I cannot believe it. It's even hotter than Beijing.

This cartoon is about US. Canada is similar to US in many ways since they are English speaking countries located in North America and their universities both provide considerable scholarship supporting grad students. However, to Chinese student, Canada is an easier version of US.

First, tuition of Canada is cheaper than US, and second, so is scholarship. It is no doubt that the top students (and rich ones) aim to US, thus the competition in Canada is less. Third, US VISA is really hard to get, and the situation has been even worsened by foreign policy of Bush government. Canada as an immigrant country on the other hand, welcomes newcomers. Further more, GRE is required in all US universities, but only a handful of Canadian ones. To sum up, it is much easier to study in Canada than US, whether you are a undergrad or grad. (That's exactly why I'm here.)

Anyway, this cartoon still reflects some common realities when going study abroad. We have somehow all been though those procedures. I think it's interesting.

How Anglophones remember so many words? I never know. Well, it's their mother tongue. How many Chinese characters do I know? 3,000? 5,000? I don't know. My Chinese is above the average level I think. Those characters integrate each other and further form much more words. I bet there are hundreds of thousands of them.

I tested myself last year and I had ~8,000 vacabulary in English. It might be a little bit more now, but not much. I'm still working on it, getting progress, slowly. There are just too many English words beyond my knowledge. When I try to memorize new words, some old ones are forgotten. It's OK. I believe I am forgetting Chinese as well. All you need to do is outlearning forgetting by memorizing. I've read a paper said educated Anglophones know ~20,000 vacabulary, which is 2.5 times of mine. It's not bad, considering the words I don't know are basically rarely used ones like "brochure" something. (This word is randomly picked from my new word database.) They don't likely come up in daily conversation. What's really holding me back is the phrase. With simple words interacting with each other, they become new ones by which you cannot conclude the original meaning literally. For example, what does "swell time" mean? The specific expanding period? No, it means happy time. You see, that's the problem. The phrase "swell time" should be counted as a distinct word for me to learn. I guess the real vocabulary of Anglophones in this sense is at least 10 times bigger than me.

Something else, on another hand, is really easy to pick up, which is "swear word" and slangs. Swear words are the words used when expressing strong emotional feelings, while may offend others, like the F word. It's not hard to speak like a punk because those people have pretty limited vocabulary and repeat the same thing again and again. Their way of talking lacks diversity. Everybody can say something like "dude what's up dude". It is not my suggestion that a foreign speaker should take this.

First, it's offending. You never know whose feeling you are hurting. When you say "God" or "damn", you offend Christians. When you say "that's so gay", you offend real gays. Not to mention those sexual-related words which almost offend everyone.

Second, you can always find a replacement. My friend taught me a phrase the first week I came to Canada, "bad ass". He was referring a statuary of an angry-look first-nation hunter. I said does that mean "tough guy"? He said yes. This is a replacement. You don't have to mention the word "ass". I heard certain professor said these words in class tough. Well, some hearsay tells us that professors use swear words to win respect from undergrads, by giving them the own-kind-feeling. I cannot make sure the context is right if I'm the one using it. If I use other words wrongfully, that's fine. No big deal. But, if I use slangs in the wrong place, it could cause issues.

Last but not the least, use euphemism. For me I do believe swear words possess irreplaceable functions, like for exclamation. However, even if you really wanna use it and you are sure about the correctness, please do not say it directly. Certain euphemism makes it smoother, like:

hell --> heck
god --> gosh
shit --> shoot
damn --> darn

The words on the left are those you should never say.

Anyhow, speaking in a street way makes you being instinctively evaluated as undereducated. All I am doing is trying to talk like an educated people, gracefully and politely. It is not the best way of talking tough. It sounds hypocritical. I'm not doing this in Chinese. No talking like writing. I'm still doing my Beijing style dialect. Time to time, you gotta need the punch lines to perform your jokes, and academic language somewhat lacks the flexibility to do so. But in English, I'm just trying not to become a joke myself.

