{"id":13405,"date":"1999-04-04T16:25:42","date_gmt":"1999-04-04T05:25:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/yewenyi.net\/wpblog\/?p=13405"},"modified":"1999-04-04T16:25:42","modified_gmt":"1999-04-04T05:25:42","slug":"ambushed-at-macdonalds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yewenyi.net\/wp\/old\/?p=13405","title":{"rendered":"Ambushed at Macdonalds"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify\">I was walking along a street in Kaohsiung with a British man who had been living in Hong Kong with his Chinese wife. I thing it was about 7 or 8 pm.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">A group of about half a dozen teenage girls in school uniform inside the MacDonalds spotted us and came out. They spoke to us in English.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">They wanted help with their homework.\u00a0 They had an assignment to describe the differences between the Taiwanese education system and the western ones. So they were in luck having snagged a teacher.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">The British gent proceeded to describe they British system. I finally learned the difference between A levels and O levels.\u00a0 After this, I talked about the Australian system.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">A few times they had troubles understanding us. On these occasions the Chinese wife would repeat what we had said and maybe provide an explanation.\u00a0 I found it interesting that they would not understand the Brit or I speeding English, but the same words said by the Chinese woman were understood.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">So I formed a new hypothesis.\u00a0 They understood her because she was consistent in the tones she used. I supposed she spoke English words in first tone. As time I became more convinced of this, though I think the total accent is probably more likely the main driver. They seemed to speak English words in first tone. I guessed that a first tone and would hold a different meaning to a second or fourth tone and. I also suspect that westerners do not use third tone much.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify\">Once our homework help was completed they thanked us and we went in our way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was walking along a street in Kaohsiung with a British man who had been living in Hong Kong with[&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,29],"tags":[1208,1949,2176,3221,3615],"class_list":["post-13405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-ramblings","category-uncategorized","tag-education-systems","tag-kaoshung","tag-macdonalds","tag-school-girls","tag-taiwan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yewenyi.net\/wp\/old\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13405"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yewenyi.net\/wp\/old\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yewenyi.net\/wp\/old\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yewenyi.net\/wp\/old\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yewenyi.net\/wp\/old\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13405"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/yewenyi.net\/wp\/old\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13405\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yewenyi.net\/wp\/old\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yewenyi.net\/wp\/old\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yewenyi.net\/wp\/old\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}