Taught to be taut:WashPost ,June 20, Page A15

Photo: Washington Nationals relief pitcher Ron Villone fires a pitch at Nationals Park on June 2nd 2009 for sports fans.

Paul Schwartz wrote:

English is such a hard language.
The past tense of think is thought.
The past tense of seek is sought.
Spell check couldn't find it,
But it should have been caught:
Villone's neck muscles were taut, not taught.

Comment:

Tension leads to muscle spasm. "Jin zhang" causes "chou jin" in Pin Yin system of romanization.

Chinese is a hard language as well. But folks in China study English to join the international community for the sake of brainstorming.

English-speaking folks study Chinese and "A Glimpse of the Chinese Language" would be useful for Westerners to start learning the Pin Yin system as phonetic equivalents of the Chinese characters initially.

Readers can get a free copy of pdf format of the above-mentioned paper at www.rand.org for reference. Chinese language is a form of art and music as known to the world.

Francis Shieh a.k.a. Xie Shihao,a promoter of cultural understanding of Sino-American economics via the Chinese language as the primary source material for humanistic enrichment in globalization.

Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 10.02 a.m.