informal style.

If “none of” is followed by an uncountable noun, a singular verb is used, e.g. in “None of the fear was left in her.”

c) The correct sentence is “When the firemen arrived at the scene, the shophouses had been burned to the ground.”

The past perfect tense “had been burned” (here it is in the passive form) is used to indicate a time before another past time, i.e “ When the firemen arrived ...” The simple past tense “were burned” (also in the passive form here) is not used.

“Burned”, by the way, is the American English spelling for the British English “burnt”.

d) Both are correct. You can use the simple present tense or the present continuous tense to talk about a future event that is part of a timetable.

e) The correct sentence is: “Nothing but rain and clouds are in the sky.”

If the subject is a phrase consisting of “nothing but” followed by a noun, the verb agrees with the noun. If “nothing but” is followed by two nouns, whether of the same kind or not, a plural verb is used. In other words, “nothing but” noun phrases follow the usual rules of subject-verb agreement.

In your sentence, there are two nouns after “nothing but” — “rain”, an uncountable noun, and “clouds”, a plural noun. The verb is therefore plural. But let me give examples of some of the possible variations in subject-verb agreement:

i. Nothing but rain is in the sky. (“rain” is an uncountable noun)

ii. Nothing but an aeroplane is seen flying under the clear blue sky. (“aeroplane” is a singular noun)

iii. Nothing but rain and lightning are seen during the storm. (“rain” and “lightning” are both uncountable nouns)

iv. Nothing but an aeroplane and a large bird are seen flying under the clear blue sky. (“aeroplane” and “bird” are both singular countable nouns)

v. Nothing but clouds are seen in the sky. (“clouds” is a plural noun)

f) “He washes his hands prior to serving his customers.” is the correct sentence.

What comes after “prior to” (which means “before”) is a noun or a gerund (an –ing verb acting like a noun) and “serving” here is a gerund.

You can replace the gerund with a noun, in a sentence like “He washes his hands prior to a meal.”

source: thestar.com.my

Decent, Righteous, Noble, Forthright.....

A few good men
By S.H. LOKE


HERE are some words to describe people of distinction.

1. Decent

A decent man honours his word and holds on to his principles.

2. Respectable

We have elected a respectable man to be the chairperson of our committee.

3. Righteous

A righteous person does something because he knows it is morally right.

4. Noble

John is a noble man who always sacrifices his time to help the sick and needy.

5. Just

He is a just man who respects the wishes of others.

6. Considerate

Amy is a considerate neighbour who always parks properly on the driveway.

7. Humble

The humble manager attributed his success to his dedicated team.

8. Straightforward

Sometimes she offends people because she is straightforward, and speaks her mind.

9. Forthright

He is a forthright leader whose opinions are highly respected.

10. Forbearing

Because of his forbearing nature, Adam smiled and remained calm even though he was unjustly accused.

11. Steadfast

We must remain strong and steadfast when we go through a crisis.

12. Tolerant

A mixed marriage can survive if both parties are tolerant of different cultural beliefs and practices.

13. Resilient

She is a tough and resilient woman because she has endured much suffering.

14. Persevering

A persevering person does not give up easily.

15. Stoical

The stoical writer who survived as a prisoner of war was reduced to half her size.

16. Calm

In any emergency it is important to remain calm and level-headed.



source: thestar.com.my

15 Ways on How To Improve Your English Language

Source: http://www.usingenglish.com

1 Start your own English language blog. Even for people who don't have to write in English, writing can be a great way of properly learning the kind of vocabulary you need to describe your own life and interests, and of thinking about how to stop making grammar mistakes. The problem most people have is that they don't know what to write about. One traditional way to make sure you write every day in English is to write an English diary (journal), and a more up to date way of doing this is to write a blog. Popular topics include your language learning experience, your experience studying abroad, your local area, your language, or translations of your local news into English.

2. Sign up for a regular English tip. Some websites offer a weekly or even daily short English lesson sent to your email account. If your mobile phone has an e-mail address, it is also possible to have the tips sent to your phone to read on the way to work or school. Please note, however, that such services are not usually graded very well to the levels of different students, and they should be used as a little added extra or revision in your English studies rather than as a replacement for something you or your teacher have chosen more carefully as what you need to learn.

3. Listen to MP3s. Although buying music on the internet is becoming more popular in many countries, not so many people know that you can download speech radio such as audio books (an actor reading out a novel) and speech radio. Not only is this better practice for your English than listening to English music, from sources like Scientific American, BBC and Australia's ABC Radio it is also free.

4. Listen to English music. Even listening to music while doing something else can help a little for things like getting used to the natural rhythm and tone of English speech, although the more time and attention you give to a song the more you will learn from listening to it again in the future.

5. Read the lyrics to a song. Although just listening to a song in English can be a good way of really learning the words of the chorus in an easily memorable way, if you want to really get something out of listening to English music you will need to take some time to read the lyrics of the song with a dictionary. If the lyrics are not given in the CD booklet, you may be able to find them on the internet, but please note that some lyrics sites deliberately put a few errors into their lyrics for copyright reasons. Once you have read and understood the lyrics, if you then listen and read at the same time, this can be a good way of understanding how sounds change in fast, natural, informal speech.

6. Sing karaoke in English. The next stage after understanding and memorising a song is obviously to sing it. Although some words have their pronunciation changed completely to fit in with a song, most of the words have the same sounds and stressed syllables as in normal speech. Remembering which words rhyme at the end of each line can also be a good way of starting to learn English pronunciation.

7. Only search in English. Switching your search engine to the English language version of msn, yahoo, Google etc. can not only be a good way of practising fast reading for specific information in English, but could also give you a wider choice of sites to choose from and give you an idea of what foreigners are writing about your country and area.

8. Read a book you've already read or seen the movie of in your own language. Although most language learners under Advanced level would probably learn more from reading a graded reader or something from the internet than they would from reading an original book written for English speakers, for some people reading something like Harry Potter in the original can be a great motivator to improve their English. To make this easier for you and make sure that it motivates you rather than just making your tired, try reading a book that you already know the story of. This not only makes it easier to understand and guess vocabulary, but you are also more likely to remember the language in it. If you have not read the book before, reading a plot summary from the internet can also help in the same way.

