What a day. I rolled out of bed at 10am, brushed my teeth, and sleepwalked over to Starbucks for a business meeting. It went pretty well.
Then, it was to the school, where I had to so some last minute editing for my Tuesday/Friday class’s first semester exam. For some reason or [...]

Last night, I went to The Beer Factory for the first time. It’s near the intersection of Bādé lù and Jiànguó nánlù. The place was huge, there was good food, and lots of cheap beer. The only downside is that it was all Taiwan Beer. I guess it’s kind of hard [...]

Last night, I went to Range’s (likemind). Truth be told I thought the name sounded like some creepy sort of cult, but I love meeting up with people and socializing, so I was really psyched about it. The location they picked was a bit far from me- in Banqiao, 13 stops down the [...]

While hiking through the country-side around Xindian, Prince Roy, Poagao and I got to talking about the whole issue of what we miss from home. All three of us are from the U.S., but we also have connections of varying degrees to Taiwan. Poagao, obviously, is the most Taiwanese and the least American. [...]

Yesterday, PR and I went down to Xindian to meet up with Poagao (AKA TC). I showed PR my highlighted and marked up newspaper I’ve been studying from. It’s a technique integrated with flashcards that I got from the How to Learn Any Language document on Scribd. It was a surprisingly quick [...]

Tonight I went to a Harbin restaurant that Martin found a few weeks ago. The cool thing about this restaurant is that the laoban actually is from Harbin. Unlike the other Chinese restaurants I’ve been to in Taiwan, this one is pretty authentic. There were great lamb kabobs, quite a few potato [...]

Tone Marks on Roadsigns Part I- Mark’s opening argument.
Tone Marks on Roadsigns Part II- Prince Roy’s opening argument.
Tone Marks on Roadsigns Part III- Mark’s rebuttal.
Tone Marks on Roadsigns Part IV- Prince Roy’s rebuttal.

What should the road signs have on them?

Mark was right, characters and pinyin with tones (42%)

Prince Roy was right, characters and pinyin without [...]

Dueling Lăowài is a new feature on Toshuo.com. This is my rebuttal of Prince Roy’s arguments against adding tone marks to roadsigns. If you missed the opening arguments of our friendly debate, be sure to check them out!

Dueling Lăowài is a new feature on Toshuo.com. Each “duel” will consist of four pieces by two writers: each writer will write one opening argument and one rebuttal.

On Sunday, I met up with my old teacher from CU, Prince Roy. We met up with Wayne, the author of the excellent but discontinued blog called A Better Tomorrow, and Poagao, the American guy who gave up his citizenship, became Taiwanese, did his time in the ROC army and wrote a book about [...]