French Reading I like the duolingo stories, actually they are mini stories, short, funny, and vivid with dubbing. There is a novel named Djinn, written by a famous French writer, but for the convenience of French learner. And I also begin to read a difficult but interesting book, Fragments d'un Discours Amoureux. For several days, I am still on the first page, I read it very slowly, by comparing the English and Chinese editions.

About Chinese Meausre Word The measure word would create a shape image in your mind about the subject. Chinese language is generally believed to be image-associated, not logic-associated , so it is important to have a right measure word used, if the measure word were inappropriate, Chinese people would be at lost when hearing it, although they can definitely understand it. I don't know if I've made my point clear, English is not mother tongue, and that's just my personal idea about the measure word.

Where does the concept "here" or "this" come from? Culture is such a big subject that I don't know where to begin and where to end, but there's one thing that I'd like to mention here: self-consciousness. When a baby was born, he didn't have any self-consciousness until he was getting to about one year old. Before that, he was living as an endless ocean, there's no border and no separation between him and the world. When self-consciousness appears, the paradise falls apart, the culture is introduced to the baby. Yeah, this is little Johnson, and that is mom... It's an unnoticeable step that gets everything complicated and pushes an organism to become an individual, who begins to seek endlessly for something vague and unknown. Well, does what I've said above has any relation with language? I think it's obvious. If there's no separation, where does the concept "here" or "this" come from?

About the Chinese Character "了“ When I were doing my translation from English to Chinese, I've encountered many situations where I would ponder for a while for whether I should put "了" into a sentence or not. It's not easy for me to decide which is better somtimes. There are some subtle emphasis when "了" is there.