9. Read a translation into English. Another way of making sure books are easier to understand is to choose a book that was originally translated into English, preferably from your own language. Even if you haven't read the book in your own language, you will find the English is written in a slightly simplified way that is more similar to how your own language is written than a book originally written in English would be.

10. Skip the first ten pages. If you have given up with a book in English or are reading it very slowly, try skimming through the first ten pages or skipping them completely. The start of most books tend to be mainly description and are therefore full of difficult vocabulary and don't have a clear story line yet to help you understand what is happening and to motivate you to turn the next page. If the book is still too difficult even after the introductionary part is finished, it is probably time to give that book up for now and try it again after you have read some easier things.

11. Read a book with lots of dialogue. Opening up books before you buy one and flicking through them to find one with lots of direct dialogue in it has several advantages. If there is less text on the page due to all the speech marks etc, this can make it easier to read and easier to write translations on. Dialogue is also much easier to understand than descriptive parts of a book, and is much more like the language you will want to learn in order to be able to speak English.

12. Read English language comics. Even more than books with lots of dialogue, comics can be easy to understand and full of idiomatic language as it is actually spoken. There can be difficulties with slang, difficult to understand jokes and/ or dialogue written how people speak rather than with normal spellings, so try to choose which comic carefully. Usually, serious or adventure comics are easier to understand than funny ones.

13. Read English language entertainment guides. Nowadays most big cities in the world have an English language magazine and/ or online guide to the movies, plays, exhibitions that are on in the city that week. Reading this in English is not only good value, but it could also guide you to places that English speakers are interested in and where you might hear some English spoken around you.

14. Read English language magazines. Like books, if you can read two versions of the same magazine (Newsweek in your language and in English, for example), that could make understanding it much easier.


15. Have English radio on in the background while you are doing your housework. Even if you are not listening carefully, it will help you get a feel for natural English rhythm and intonation.

When in Rome, do as the Romans do

Written by: JOHN EVANS

GREAT cities of the world have been celebrated not only in essays and full-length books, but also in nursery rhymes, songs and poems.

Famous quotations about great cities are still mostly confined to the ‘old’ European capitals of London, Paris and Rome, even though megacities such as Tokyo, Shanghai, Mumbai and Mexico City have long outstripped them in size and population.

When it comes to proverbs about cities, London only has The streets of London are paved with gold, suggesting that London, with its wealth of easy opportunities, is the place to go if you want to make your fortune. This proverb is associated by many people with the legend of Dick Whittington, the penniless youth destined to become Lord Mayor, who was lured to London by the rumour of streets paved with gold.

Rome outstrips London with several time-honoured proverbs associated with its former grandeur, namely All roads lead to Rome, When in Rome, do as the Romans do, Rome was not built in a day and to Fiddle while Rome burns.

Rome was not built in a day teaches patience and perseverance. A job cannot be done properly if it is done too hastily. Important tasks call for a lot of hard work and take a long time to complete, just as it took centuries for Imperial Rome to be built.

However, this proverb (also occasionally heard in reference to other major cities, particularly Paris) has also often been used as an excuse, whether warranted or not, for delay!

All roads lead to Rome suggests that all ways or methods of fulfilling a specific intention end in the same result. For instance, a number of persons — scientists, for instance — can arrive at one common objective or conclusion by different means. This proverb is often used to defend one’s personal way of doing something or to suggest that no one method is better than another.

The proverb recalls the prime of Imperial Rome, when much of Europe was linked by the unparalleled Roman road system and when Rome dominated all matters cultural. It was said that on whichever road one began a journey, if one kept on travelling, one would finally reach the city of Rome.

The idea that Rome was the centre of the human universe was kept alive after the collapse of the Empire through the Roman Catholic Church, which sited its headquarters at the Vatican and thus endowed the city with the claim of being the spiritual centre of the civilised world.

Similar sayings may be found in many other cultures, including those of China (where all roads lead to Beijing) and Japan (where all roads lead to the palace of the Mikado).




When in Rome, do as the Romans do suggests that when we find ourselves in unfamiliar surroundings, it is good policy to compromise our usual habits and customs and imitate the manners and ways of life practised by the people one is visiting or living with.

The English writer and politician Lord Chesterfield wrote to his son in 1747: “Good breeding, as it is called, is different in almost every country, and merely local; and every man of sense imitates and conforms to that local good breeding of the place he is at.” Despite a shrinking and increasingly homogenised world, Chesterfield’s advice is as relevant today as it was over two-and-a-half centuries ago.

A lesser-known Roman proverb is to Fiddle while Rome burns. It means to do nothing while something important is being ruined or destroyed, and refers to a story about the Roman Emperor Nero, who is said to have played a lyre and sung while he watched Rome burning.

Apart from Rome, the Italian town of Naples is associated with the saying See Naples and die. The idea is that Naples is (or was) the finest city in the world, so having seen it, travellers might as well die, as they will never see anything better.

There is a darker side to this seemingly light-hearted boast, for Naples was once notorious for disease epidemics, and as a result many visitors did die after seeing the city in those days. Whether this proverb was always intended to be ambiguous is a moot point. As Oscar Wilde once noted, “The truth is rarely pure, and never simple”, and this can apply as much to the origins of proverbs and idioms as it can to most other things in the rich tapestry of life.


taken from: http://thestar.com.my/english

Samples of Formal Letters

Looking for samples, examples of formal letters? Here is the website that would really help you:



http://depts.gallaudet.edu/englishworks/writing/main/letter.htm

How To Improve My English Language

1. Read

Read anything English - books, magazines, brochures, catalogs, signboards and everything. If you’ve been accustomed to reading the newspaper in your mother tongue, choose the one in English from now on. Stick to it.

Set yourself a periodical target to achieve. For example, reading 2 books per month. Then, increase the load to 3 or 4 books. Mix the book genres according to your interest. Start slow and you will improve progressively.

Learning a language, especially a language which is foreign to you, is a gradual process. It takes time. Don’t be discouraged with the amount of new vocabs and grammar you learn every day.

