Yes, I heard you calling

It may be freezing outside, but it's as clear as an Orwell essay and ten times as sunny. I heard an intriguing bird call on my coatless jaunt to the coffee shop and stopped to locate its originator, all the time thinking, Why are you bothering? Normally, I suck at bird-spotting, even in leafless weather, but stick a bright crimson male cardinal smack in the middle of the manicured face of a deep green yew hedge and even a dumbass like me will find it. Hey buddy! Trying to tell me this will be a kickass day?

I saved a bit of my morning indulgence--an ersatz Egg McMuffin--for him, but he was gone by the time I returned.

Cheese by any other name would smell as strong!

The last two Chinese classes have been really great. We finally seem to be hitting our stride with the new textbook, which is a massive improvement over the one we were using before. For one thing, it's aimed at grownups rather than kids; for another, it actually includes explanations of some of the syntactic patterns and drills for practicing them. Plus, Liu laoshi is forcing us to talk more. Last night, Xiao Fei told me that the grammar is beginning to fall into place for him and Mozhu says she's finally beginning to parse the Chinese spoken in class. I still have trouble with this myself. Listening comprehension has always been my worst linguistic skill, even poorer than my oral production.

Our assignment was to explain how to cook a dish so I got monshu to type up the recipe for master sauce and presented it as hong2shao3rou4 ("red-cooked meat"). After I finished, my teacher said, "Very good, but that's not hongshaorou." "What is it?" I asked, but she couldn't tell me. Xiao Fei wasn't prepared and had to describe the preparation of chicken cordon bleu off the cuff. He was going along pretty well until he had to ask how to say "cheese". Teacher misunderstood him and thought he was trying to produce a Chinese word until I looked up ru3lao4 in my Little Red Book.

She pronounced this ru3luo4, which confused the heck out of me. Looking in my bigger, Taiwanese dictionary, I see that luo4 is the "reading pronunciation" of 酪. This isn't the first time we've encountered one in her speech, so either these are more current in Taiwan or she's just that old-fashioned. Fortunately, the whole matter is moot, because modern Chinese speakers don't say ru3luo4 or ru3lao4--they say qi4si1.