Blog writing 4: Tastes and preferences

Tastes and preferences





大头菜+稀饭

From the days when I could remember things till now, I have experienced huge changes in people’s tastes and preferences. During just less than 13 years, people have changed significantly in the food they prefer, the clothes style they choose and the haircut they chase.

Food has played a key role in our daily life and great change has been indicated in food people like. In the past, many people were not rich and they must spend according to their incomes. Ddining out in the restaurant was a luxury, so most of them chose to cook in the home, eating a simple dish like poached Chinese cabbage and poached toufu. For the breakfast, we used to eat Da tou cai, one of my hometown specialty, and porridge as well as steamed buns. In total, it cost us less than $0.2. But now, it is quite different. People usually eat various kinds of food raging from porridge, steamed rice to noodles. And a large portion of them often dine out to eat something that cannot be cooked in the home. Correspondingly, they usually pay more to enjoy this.



Apart from the food, changes have also been reflected in clothes. I still remembered my father wearing the Chinese tunic suit, which he seldom put on except on important occasions. And at that time, trend was wearing this kind of suit. For most women, they liked dressing in long skirt so that they looked elegant. On the contrary, nowadays, few people will put the Chinese tunic suit on again. And for young people, it is very popular among them to wear clothes that have many patches and holes, which their parents think inconceivable. Women have changed as well. Instead of long skirts, their prefer to wear miniskirts so as to make them more attractive and hot. Also, minipants or hot pants are among their favorite. In general, old styles go; new styles come. This change cannot be more enormous.

Zhou Runfa

Finally, these 13 years have also seen tremendous transformation in haircuts. Ten years ago, the hair style has been governed by Zhou Renfa style in which men looked very handsome. And even now many seniors still maintain this kind of haircut. However, as the representative of the new era, young people have already abandoned this and turn to new hairstyles, such as cockscomb style, boldness like monk and crew cut. They admire strangeness and odd things, and are always ready to try new things. People changed; what they like certainly will change accordingly.

    For me, what I like has also changed a lot. I sort of prefer longer hair than the crew cut, and I like rice instead of noodles. Nevertheless, today it may be a trend, tomorrow it may not and the day after tomorrow it is popular again. Times change; so do the tastes and preferences.

I have a dream!! (Blog writing 2)

    I have a dream that one day my son and his American friends could communicate with each other in Chinese, naturally and happily.

    I have a dream that one day everyone is born to be capable of speaking Chinese.

    I have a dream that one day my son can proudly tell his son:’ you no longer need study English.’

    But when I woke up to the joy of getting rid of English, I found it was high time that I went to CELC learning English. Despite the fact that in recent times, English act as a common language for people across the globe to speak, it cannot cover its inherent drawbacks which may greatly contribute to its failure as compared to Chinese.
     One of its fatal weaknesses is that for each new object, it must create a new word which none know its meaning except its creator. Take ‘altostratus’ for example. It means a layer of flat cloud, lying at medium height, or one of the clouds which form this layer. Few people exactly know this word’s meaning unless they are atmosphere professionals. On the contrary, even third-graders in China know the meaning of its equivalent in Chinese, regardless of their age or major. (in fact, they have no majors).
     In addition to the previous point, English also has a bulky grammar system which made it not only a tough job for language learners to gain a clear idea but also hard for native speakers to use freely. For instance, it has 16 tenses, a wide array of moods and different shapes for a word. They serve as endless traps waiting for us to fall in and make us extremely confused. However, Chinese neither has tenses nor moods. Nouns need not add a ‘tail (end)’, either. Due to this, Chinese is more human friendly than English.
    The third point, which few people have ever noticed, is that Chinese does much less harm to the environment. It is allegedly the fact that each time Chinese officials attend conferences at UN, they always consume the least time to deliver a speech and the least paper to put their notes down. Few other countries have done as well as China in terms of this. Compared to other languages, Chinese is incontestably the most efficient and environment friendly one.
    All in all, Chinese exceed English in many aspects. However, dream is enjoying; life is suffering. Now that it is an irresistible trend towards the universal popularity of English, it is not our turn to make a choice between English and Chinese. The only thing we can do at present is study English hard and have a promising future.
Thanks for your honored patience to finish it. Have a good day!

Reading Journal

My reading journal

After reading, I still have no idea of the main events and just got some fragments of the event. I do not think these techniques affected my reading ability, and I did not see much help. As for reading rate increase, it is not much. Actually, in my personal view, little change will be generated after just two passages’ training which is less sufficient. Personally speaking, the best technique for reading varies from essays to essays, depending on its type. Take narrative for example, there is no need or use to adopt the uniform method that we should read the first and last paragraph and then look at the first sentence of each body paragraph. Because reading a story is like reading a picture, if we just look at the top and bottom and then some thin space in the middle, with majority part of the picture unknown, we still have no idea what the picture is about. However, for most comparison essays or argument essays, this method will be of great help for us to gain a main idea of the whole essay in a short time. All in all, every road leads to Rome. I believe there are also various ways for different essays and each type of essay has its unique rather than uniform way to be adopted.