Wednesday, November 12, 2003
HAI MEI YOU GUANXI
Yesterday, I blogged about guanxi -- the Chinese web of social connectedness -- and how westerners' failure to detect and understand guanxi helps give rise to a perception of "the mysterious East." Today, I see another good article -- at Lvining in China -- about east/west differneces; this time about how basic differences in grammatical structure between English and Chinese give rise to very different "styles of discourse" (an unfortunatley pomo-ish term, but one that is basically correct). If I keep at this, maybe one day I'll understand it. This is actually something my associate Tom Tong has corrected my Chinese on many times, since I tend to use a kind of "Chinglish" grammar and improperly use an English-style subject-predicate construction when I'm not concentrating hard.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 8:44 PM
