Rajab, the SEO Gladiator
Rajab, one of my readers, and an SEO Gladiator from north Africa, is coming to Italy to study Italian this summer.
I’ve been exchanging the odd email with Rajab, and I complimented him on his English, but he disagrees. Indeed, this is how he disagreed:
My written English is good? Heck no, I think it sucks! But thanks anyway, I’m gung-ho about languages
Now, I don’t know about you, but I think that for someone who says he does not know English, the above response was absolutely excellent.
It’s grammatically accurate, colloquial, and, there is even a nice little idiom thrown in for good measure.
Maybe I should point out that he is studying French, Arabic, and English at university. He must be making good progress.
I would be interested to hear what his spoken English is like, but, in today’s email oriented world, being able to write well in a language or two is a very useful skill to have.
Rajab appears to have a bright future ahead of him. Hope he’s on Linked-In.
I write too much, I know
Nope, I’m not on about the number of posts, but the length of the things. I do try to keep things brief, but they tend to get out of hand, and when I see them, I think ‘Heck, I didn’t think it was going to end up that long’.
As an excuse, I would say that the WordPress posting screen is much wider than the actual space for posts on the blog, so I don’t think that I have gone overboard. Generally though, I know that I have a tendency to go on a bit too much.
Sorry if this bothers you, and if it does, tell me, and I’ll attempt to bring my verbosity to heel.
Burnt Midnight Oil
A little while back I was asked to prepare a short two day workshop on how to write a press release in English for the Media Relations master at the business school where I often find myself.
After burning copious amounts of that old midnight oil, I came up with such a course.
The first time this course was held was quite a nerve racking experience and I remember feeling much like an actor appearing on his first night. I really had no idea as to how my course would go down. Even though I was fairly sure that I had covered almost everything, and come up with a method that was thorough but, at the same time, quite straight forward. I had even come up with a way, I hoped, of getting the most out of a large group of people with widely differing levels of knowledge of English.
At the end of the day though, I had never really done anything as extensive as this. So how did the course go? Read more
The Dragon’s Revenge?
Anti-Chinese feeling in my area of Milan appears to be running a little higher than usual. Someone seems to be getting some kind of warped pleasure out of scribbling ‘Cinesi merda’ (’Chinese shit’ is the translation) on the walls alongside Chinese run businesses in Via Paolo Sarpi and its immediate vicinity here in Milan.
Oddly enough, the Chinese residents of the area have not taken to writing ‘Italiani merda’ on the walls in the area, or have they? Well, I don’t really know. So, I wondered, how do you write ‘Italiani merda’ in Chinese.
Well, out of sheer curiosity I asked the bar staff of Chinese origin in a bar I pop into on Sundays for a quick coffee to write ‘Italiani merda’ in Chinese. These people chuckled a bit at my request, smiled, and then obliged, with one of them writing the offending words on a paper napkin.
Ah, I thought, now I’ll know if the Chinese are getting their own back. Except for the fact that I discovered, about two minutes later, that I could not even work out which way was the right way up for this group of two, what I assumed to be, words. I don’t even know whether the writing was a translation of the offending words, or a Chinese equivalent, to be honest. The writing could have read ‘Who is this idiot asking such a stupid question’, or worse, for all I knew.
This rather pointless act of abject curiosity has brought me to two conclusions.
First, it really would be pointless for the Chinese to go around scribbling ‘Italiani merda’ all over the place in Chinese, as the Italians would have no idea they were being insulted.
And, secondly, I doubt whether there are that many graffiti artists in China, as it would take them ages, in their elegantly complex language, to write anything on the walls there, especially seeing as the spray paint cans beloved of those who write all over the place are not the most precise of instruments. If anyone would care to correct me on the existence of graffiti artists in China, then please do.
PS We went for a Chinese meal in one of the restaurants near us this evening. And it was very good. Indeed, the fame of this particular place has even reached as far a field as Genova, or so I discovered from a friend of mine from Genova this evening.
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