2. Write

Write your first sentence in your sketch book, diary, journal, blog and so on. If you’re so scared that someone will see your writing and laugh at it, keep it a secret. Put under your mattress or something. If you blog, assume no one is reading it. Or keep it password-protected. As the time goes by, take your time to review back what you have written for the past 6 months. While the beginning of your ‘writing career’ may sound embarrassing, you will be surprised to see how well you actually can write and how much you have improved.

3. Speak, and don’t be afraid of mistakes

The easiest way to avoid mistake is to stop doing things and this is where people go wrong. They assume that those who make less mistake are the better learners, an assumption which is only true inside the classroom. In real world, people who make mistakes learn faster as the experience taught them invaluable lesson. So, start your English conversation with your parents, siblings, neighbours, classmates and peers. Don’t be intimidated when other people surrounding laugh at your attempt and your mistakes. See the difference after 1 month.

4. Watch English movies without subtitles

Watching English movies or programs without the subtitles sharpen your listening and auditory skills. Begin with those films or documentaries you have not watched before. Listen to what is being said and interpret the meaning of it, either implicitly or explicitly. Later, when you write, try recalling some of the phrases used in the movie and now you have combined your listening skill with your writing skill into one.

5. Join courses

When circumstances are right, pick and join an English course, which is easily available nearby your neighborhood, in schools or even online, where you can learn from the comfort of your own place. There are many levels of courses available and making the right choice seems to be a daunting task. But fret not. You can always discuss with the program provider to make an initial assessment on which level of English competency you have. You can also test yourself to discover what kind of English learner you are here, before proceeding with any English courses.

taken from: http://skorcareer.com.my/blog/5-ways-how-to-improve-your-english/2008/11/05/

Learn and Improve Your English

Hi all...

I am sure all of us want to improve our command of English Language, right?

Here is a website that can help us to improve our English.




http://www.englishpage.com/

Free online English lessons & ESL / EFL resources

Between of To

Sometimes it can be very confusing when to use 'between or 'to'



Here is a simple explanation.



'Between' must be followed by 'and'.



'From' must be followed by 'to'.



For example:



There were between 200 and 300 people at the concert.



The seminar will be conducted from 8 a.m to 10 a.m

alot

So many people write a lot as one word instead of two.

If you do this, ask yourself if you would write a little as alittle.

Of course not. So please don't write alot!

The same goes for in spite of and in fact.




Taken from: Communication for Business by Shirley Taylor

Boring

I often hear people use boring instead of bored. One workshop participant was blatantly honest with me when she said 'My boss made me come here but I didn't want to attend because I think I'm going to be very boring'.

Hmmm... I think she meant she thought she was going to be very bored.

She could only be bored if I was boring!

An example:

The lecture is boring so I am bored.

- Shirley Taylor

Mommy... I'm bored...

As per....

I came across this while reading through Communication for Business by Shirley Taylor;

The usage of "As per..." (Usually found in formal letter writing)

According to Shirley Taylor, it is old-fashioned and overworked. We should not use 'per' in our writing.

Instead of

As per your request.... say 'As you requested'

As per your agreement... say 'As we agreed'

As per your instructions... say 'As you instructed'



well... that's all... hope it's useful for you....

Baguette

Still talking about food... hehe...

Baguette or also known as French bread

A baguette (pronounced /bəˈɡɛt/)

A baguette (pronounced /bəˈɡɛt/) is a specific shape of artisan-style breadcommonly made from basic lean dough, a simple guideline set down by French law, distinguishable by its length, very crisp crust, and slits cut into it to enable proper expansion of gasses and thus formation of the crumb, the white part of bread. The standard diameter of a baguette is approximately 5 or 6 cm, but the bread itself can be up to a meter in length. One baguette typically weighs 250 grams (8.8 oz). It is also known in English as a French stick or a French bread.

Cooking Terminologies

Whenever we go to a fancy restaurant with a fancy menu, don't get intimidated with words appeared before the real food... like... grilled lamb chop, smoked salmon and etc... those words are actually telling you how the food is being cooked...

Let see the real meaning for all those fancy names...

Grilled Salmon

Grilled Chicken

Grilled
This is a more common term that many will already know, even if they don’t often cook. When a recipe requires you to grill a food item, it will basically mean that you need to cook over an open flame, whether it is by gas or charcoal. Obviously the most ideal place to do food grilling is over a grill.

Deep Frying in the process

Frying and Deep-frying
These are terms that are often confused, but they are actually quite different. Frying can be done using a frying pan and with oil or butter, whereas deep-frying on the other hand means that the food needs to be submerged in boiling oil until it is cooked. This can often be seen in fast food chains where the food is placed in a basket and submerged into the boiling oil, often to produce french fries, tender breaded chicken, and funnel cakes.

Sauteing garlic

Sautéing
An alternative to frying is sautéing, to produce strong flavours from your food. To sauté food, cook quickly using a small amount of fat (oil or butter), and use a frying pan to receive best results when using this cooking method.

Broiled Salmon

Broiled
When a recipe calls for the food to be broiled, it means that the food should be cooked by direct exposure to a flame or heat element. You may find the “broil” setting on many ovens, although it is important to place the food on the top rack when using this setting.

miszsensei: broiled n grilled,I just got confused with the definition.. hmmm.. what do you think?

In Europe, broiling is considered virtually synonymous with grilling, but in America, the term "broiling" is usually applied to cooking in an oven, while "grilling" usually denotes the use of an outdoor or indoor grill.

owhh...ok.. now I understand. :)

Then, what about smoked? What's the difference between smoked salmon and grilled salmon??

Smoked

Smoking is the process of flavoring, cooking, or preserving food by exposing it to the smoke from burning or smoldering plant materials, most often wood. Meats and fish are the most common smoked foods, though cheeses, vegetables, and ingredients used to make beverages such as whisky,Rauchbier, and lapsang souchong tea are also smoked.

Now.. fret no more... just go ahead and order what you have in mind confidently...

