21 Oct, 2009 in
Chinese culture by Fili An

My friend Lin, a Chinese teacher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who runs the Chinese Garden, has been translating Chinese songs for her students for years. I have very fond memories of sitting in on her classes where all the students were KTVing together to some old Chinese folk songs. Lin’s quite good [...]
4 Dec, 2008 in
Chinese Studies by Fili An

There are some great translation tools out there but Lingoes is by far the most useful one that I’ve been using lately. Based on a concept similar to the pricy Israeli-based Babylon this software will translate any language to any language in any software you run on your PC, using three methods – either [...]
20 Nov, 2008 in
Hong Kong by Fili An

Having been to Hong Kong for almost a week, this being the second visit to Hong Kong after a one week visit to Hong Kong 3 years ago, I find many of the myths built around Hong Kong to be very inaccurate. Here are some quick out-my-head points of some of the most popular [...]
2 Oct, 2008 in
Taiwan Blogosphere by Fili An

Today, I gave a one hour lecture to a room full of NCKU Taiwanese students. The topic I was asked to talk about was “Taiwan’s English language Blogosphere”.
Following is the presentation I ended up with
It looks much better when not embedded, download it here.
I gave an overview of some interesting blogs and bloggers I [...]
20 Sep, 2008 in
General by Fili An

I have no idea what my English sounds like, it might be terrible. Yet, I’d like to quickly point out something in common for some of the non-native in English, especially teachers, that sometimes makes it very difficult for me to concentrate listening. Interestingly enough, some of those issues also hold true for some Israelis [...]