Language!

No time to write a full report of the world championship tonight, I'm afraid - it's the office Christmas do, in (funnily enough) a Chinese restaurant. Having eaten genuine Chinese food for the last week, I'd prefer somewhere else, but never mind. The account of the other things I've done for the last week will have to wait until the weekend, assuming I can still remember it then.

But among the things I've resolved to do before the next world championship (and there are many such things, and a lot of them involve memory training) is learning Chinese. Even if the next world championship isn't in China after all, it's a thing that I feel I should do. All through the WMC, Chinese competitors' names were horribly mispronounced by the non-Chinese-speakers, and the non-Chinese-speakers had their names similarly mangled by the Chinese-speakers. Everyone needs to have some kind of crash course in pronunciation before next time, it will make communication so much easier.

We need to ask Martian Kid for help, I think. The best cartoon I found on Chinese TV (I had surprisingly little time to watch cartoons all weekend) was an educational show involving five children called AA, EE, II, OO and UU, with the appropriate vowels on their shirts and hats, who have surprisingly exciting 3D-computer-animated adventures with a Martian kid, a robot and their enemy, a purple bear. Interrupting these adventures at regular intervals are 2D segments titled "Martian kid teachs your English" (sic), in which the audience are taught a few English words and the cast enact scenes illustrating them in memorable ways. I tried to use it to learn some Chinese words, but didn't get very far. The sports-themed one, having illustrated the English names of a wide range of games (but not memory), intriguingly ended by presenting the phrase "Both are hurt", without elaborating further. Is that really the number one phrase you use when talking about sporting contests?

Also, I've had 32 pageviews here today from Moldova, which I think deserves a hello. Hello, Moldova!