Crazy English

Letter from China
Crazy English

The national scramble to learn a new language before the Olympics.

by Evan Osnos

Copy&paste from http://www.newyorker.com/


Accompanied by his photographer and his personal assistant, Li Yang stepped into a Beijing classroom and shouted, “Hello, everyone!” The students applauded. Li, the founder, head teacher, and editor-in-chief of Li Yang Crazy English, wore a dove-gray turtleneck and a black car coat. His hair was set off by a faint silver streak. It was January, and Day Five of China’s first official English-language intensive-training camp for volunteers to the 2008 Summer Olympics, and Li was making the rounds. The classes were part of a campaign that is more ambitious than anything previous Olympic host cities have attempted. China intends to teach itself as much English as possible by the time the guests arrive, and Li has been brought in by the Beijing Organizing Committee to make that happen. He is China’s Elvis of English, perhaps the world’s only language teacher known to bring students to tears of excitement. He has built an empire out of his country’s deepening devotion to a language it once derided as the tongue of barbarians and capitalists. His philosophy, captured by one of his many slogans, is flamboyantly patriotic: “Conquer English to Make China Stronger!”

Li peered at the students and called them to their feet. They were doctors in their thirties and forties, handpicked by the city’s hospitals to work at the Games. If foreign fans and coaches get sick, these are the doctors they will see. But, like millions of English learners in China, the doctors have little confidence speaking this language that they have spent years studying by textbook. Li, who is thirty-eight, has made his name on an E.S.L. technique that one Chinese newspaper called English as a Shouted Language. Shouting, Li argues, is the way to unleash your “international muscles.” Shouting is the foreign-language secret that just might change your life.
Li stood before the students, his right arm raised in the manner of a tent revivalist, and launched them into English at the top of their lungs. “I!” he thundered. “I!” they thundered back.
“Would!”
“Would!”
“Like!”
“Like!”
“To!”
“To!”
“Take!”
“Take!”
“Your!”
“Your!”
“Tem! Per! Ture!”
“Tem! Per! Ture!”

One by one, the doctors tried it out. “I would like to take your temperature!” a woman in stylish black glasses yelled, followed by a man in a military uniform. As Li went around the room, each voice sounded a bit more confident than the one before. (How a patient might react to such bluster was anyone’s guess.)

To his fans, Li is less a language teacher than a testament to the promise of self-transformation. In the two decades since he began teaching, at age nineteen, he has appeared before millions of Chinese adults and children. He routinely teaches in arenas, to classes of ten thousand people or more. Some fans travel for days to see him. The most ardent spring for a “diamond degree” ticket, which includes bonus small-group sessions with Li. The list price for those seats is two hundred and fifty dollars a day—more than a full month’s wages for the average Chinese worker. His students throng him for autographs. On occasion, they send love letters.


There is another widespread view of Li’s work that is not so flattering. “The jury is still out on whether he actually helps people learn English,” Bob Adamson, an English-language specialist at the Hong Kong Institute of Education, said. The linguist Kingsley Bolton, an authority on English study in China, calls Li’s approach “huckster nationalism.” The most serious charge—one that in recent months has threatened to undo everything Li has built—holds that the frenzied crowds, and his exhortations, tap a malignant strain of populism that China has not permitted since the Cultural Revolution.

“I have seen this kind of agitation,” Wang Shuo, one of China’s most influential novelists, wrote in an essay on Li. “It’s a kind of old witchcraft: Summon a big crowd of people, get them excited with words, and create a sense of power strong enough to topple mountains and overturn the seas.”

Wang went on, “I believe that Li Yang loves the country. But act this way and your patriotism, I fear, will become the same shit as racism.”
The global headquarters of Li Yang Crazy English holds about two hundred employees (another two hundred work nationwide) and sprawls across four floors of an office building in the southern city of Guangzhou. Li is rarely there. He likes hotels. Even in Beijing, where he shares an apartment with his wife and their two daughters, he often keeps a hotel room nearby so that he can work without distraction. (A third daughter from a previous marriage lives with her mother in Canada.)

For several days this winter, Li and his lieutenants were ensconced in the presidential suite on the top floor of Guangzhou’s Ocean Hotel. The suite was furnished in a modern clubby style: a faux fireplace, white leather couches, a cavernous Jacuzzi, a large wooden model of a schooner. Fresh air was needed. Li had just wrapped up an annual marathon of meetings with managers from around the country, and a dozen young men and women were huddled, heavy-lidded, over laptops. He fiddled with the thermostat and threw open the curtains to reveal a view, from the twenty-sixth floor, of dun-colored apartment blocks and blue-glass high-rises twinkling in the sun.

He sat down on a couch and began explaining to me a list of new projects, including a retail plan that would create, in his words, the Starbucks of English education. “People would get off work and just go to the Crazy English Tongue Muscle Training House and then go back home,” he said. “Just like a gym.”

Li’s name adorns more than a hundred books, videos, audio boxed sets, and software packages, such as the “Li Yang Crazy English Blurt Out MP3 Collection,” which sells for sixty-six yuan—a little more than nine dollars—and his motivational memoir, which costs twenty yuan. He encourages companies to buy the memoir, whose Chinese title translates as “I Am Crazy, I Succeed,” in bulk for employees; orders of a thousand copies or more receive a forty-per-cent discount. (The original title used a word that implied “I Am Psychotic, I Succeed,” but the publishing house rejected it.) Most of Li’s products bear one of his portraits: well groomed, rimless glasses, a commanding grin. He says that he has no idea precisely how many books he has sold over the years. One of his publishers (he has several) estimates that the figure is in the millions.

