Blich Highschool students in the city of Ramat-Gan in Israel will be the first among Israeli high-school students to go through extensive Chinese language studies. Here’s a translation from Hebrew for the NetoNews article  :

Bliecher - "Ramat-Gan City is leading a revolution in language study, to enrich the highschool students with a variety of languages to help the young students in their road towards international business success".
Berlitz language school [...] will teach Chinese at Blich high-school. Studies, commencing today, are made possible through a unique first-ever collaboration with the Ramat-Gan city council.
According to Gadi Bliecher, CEO of Berlitz Israel, the purpose of this initiative is to give the students skills to succeed in the business environment. The Chinese language was chosen because …

I was recently interviewed by MyChinaStart about Chinalyst. A couple of months ago, while I was in London, I built this small experiment called Chinalyst which I hoped would become some sort of a community for all the China-related bloggers and blog readers, which I consider myself to be a part of. With very little publicity, and almost no incoming links, Chinalyst has steadily grown and now has over 50 registered China blogs with what I think is a fascinating frontpage with an amazing variety of China-related information from all kinds of different blogs. It’s still quite anonymous and has a …

Last weekend I introduced the China and Taiwan Blog Search tools. Due to extremely positive feedback, I’ve added a very simple way to add this search to your personal web-browser, on either Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) and Mozilla Firefox 2 (FF2) which both have intergrated search toolbars.
 

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It quite simple. I’ve tweaked automatic installation for anybody visiting my blog. Some of you might have noticed that your search toolbars look a bit different now - they’re highlighted, which means they discovered the new search engines I added. Here’s what it looks like :
Discover it with Internet Explorer 7
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Chinese can be tough for many reasons, but the most frustrating issue has to be that of what should be a very simple task - translating a western name.
 
My Chinese name has been an issue since day one. First, there was the translation of my Hebrew name to something easily pronounceable in English. My friends took care of that, giving me the nick name of fiLi, which is a combination of my first and last name. Although I later found out that fiLi actually means things in English (a female horse, for example), it was still easy to use - most foreigners that I met abroad could pick it up immediately.
Problem with Chinese started from day one in my Chinese …

I came across a few interesting examples of Chinese being used around Israel, usually to promote some products. Thing is, the Chinese usually shows up without any indication that it’s Chinese, so when I ask my friends and family what they think about the symbols they see they just respond with "We don’t know. What kind of picture is that?" and when I tell them it’s a Chinese character they either don’t believe me or they respond with some enthusiastic cry "Oh my god, it’s beautiful!".
 
Here’s a simple example from my tea collection. These are two photos of tea described in Hebrew as "Wilderness tea - Classical green tea (with Vitamin C)"….

This Wednesday, a representative from the Chinese embassy came to talk to the students of the Hebrew University about Chinese studies in China. Mr. Li requested that all the Hebrew University students who studied in China come and talk to him. Although I’ve studied in Taiwan and not China, and even that wasn’t for very long, I was extremely curious as to see how this meeting would go and try to understand why the Chinese embassy wants such to hold such a meeting.
 
I was surprised to see that quite a few students came to attend this meeting. Apparently we have fellow students who stayed in China for a while, with one 3rd year girl who lived in China for a few …