Weiyu Lin

After eight hours today up and down this 6000-meters giant, behind the woods I could finally hear the roar of traffics flashing across, somewhere down the hill, like shooting stars. I picked up my pace and felt ready to put a ¨glorious¨ end to my solo trek that had started yesterday afternoon. Twenty minutes later, the slope finally intersected the road, where the familiar human civilisation gushed back to my senses. And my two days in the wild started to feel like a dream th at I already began to forget. By the road there happened to be an observatory. Its splendid view overlooking a valley felt like my trophy. Meanwhile I put up my thumb and started to hitchhike. Just then, a bus drove in and unloaded a pack of Chinese Han tourists who came to admire the view. Some of the tourists were curiously scanning me —-who , by this time, had been covered in mud (it had just rained and snowed for two good hours). I was definitely enjoying their curious gaze. I faked an air of non...

After I learned Italian for two years, or several other languages for that matter, I have amassed a sophisticated system for acquiring languages. I had a lot of fun; that is undeniable, but it is a self-obsessed kind of fun that stems from stimulating my sense of discipline. As long as I accomplish a task with high efficacy, I feel that pleasure, even though this ple asure has no essential rapports with language or culture itself. Tonight I had a different kind of fun. I signed up on Italki and found an Italian partner who is learning Chinese. Since he just began his chinese studies, I could talk in Italian throughout; whereas, while we talked in Chinese, we talked about Chinese culture and language, so each got what we wanted. We exchanged jokes; exchanged films and musics; tested our culture stereotypes. I got, from all these, an interactive, talkative kind of pleasure that my ivory tower of sophisticated methods could not bring, nor can compare the efficacy with. It...