China has been in the grip of “English fever,” as the phenomenon is known in Chinese, for more than a decade. A vast national appetite has elevated English to something more than a language: it is not simply a tool but a defining measure of life’s potential. China today is divided by class, opportunity, and power, but one of its few unifying beliefs—something shared by waiters, politicians, intellectuals, tycoons—is the power of English. Every college freshman must meet a minimal level of English comprehension, and it’s the only foreign language tested. English has become an ideology, a force strong enough to remake your résumé, attract a spouse, or catapult you out of a village. Linguists estimate the number of Chinese now studying or speaking English at between two hundred million and three hundred and fifty million, a figure that’s on the order of the population of the United States. English private schools, study gadgets, and high-priced tutors vie for pieces of that market. The largest English school system, New Oriental, is traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

Li long ago expanded from language instruction to personal motivation. His aphorisms mingle Mao with Edison and Teddy Roosevelt. Li’s shtick is puckish and animated. He mocks China’s rigid classroom rules, and directs his students to hold his books in the air, face the heavens, and shout in unison—a tactic known in Crazy English and other teaching circles as T.P.R., or total physical response, a kind of muscle memory for the brain. His yelling occupies a specific register: to my ear, it’s not quite the shriek reserved for alerting someone to an oncoming truck, but it’s more urgent than a summons to the dinner table.

Li’s cosmology ties the ability to speak English to personal strength, and personal strength to national power. It’s a combination that produces intense, sometimes desperate adoration. A student named Feng Tao told me that on one occasion, realizing that he had enough cash for tuition to an out-of-town Li lecture but not enough for train fare, “I went and sold blood.” Collect a crowd of those fans and the atmosphere can be overwhelming. “There have been times when I’ve had to run in, or ask someone bigger, a guy, to go pull my daughter out of a crowd that is just pushing so much that I’m scared,” Li’s wife, Kim, an American teacher who met him on a trip to China nine years ago, said. “Those aren’t like a ‘Wow, he’s famous’ moment. Those are like an ‘Oh, God—this is out-of-control famous’ moment.”

Li’s indispensable asset is his voice, a full-throated pitchman’s baritone. He delivers it in an accent of his own creation that veers between Texan and Midwestern, stretched by roomy vowels. He has spent only a few weeks in the United States and Great Britain, but he makes few mistakes. He exudes the restlessness of a performer who has long since mastered his repertoire. Even among professional speakers, who market their indefatigability, he is known for a startling energy level. After Li appeared in Shanghai last fall, as an interpreter for the peak-performance coach Anthony Robbins, Robbins told me, “Usually, I do my translations through headsets and burn through two or three different translators in an hour and a half to two hours—I go onstage for about ten to twelve hours a day—but he lasted the entire day.” Robbins added, “It was really, really extraordinary.”

At times, Li can be grandiose, comparing his business to Oprah’s and claiming that he has sold “billions of copies” of his books. But at others he is self-deprecating, mocking his occasional English flubs or the strangeness of his approach. He knows that these shortcomings reinforce the image he has fashioned: that of the hardest-working man in the study of English, an archetypal Chinese citizen for the twenty-first century.

On the couch at the hotel, Li turned one of our interviews into a lecture for his employees, who crowded around to listen. (Someone recorded it on a video camera.) “How can we make Crazy English more successful?” he asked me, his voice rising. “We know that people are not going to be persistent, so we give them ten sentences a month, or one article a month, and then, when they master this, we give them a huge award, a big ceremony. Celebrate! Then we have them pay again, and we make money again.”

He turned toward the assembled employees and switched to Chinese: “The secret of success is to have them continuously paying—that’s the conclusion I’ve reached.” Then back to English: “How can we make them pay again and again and again?”
In late January, China faced its worst winter weather in half a century. The blizzards coincided with the travel weekend for Lunar New Year, the most important family holiday in the Chinese calendar. The havoc was unprecedented; at a train station in Guangzhou, hundreds of thousands of stranded travellers were sprawled in the streets around the terminal.
Still, some seven hundred adults and children managed to make it to a college campus in the southern city of Conghua for Li Yang’s Crazy English Intensive Winter Training Camp. In a typical travel tale, one ten-year-old boy told me that he journeyed by car for four days, with his older brother at the wheel.

The camp had a military motif: supervisors dressed in camouflage, with megaphones, escorted students in formation around the campus. Li’s face could be seen on oversized posters everywhere, accompanied by English phrases. Above the stairs to the cafeteria: “Have you thought about whether you deserve the meal?” Along the plaza where they lined up before lectures: “Never let your country down!” Above the doorway leading into the arena: “At least once in your life, you should experience total craziness.”

Each student received a red backpack filled with books and a matching jacket emblazoned with the words “2008 International Elite Club.” Shortly before nine o’clock on opening day, the students filed into the arena. It was unheated and frigid, like their dormitories. (The previous night, I had slept in a full set of clothes and a ski hat.) In his teaching, Li associates physical toughness with the ability to speak English. At one point this winter, he announced a new campaign for “physical intelligence and ability,” and posted photographs on his blog of himself on a treadmill.

A long red-carpeted catwalk sliced through the center of the crowd. After a series of preppy warmup teachers, firecrackers rent the air and Li bounded onstage. He carried a cordless microphone, and paced back and forth on the catwalk, shoulder height to the seated crowd staring up at him.

