It’s here! 

Time to give the gift of creativity and inspiration!

We will start with a quiz about our annual event Chinese Writing Contest. Four lucky participants will win awesome prizes!

If you ask any Chinese people to name a day for them to customarily go hiking in the mountains, they will probably answer that it is the ninth day of the ninth month in the lunar calendar.

That day is Chong Yang Jie (重阳节), the Double Nine Festival. This year, it is Oct 23, 2023.

This year’s Zhong Qiu Jie (中秋节), Mid-Autumn festival, is just around the corner, Sep 29th to be precise, and it is a time for Chinese learners around the world to take a break in their regular study routines and to enjoy some of the festivities. 

Let’s remind ourselves that learning Chinese is also about gaining insights into Chinese cultural practices and about participating in the cultural activities. And you don’t have to be in China to enjoy Mid-Autumn festival.

September 12th, 2023 is Qian Xuantong (钱玄同)’s 136th birthday. 

In 1923, when he was 36 years old, he proposed to simplify Chinese characters, which was the first step to his ultimate goal of making Chinese into a phonetic writing system. He wanted to abolish the Chinese characters.

It’s time for a beautiful folklore to be told again for anyone who is interested in learning Chinese and learning about Chinese culture, as the seventh day of the seventh month is coming. It is August 22 this year. 

On this day, two lovers will meet on Queqiao (鹊桥), the Magpie Bridge, to celebrate their eternal love for each other.

I hope this is not too confusing.

Last week, I received a memo from the office building management office that the name of the office building was going to change.

Chinese people are very proud of Chinese food. One important aspect of learning Chinese is to learn about Chinese food. 

During the Chinese New Year, it’s about dumplings and all the auspicious good food. During the Mid-Autumn Festival, it’s about moon cakes and those wonderful seasonal fruits. Right now, it is about zong zi (粽子), as Duan Wu Jie (端午节) is here!

One bizarre thing happened last month after Hong Kong DSE (Diploma of Secondary Education) English exam, which used some excerpts from the former US First Lady Michelle Obama’s memoir Becoming in one reading section.

After the exam, many students went on to Michelle Obama’s social media account and left unseemly comments, blaming her for the exam being too difficult and for their own failures.

May 4th 2023 is coming. 

It’s time to commemorate the May Fourth Movement that happened on May 4th, 1919, and revisit the irrevocable changes happened to China and the Chinese language.

April 22, 2023, is the third day of the third month in Chinese lunar calendar. 1670 years ago, on the same day, i.e. the third day of the third month in 353CE, a great calligrapher, and also a great poet, composed and wrote a poem in the semi-cursive script. 

This writing eventually became the most well known masterpiece of brush calligraphy in Chinese history. And it is this masterpiece that appears on the covers of all Chinese Reading and Writing series.

Despite harsh penalties, cheating has never been stamped out in schools. The advent of ChatGPT, or generative AI in general that is widely available, is making the situation worse. 

Before ChatGPT, the following ways are considered cheating: students pay someone to write papers for them; they copy papers from other students; they plagiarise sections from other sources; they present translated materials from a foreign language as their own; they describe ideas of others as their own; they do not give proper credit to others.

I’m not a bar person, but I regularly visit a nearby bar on Tuesday evenings. It is because that night is the jam night. Each musician gets to choose two songs to play or to sing. Other musicians will go along with these choices and stage a performance. The sounds of keyboard, guitars, bass, drums, vocals, and sometimes a saxophone, are fused together and exemplified by loud speakers.

Although I am always a spectator, I find the whole experience fascinating.

On the surface, it may not look any different. But MSL Master website had just went through a massive software upgrade over the weekend. I was told that there were many benefits that this new upgrade would bring. However, an immediate problem is that the upgrade seemed to be able to rewrite old URLs, and my tech support guys couldn’t figure out why.

I admit that it is very very “disruptive”, a fitting term used so often in the technology community. And I’m very sorry about the problems that readers will likely to experience when browsing the website, a ton of “404” pages.

International Women’s Day (March 8) is coming. It is a highly celebrated day worldwide. In Chinese, it is called 妇女节, 三八节, 三八妇女节, or 国际妇女节. 

As MSL Master is 100% female led and operated, and also because I’m in a profession that is predominantly female, I am happy to contribute to this special occasion and introduce three must known Chinese women in history.

The fifteenth day of the Chinese New Year is a special occasion, a festival within a festival. According to Lao She (老舍), this is the climax of the Chinese New Year. It is the brightest and the most beautiful festival. 

In 2023, this brightest and most beautiful Yuanxiao Festival (元宵节) falls on Feb 5.