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All you people with connections to Chinese businesses or universities, I’ve said this often to people in China and I’ll say it again here. If a company in a developing country wants to attract business from the developed countries it won’t succeed with a website that has mistakes in its English. The prospective customer will read as far as the mistake or mistranslation and then look for another company to do business with. There are too many Chinese websites with mistakes in the English and too many that have bad English. Chinese businesses are losing money because they have no comprehension of the fact that a perfect translation is the only way to sell their products to the world. Can they afford to spend a little more and get a lot more business? Of course they can. Their children wear name brand shoes that cost more than several pages of top quality proofreading and editing. My OmniEnglish and TepsonChina sites offer valuable services. If you have any connection with Chinese business read these sites and contact me.

If you are attending a Chinese University or working as a teacher or other staff member in one, the same applies to you or your institution. If you have an important academic paper you want the world to read, or a website that you hope will attract overseas interest, or a journal with the best of your professors’ or students’ work, it will go nowhere without perfect English. I can help you. The companies I represent can correct your work and bring it to the level of perfect English. How much is that worth to you? If you are truly clever you will understand the value of this.

Since I came to China I have been seeing terrible English, not only in Restaurants and on the street, but in websites of major companies and even universities. These sites are driving away profit.

Many of you will know that I was able to take a year off, in a sense, doing a little work for translation companies and proofreading translations to English done by Chinese workers. I began to blog during that period and have enjoyed it tremendously. Now my life has changed again. This week I started in my new job, teaching oral English at a university. My programme is not full yet but to start with I have two classes of second year students, sophomores in American English. My first impressions are good. They are nice young men and women who are serious about their study and willing to adapt to my methods, which will involve them as much as possible in thinking and speaking in English. The more they speak, the more it will become automatic. I am hoping they will talk to one another in English outside class time and even start a bit of a fashion for English on that campus. Speaking a foreign language can be cool.

I looked for a definition of autism today and found the website of a remarkable autistic woman called Alison Hale. Here is the site http://www.hale.ndo.co.uk/index.htm  Please read it to get some insights into what people with major learning difficulties experience in their school  lives. I would love to read her autobiography some day. What has that got to do with China? To Alison, writing was just shapes and spaces which changed constantly. It was utterly meaningless to her for many years. Voices were the same. She could become familiar with a voice but when a new person came in to her life the sounds were different and she could not interpret their meaning. Most of us can slot the sounds and tones of a new voice into a general pattern called ‘English’ or whatever language we were born to and access its meaning, but for Alison every voice was unique and had to be coded individually for meaning. Living in China is a little like living in Alison’s world. I walk around the streets and hear people speaking but don’t know their meaning. They are just making sounds I don’t understand. I look at shop signs, street names, newspapers. I go into a bookstore with a thrill of anticipation but I see marks on paper that I don’t understand. The worlds of speech and print are meaningless. Even the looks on people’s faces are foreign and in a different code than the one I knew so well at home. I have had to relearn one of my favourite accomplishments, to read body language. Living in China is like being in Alison Hale’s world for a while.

I finally learned to make dumplings. Why has it taken me three and a half years? It’s so easy. You just mix plain flour and water into a firm dough, flour a board, roll the dough into a long sausage, cut it into small discs, then roll the discs into thinner discs (there’s an art to making them round). The filling should have been made earlier. It can be vegetable, meat or a mixture. Spoon some filling into the centre of a dough disc then fold the dough over and pinch the edges of the dough together firmly. If you don’t have a Chinese to teach you, find your own ways of doing this artistically. At first your dumplings will be a little ugly but you will soon find yourself making neat little parcels. When you have made all of your mixture into parcels, boil water in a wok or saucepan and drop your dumplings in. Most should sink to the bottom. When they are bobbing on the surface again they are almost ready. Wait a little longer then serve. Now you can eat your jiaozi. I ate mine an hour ago, delicious.