“One-sixth of the world’s population speaks Chinese. Why are we studying English?” he asked. He turned and gestured to a row of foreign teachers seated behind him and said, “Because we pity them for not being able to speak Chinese!” The crowd roared.
Li professes little love for the West. His populist image benefits from the fact that he didn’t learn his skills as a rich student overseas; this makes him a more plausible model for ordinary citizens. In his writings and his speeches, Li often invokes the West as a cautionary tale of a superpower gone awry. “America, England, Japan—they don’t want China to be big and powerful!” a passage on the Crazy English home page declares. “What they want most is for China’s youth to have long hair, wear bizarre clothes, drink soda, listen to Western music, have no fighting spirit, love pleasure and comfort! The more China’s youth degenerates, the happier they are!” Recently, he used a language lesson on his blog to describe American eating habits and highlighted a new vocabulary term: “morbid obesity.”
Li’s real power, though, derives from a genuinely inspiring axiom, one that he embodies: the gap between the English-speaking world and the non-English-speaking world is so profound that any act of hard work or sacrifice is worth the effort. He pleads with students “to love losing face.” In a video for middle- and high-school students, he said, “You have to make a lot of mistakes. You have to be laughed at by a lot of people. But that doesn’t matter, because your future is totally different from other people’s futures.”
He strives to be as unprofessorial as possible. On book covers, he wears a suit and tie, with his cuffs rolled up to the elbow, like a bond trader. It affirms his image as the anti-intellectual who has wrested English from the grip of test proctors and college-admissions committees. At one point mid-lecture, Li called a student up from the crowd, a middle-aged man with glasses, and asked him for his story.
The man, whose name was Liu Donghua, responded in Chinese, explaining that he was the president and former editor of the magazine China Entrepreneur, in Beijing. “I just came back from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland,” he said. (Li, turning to the crowd, interjected, “Many of them flew in on their private jets!”) The entrepreneur continued, “One of the greatest benefits was that I was irritated there—as I stood in front of thousands of the most important people in the world, I was as stupid as a fool, because my English is extremely poor.”
Turning to the class, Li commended Liu’s gumption: “If he goes crazy, all enterprises in China will go crazy!”
In the hours that followed, Li swooped from hectoring to inspiring; he preened for the camera; he mocked Chinese speakers with fancy college degrees. By the time the lecture ended, he had spoken for four hours, without a break, in numbing cold—and the crowd was rapt. In the days afterward, students would run together at dawn, shouting English. On the final night, they walked on a bed of hot coals. Between classes, the campus was scattered with lone learners, muttering like rabbinical students, Li’s books pressed to their faces, their lips racing.
Li’s parents were committed Communists who heeded Chairman Mao’s call, in the late sixties, for students to train the peasantry. After college, they settled in the remote northwest province of Xinjiang, in a town so bleak and cold that the Chinese describe it as “a place haunted by the Devil.” The family was privileged, with a house equipped with an indoor toilet. Li’s father, Li Tiande, ran the provincial broadcasting bureau, and his mother was a senior engineer there. They were essentially high-ranking propagandists. Until he was four, Little Yang, as Li was known, lived thousands of miles from his parents, in the care of a grandmother, because his parents felt ill-equipped to raise him in rugged Xinjiang. After the family was reunited, Li’s father spent most of his time on the road, returning every two or three months.
When Li Tiande was present, he was severe. Once, after Li and his friends were caught poking holes in melons on a farm, his father was incensed. “I felt I’d lost face,” he told a Chinese interviewer years later. “When I got home, I hit him. This incident let everyone see that this quiet kid of few words also had another side.” His mother was equally stern. She would watch as Li practiced his penmanship. If he made a mistake, she tore up the page. Even so, he remained an uninspired student.
In time, Li developed a crippling shyness. A ringing telephone unnerved him. “I would count it: one, two, three, four,” he recalls. “I’d say, Should I do it? Maybe something important? A phone call for me? Still I could not. I don’t know why. It’s really hard, even for me now, to directly address my parents. I cannot blurt out ‘Mama!’ or ‘Baba!’ ”
In high school, Li grew his hair to his shoulders and considered dropping out, but, ultimately, he enrolled in the mechanical-engineering department at Lanzhou University, in one of China’s poorest provinces. He failed his classes. Wu Jianjun, an older student who taught Li, recalls, “He was very introverted. He was not good at expressing himself.”
Toward the end of 1987, with a mandatory English test looming, Li and a friend decided to practice reading in an outdoor campus pavilion every day at noon. Li discovered that the louder he read, the better he felt. “I could concentrate, I felt really brave,” he recalls. “If I stopped yelling, I stopped learning.” He had harnessed something universal—the cloak of confidence that comes with slipping into a language not one’s own—and added a Chinese twist.
On Chinese campuses, there’s a tradition of reading aloud to hone pronunciation. Li simply turned up the volume. He began reciting English everywhere. “Lights-out in the dorm was at eleven o’clock,” Wu Jianjun, who is now a professor of mechanical engineering, told me. “After the lights were off, he would read English in the hallway outside his room. His reading drew criticism from other students, since it disturbed their rest.” But when the annual English test came around, Li told me, he took second place: “I became instantly, instantly famous.”
After graduation, Li obtained a state job at an electrical-research institute, and taught English classes to groups on the side; he charged students eight yuan per month—a little more than two dollars, at the time—a fine haul in 1989. With his father’s connections, he soon moved to Guangzhou as an English-language host on radio and television. After two years on the air, he was well known but bored. He quit and founded a company whose name was a phonetic spelling of “crazy”: the Li Yang-Cliz International English Promotion Workshop.
He hired his sister, Li Ning, and they rented a single room, which served as both the company’s headquarters and their home. They had desks but no beds, and slept on an oversized windowsill. They posted flyers for lectures, and they began to draw crowds. From across China, letters started to arrive, asking for teaching materials. Li’s sister was in charge of the mail, which she carried home from the post office each day in a backpack. Soon, she needed two large nylon sacks to hold it all, and, eventually, a second person to help drag them. “Then we stayed up all night opening letters,” she told me.
