Word: english
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...other guests prattle on about the British Prime Minister, some even in English, the new language of the New China, I am transfixed by the marriage of the two coffins in front of me. The groom died in an automobile accident five days earlier at the age of 23. The body of his bride, dead of cancer for five months, cost $3 to exhume. They had never...
...year-old English teacher in a small town not far from Shanghai on China's eastern coast. He could have taken Russian in college but chose English because "there is no one to talk to in Russian and no one interested in learning it." Bi speaks English so well that only a careful listener might guess that it is his second language. He pays particular attention to his consonants, and the effect is riveting. It seems that everything he says has been carefully weighed and thought...
...this day. Instead he is incensed about work. "Meiyou," he says once, and then again. Meiyou (pronounced may-o) means "No, it cannot be done," or "No, we don't have it" -- a word foreigners learn quickly. "Too few primers," says Bi. "One hundred eighty-two students and 15 English books. Bad enough, right? But look at the books. They're about 40 years old, and boring. We can barely get by the first story...
...would like to ignore the texts entirely, but the college entrance exams test the books' content. "They can actually ask you how exactly Marx learned English," he says. (By writing for American newspapers, it turns out.) "So we have to go through them. But we also try to come up with exercises that get to the real questions of English grammar. Now, which word do you think belongs in the blank...
History 1a, "Western Societies, Politics and Cultures," marks the first time since the late 1960s that Harvard has offered an introductory survey course in European civilization and it attempts to cover Europe from ancient Greece to the English revolution...