PS: Of course Christians use the word "God". IMO, they want the word to refer to THE God only, not for exclamation.

Slender as a badminton player?

 
(Bao Chunlai the top pro badminton man's single player.)

Or fat as a sumo player?

 
(Unknown sumo picture from interenet)

As tall as a basketball player?

 
(Yao Ming the NBA player, 226cm)

Or as short as a gymnast?

 
(This cutie is a gymnast in China national team, 151cm)

As weak as a pro-gamer? (People who play computer game for living.)

(Top world's pro-gamers, usually spend 12hours/day playing video game. And yes, they call themselves athletes.)

Or as crazy as a bodybuilder?

(Ronnie Coleman, looks like a giant frog.)

I know the word "athletic" here means strong. I just want to argue there is not an universal standard of being strong.

I have been programming and debugging a lot recently, from my course and research. I also debug junior undergrads' lab assignments in consultant office.

I have to say I am not a bad coder/debugger. I started writing program for fun when 13, that might help in experience. But I don't think that is the reason. After all, I wasn't heavily engaged by programming when in China ---- my major was not computer science by then.

As I believed, emotional quotient, or well known as EQ, has much stronger influence to people than they think. I have read a paper from Scientific American says that the patience is one significant factor to one's math ability, contrasting to the common sense that math ability is inborn and highly related to IQ. Also, programming is usually considered as an activity benefits from IQ. Well, I don't think that way. Programming is more hardworking in my opinion. I argue the most 2 quality for programming are belief and objectivism. I know I'm using funny words, but, wait me to explain.

Programming in some way, is like a religion, namely Christianism. I know quite some Christian here, because they are nice people and they provide free food. Kidding. Seriously, when I dig into the religion of Christianism, I find the most important concept is: believe. Certain country even puts "IN GOD WE BELIEVE" on their money. Christian think in this way: the God, the invisible but universally existed God, controls everything in the world. Everything ever happened, is happening and will happen is from the will of God. I'm not judging but this really doesn't make any sense to me. If there happened some terrible things, like an earthquake killing many people, they would explain like: Well, the God let it because he wants us to "learn things".

Oh my God, you must be the worst teacher ever.

In Christianism, God cannot be wrong, and no man can doubt God or challenge him. Anything happens because the invisible guy wants it to happen, in a good-will way. There is no such thing as bad luck. Anything goes wrong? This is all your fault, go self-questioning. Hitted by a meteorite? Again, go questioning yourself. OK, I really should stop joking about other people's religion. Speaking as an atheist, this isn't really the best attitude sometimes. Nonetheless, this attitude could be positive in other circumstances, when something is overwhelmingly ruling and absolutely correct. That is programming.

Programming is the thing completely logic that makes perfect sense. The compiler, the thing makes your code into a program, is extremely likely to be correct, if not entirely. Some 1st/2nd year kids have trouble with debugging. They complained to me: "Java/C doesn't make sense." Dude, it's not Java doesn't make sense. It is you are not making sense. Nothing wrong with Java if you put the right thing in. You cannot, even try to think the compiler is wrongfully working, like Christian cannot question God. If there is a mistake, it must be yours.

I call this belief as "always my fault". It divides the world in 2, inside and outside. Inside is what you can control or you can cast direct influence on. Outside on the other hand, is what can only be affected by an inside way. If you want to blame something, blame the inside factor, cuz that's what really matters. Examples: In programming, compiler is outside and my design and implement is inside. If there is something wrong, it must be the latters. In life, say, if your boyfriend/girlfriend is a "son of bitch"/"bitch" so that your relationship didn't work out, that's not his/her fault. There are millions bad people in this world, and their existence is an objective fact. It is you who made the bad decision and picked the wrong guy. People are responsible for their choices. All the faults are yours.

If Christianism provides an concept in this way, I would say it is a healthy one. However, as Laplace said, there is no necessity of the assumption of God. My suggestion is, keep the essence, and cut the rest away with the Ockham's Razor.