There was little reason to bank on the business of teaching English. China and the language didn’t have an auspicious history. In 1636, King Charles I authorized a small fleet of four ships, under the command of Captain John Weddell, to set sail for the East. The expedition headed for Canton but encountered a firefight with a Chinese fort, and more clashes ensued. As the linguistics scholar Kingsley Bolton recounts in “Chinese Englishes,” an exhaustive history, the British blamed their problems partly on a failure to communicate; they had no English-Chinese translators. By the eighteenth century, though, local tradesmen in Canton had begun to make sense of the alien language. Eventually, they composed a pidgin-English vocabulary, using Chinese characters to capture the phonetics: January became “che-na-wi-le” and the west wind was “wi-sze-wun.” They wrote it all down in “The Common Foreign Language of the Red-Haired People,” a pamphlet of sixteen printed pages and three hundred and seventy-two entries, beginning with the numeral “one” and ending with “shoe buckle.” The cover depicted a man wearing a tricornered hat and flouncy knickerbockers, and carrying a cane.
Speaking basic English was no virtue. It was the language of the compradors, the middlemen, who were so roundly reviled that they had trouble finding women who would marry them. “They serve as interpreters only because they have no other means of making a livelihood,” the reformist scholar Feng Guai-fen wrote. “Their nature is boorish, their knowledge shallow, and furthermore, their moral principles are mean.”
China urgently needed proper English for diplomatic negotiations. Feng called for special new language schools that would provide “double rations” to talented students and expose them to foreign teachers. “There are many brilliant people in China; there must be some who can learn from the barbarians and surpass them,” he wrote. And, by the twentieth century, a fresh crop of mission schools was spreading foreign languages in China in the name of God.
But when Mao Zedong took power, in 1949, he expelled the missionaries and declared Russian the primary foreign language. Within a decade, China had fewer than nine hundred secondary-school teachers of English in the entire country.
By the mid-seventies, the study of English had been cautiously restored, with limits. “ ‘Foreign language is a tool of class struggle.’ That was one of the first English phrases we learned,” Zhang Lijia, who, at the time, was a teen-ager in Nanjing and is now a bilingual author, told me. “The other was ‘Long live Chairman Mao!’ ”
Finally, in the two decades that followed, Deng Xiaoping thrust his country into the world and returned English to prominence.
In 1997, Li was trooping from city to city. In the soot-stained industrial redoubt of Zhuzhou, in Hunan Province, he met a man with a red face and an earthy farmer’s accent. Ouyang Weijian was the deputy principal of Zhuzhou No. 1 Middle School. He had first heard Li speak in the city of Changsha, and was so impressed by his “magic English-study method” that he encouraged the local board of education to invite Li to lecture in Zhuzhou. Ouyang rented the city’s largest venue, the Zhuzhou Sports Stadium, but he wasn’t prepared for the response. “It was a three-thousand-seat arena,” Ouyang told me. “We got five thousand people.”
They were an improbable pair: Li, the scion of a cosseted cadre family, and Ouyang, one of five children raised in a dirt-floor farmhouse. He was the family’s only college graduate. China, in the nineties, was crackling with new ventures, and Ouyang wanted to try his own luck. He was a natural salesman—he knew “how to talk,” as the Chinese expression puts it—and he thrived among backslappers. “Even after I became a principal, my desire to do something big was still not satisfied,” he said. After Li spoke in Zhuzhou, Ouyang quit his job and joined him as general manager of the company.
For their first big gig together, Ouyang badgered the radio station, the schools, and the education officials in the southern city of Guilin to help him promote a show. This time, Ouyang recalls, “there were three thousand stuck waiting outside.” The crowd toppled a stadium gate. The police arrived to try to control traffic on the surrounding streets. The city’s vice-mayor approached Ouyang and urged him to call it off, because the temperature inside was climbing dangerously high. “I said, ‘No, we can’t stop now. Everybody is moving and sweating and happy. It’s O.K. as long as everybody is moving. We can’t stop this now.’ ”
With recognition came controversy. Li was harshly criticized by both newspapers and professors in the province of Guangdong and the western city of Chengdu. Yet the business continued to grow. On several occasions, Li received a rare disposition to lecture inside the ancient walls of the Forbidden City, in Beijing. He led English-yelling classes for soldiers on top of the Great Wall. A prominent Chinese filmmaker, Zhang Yuan, made a documentary entirely about Crazy English.
Li was teaching in the northern coal city of Jilin, in June, 1999, when he met Kim Lee, a tall, confident brunette from Florida who had been sent by the Miami teachers’ union on a research trip to study foreign-language teaching practices. When Li introduced himself, he joked that he was a computer engineer from California. Kim brushed him off. He then approached her again, this time with the truth. “He said, ‘I’m just kidding. I’m really an English teacher, and I’ve never even been to America,’ ” Kim recalls. “So, at this point, I just think this guy is a nut job.”
Within days, Kim was teaching beside Li onstage. They had a natural rapport. Her dry wit and all-American looks were the perfect foil: an American Alice Kramden to his Chinese Ralph. They married four years later, in Las Vegas. Even there, on the Strip, Kim said, a Chinese shopkeeper spotted Li and chased down the newlyweds to shake his hand.
Kim was baffled, at first, by Li’s antics, his fire-breathing. When she noticed how students responded, however, the educator in her came to see things differently. “This guy is really passionate about what he’s doing, and, as a teacher, how can you not be moved by that?” she said. Today, she rolls her eyes at his critics—“P.C. crusaders,” she calls those who object to Li’s nationalism—and plays a major role in Crazy English, both as an editor and as a performing partner. In social settings and in classrooms, he often glances her way for a nod of judgment or encouragement. She has imposed a “ten-day rule” on his tours: if he’s gone for more than ten days straight, she gets on a plane with the kids. (“I’m just a mom who came into a bizarre life by happenstance,” she says.) While we were having dinner one night at a neighborhood restaurant near Guangzhou, Li and Kim took turns depositing shreds of chicken on a plate for their two-year-old, Lila. At one point, Li was caught up in a conversation about management styles and the toddler got her tiny hands on a drumstick. Kim nudged her husband: “So you’re just going to let her eat like a Viking?”
Last fall, Li’s blog site posted photographs from a middle-school lecture in Inner Mongolia. One picture showed hundreds of students on their hands and knees, kowtowing. Bowing one’s head to the ground is, in China, a potent symbol reserved mainly for honoring the dead. It was once required of visitors to the Emperor, and during the Cultural Revolution it was used as a tool of humiliation against those who were accused of committing political crimes.
The response to the photographs was swift. A columnist in the state-run China Daily pronounced Li a “demagogue,” and his lectures “like cult meetings.” “Cult” is a dangerous word in a country that affixed that label to the spiritual group Falun Gong nearly a decade ago and has been rounding up its followers ever since.
Li fought back. “I was pissed off,” he told me. The students, he asserted, were bowing not to him but to their teachers, at his suggestion. The explanation did little good. An article in the South China Morning Post asked whether Crazy English was becoming “one of those cults where the leaders insist on being treated like deities.” Kim’s cell phone rang so much that she stopped answering. To her, the storm felt unjust, as if they were being blamed for China’s “burning passion” for learning a language.
