A number of things

The school year is busy, and in the summers we travel. Often I fail to make time to see the sights around here. Yesterday, I went to the Biltmore Estates in Asheville for the first time. Still owned by the Vanderbilt family, the estate is now operated as a non-profit corporation. The 250 room mansion is filled with Asian and European art and picturesquely situated on 125,000 acres of North Carolina real estate. The palaces of Chinese emperors were modest by comparison. Despite what I think of the way George Vanderbilt and other Golden Age robber barrons treated their workers, I was impressed.

The gardens are particularly enchanting. The excursion put me in mind of these lines fro A Child's Garden of Verses:

The world is so full of a number of things

I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.

-- Robert Louis Stevenson

Above: Flowers at Biltmore Estates

A library in my shoulder bag

Whenever I go to China, I miss my personal library. I can find English books in China, but they aren't always my favorites. In the evenings, I like reading novels from Oprah's book club, or browsing the dictionary, or reading Bertrand Russell, or the English romantic poets. I stuff my suitcase with as many books as I can, and I always get inspected by Homeland Security because books, like bombs, are heavy. When I come home, I leave dictionaries and other books behind as gifts for my Chinese friends.

Usually, I take no more than ten books overseas, and even that often renders my suitcase overweight. But this time, I'm taking forty-five. I now have a Kindle, a lightweight electronic reader that holds up to three thousand books. There are several competing devices of this type on the market. The IPad is probably the glitziest, but at the moment anyway, the Kindle has the clearest print. In fact, the print is generally clearer than hard copy, and it can be enlarged to a comfortable size.

Do I miss the feel of the pages? Not really. This is much more convenient. I imagine that when humans invented scrolls, some people thought of rocks with nostalgia. But scrolls were easier to carry around, and so they won out. This innovation may be similar.

Above: The Kindle

Below: Modes of writing the paper book has replaced

YES WE CAN... learn languages

None of my grandparents spoke English natively, but all of them learned. They came from four different countries: Austria, Latvia, Romania, Poland. Yet all of them spoke at least two languages in addition to English-- Yiddish and one or two of these others: German, Lettish, Russian, Polish, Romanian. My grandparents were not particularly well educated-- except for my father's father, none of them finished high school. You don't have to be hypereducated to acquire a foreign language.

Despite my training in applied linguistics, I often despaired of learning to speak foreign languages. It's not that I didn't try. As a child, I took Hebrew in an after school pogram. I made good grades in high school and college French and could even read Camus and Moliere at one time. I can read New Testament Greek, to some extent. But I could never communicate in any language I tried to learn, until now.

Slowly, painfully, I am learning to speak 汉语 (Chinese). For a speaker of English, it is extremely difficult. The language is tonal; this means that the relative pitch of pronunciation alters meaning. Chinese has no alphabet, but has thousands of interrelated symbols like this one （pronounced "ni hao") which means "hello": 你好。Its grammatical and idiomatic structure are very different from ours. But with persistence, one learns.

Languages are learned best through exposure and practical use. When I enrolled in a Chinese class based on rote memorization, my brain rebelled. I have been more successful working with software and weekly lessons with a Chinese graduate student. Ever so slowly, I am learning Chinese.

Joe does better with Chinese writing system than I, though I can discriminate some character's It's a question of learning style. We leave for 北京 (Beijing) on May 28, a week from Friday.

Below, my favorite software packages: Rosetta Stone and Communicate in Chinese by 大山 (Da Shan).