中文四學生: 你可以聽懂她說的中文。我們下個星期一要包餃子。
 
Rendezvous Always Knew ‘Bilinguals Are Smarter’  Read More...

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For me, it just made sense in our globalized world. From a purely practical point of view, by the time my children graduate from high school, China will probably have the largest economy in the world. (When I told DealBook editor at large Andrew Ross Sorkin my reasoning, he looked into getting his kids a Chinese nanny, too.) We are not alone among New Yorkers — or even Americans!

 
3/18 Sunday Times

Why Bilinguals Are Smarter
SPEAKING two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age.(more)
 
NYTimes  3/17
My Life’s Sentences
By JHUMPA LAHIRI
Knowing — and learning to read in — a foreign tongue heightens and complicates my relationship to sentences. For some time now, I have been reading predominantly in Italian. I experience these novels and stories differently. I take no sentence for granted. I am more conscious of them. I work harder to know them. I pause to look something up, I puzzle over syntax I am still assimilating. Each sentence yields a twin, translated version of itself. When the filter of a second language falls away, my connection to these sentences, though more basic, feels purer, at times more intimate, than when I read in English.  (more)
 
EVERY so often someone asks me: “What’s your favorite country, other than your own?”
(Josh Haner/The New York Times Thomas L. Friedman )

I’ve always had the same answer: Taiwan. “Taiwan? Why Taiwan?” people ask.
Very simple: Because Taiwan is a barren rock in a typhoon-laden sea with no natural resources to live off of — it even has to import sand and gravel from China for construction — yet it has the fourth-largest financial reserves in the world. Read more...