“People have that within them,” she told me. “He’s just bringing it out.”
For weeks after the kowtow story, Li avoided the spotlight. (The controversy “scared me to death,” he said.) His most high-profile contract was on the line: the Beijing Organizing Committee had appointed one of his companies—a joint venture between Crazy English and Aigo, an electronics-maker—to teach as many volunteers as possible. Officially, Beijing wants half of its hundred thousand volunteers to be able to speak a foreign language. That seems unlikely, but the city is going to unusual lengths in the effort. Cabdrivers have been issued an “Olympic Taxi Handbook,” a three-hundred-and-twelve-page primer on the world, which features not only a list of useful English expressions—“I want to go to the People’s Hospital”—but also a section of do’s and don’ts that account for purported national preferences and taboos: never rub the head of a Thai child; a Frenchman likes his handshakes brief and light; Americans shun “goods and packaging that use a bat-shaped pattern, believing that those animals suck people’s blood and are inauspicious.” (In China, bats signify good fortune.) The “Olympic Taxi Handbook” concludes with a section on emergencies, including how to escape from a burning cab (use your belt buckle to break the glass) and how to retrieve, bag, and ice a severed finger. When Li began to speak publicly again, Olympic officials told him to skip any signature Crazy English flourishes, like having students hold his books aloft, Mao style. The Olympic organizers were determined to avoid anything that might attract controversy, a hope that now seems quaint amid the clamor of protests abroad over China’s hosting of the Games. Still, Li has mostly held back, and his Olympic campaign continues to thrive.
Among those I met at the Crazy English camp was Zhang Zhiming, a slim, inquisitive twenty-three-year-old with a plume of hair in the front that makes him look like Tintin. He prefers to use the name Michael, and has studied Crazy English for five years. He is the son of a retired coal miner and could never have afforded a ticket to the camp, so last year he got a job as a camp security guard and strained to hear as much as he could from the sidelines. This year, he was promoted to teaching assistant at the camp and received a small stipend.
“Usually when I see Li Yang, I feel a little nervous,” Michael told me one morning, as we sat outside. “He is a superman.” Michael had trouble sitting still. His enthusiasm was infectious, and I liked him instantly. “When I didn’t know about Crazy English, I was a very shy Chinese person,” he said. “I couldn’t say anything. I was very timid. Now I am very confident. I can speak to anyone in public, and I can inspire people to speak together.” Michael first encountered Crazy English through his older brother, who had worked for Li as an assistant. His brother never learned much English, but Michael was mesmerized by it. He began spending as much as eight hours a day on English, listening over and over to a tape of Li’s voice, which sounded, to him, “like music.”
His favorite book was Li Yang’s “American Standard Pronunciation Bible,” which helped him hone his vowels and punch up his consonants. Eventually, he got a job teaching at an English school, with the hope that, someday, he might open a school of his own.
I met scores of Li Yang students this winter, and I always asked them what purpose English has served in their lives. There was a hog farmer who wanted to be able to greet his American buyers. A finance worker, studying during his vacation, wanted to get an edge in the office. Michael had no doubts about what English might do for him. A few years ago, his brother got involved in a direct-sales network, pushing health drinks and potions. Schemes like that, known in Mandarin as “rats’ societies,” have proliferated in China’s era of surging growth, fuelled by get-rich-quick dreams and a population adrift between ideologies. “He always wanted me to be involved in that,” Michael went on, and I tried to picture him extolling the benefits of a health tonic with the same passion that he now expressed about English. “I spent half a year doing this business, and I gained nothing.” Neither did Michael’s brother, who flew to the United States six months ago to try to earn the money to repay his creditors. He now works as a waiter in New York, Michael said, and, until he returns, it’s up to Michael to support their parents.
As Michael talked, the vigor in his voice faded. His brother wants him to go to America, too, to help earn money. “He has big dreams,” he said. “But I don’t really want to go there, because I want to have my own business. If you are a worker, you can’t be a rich man. You can’t buy a house, buy a car, support a family.”
Michael stared at his feet and said, “I have no choice. This is life. I should always keep smiling. But, actually, I feel I’m under a lot of pressure. Sometimes I want to cry. But I’m a man.”
He stopped. The air was silent, except for a warm wind that carried a trace of Li’s voice, booming in the stadium behind us.
A few weeks later, Michael invited me for lunch at the apartment he shares with his parents in Guangzhou. It’s in a cluster of modern high-rises on Gold Panning Road, in the center of the city, formerly known as Canton, where the compradors once chattered in pidgin English.
When Michael met me at the gate, he was in a good mood. (“I got promoted to teaching supervisor,” he said. “I got a raise.”) The family’s apartment consisted of a living room, two small bedrooms, and a kitchen. His parents were cooking, and the air smelled of ginger. Michael and his father shared a bunk bed in one room, and his mother and his older sister occupied the other. Michael’s room was cluttered with English-study books, an overfilled desk, a laptop. English felt tangible, like a third—and messy—roommate.
He rooted around in a box to show me the homemade vocabulary cards that he carries, just as Li once did. He pulled out a card marked “Occupations: Astronomer, Baker, Barber, Barkeeper, Biologist, Blue-Collar Worker, Boss/Superior, Botanist. . . . ” He wanted to play some recordings that he’d been making for his students, as models of pronunciation. He clicked on a recording called “What Is English?,” which he’d cribbed from the Li Yang Crazy English Web site. He had layered the sounds of waves and seagulls into the background and recorded it with a girl named Isabell, trading sentences as they went: “English is a piece of cake. I can totally conquer English. I will use English. I will learn English. I will live in English. I am no longer a slave to English. I am its master. I believe English will become my faithful servant and lifelong friend. . . .”
It went on for another minute, and, while Michael listened intently, my eyes settled on a small handwritten Chinese sign, taped to the wall, at the foot of his bed: “The past does not equal the future. Believe in yourself. Create miracles.” ♦

Useful Site

While hopping here and there, from one blog to another...

I found this site...

Not only useful for students but for English teachers too..

http://www.business-english.com/

Words Of The Day

Novice

Someone who is beginning to learn a trade or skill.

Example:
The top 5 riders of Malaysian Cub Prix in the Novice class from 2004 has been upgraded to race in the Expert category


Debris

Broken pieces of something that has been destroyed.

Example:
In the landslide at 4am, seven other victims were believed to be still trapped in the houses that were buried by the debris and rescue efforts were being carried out.