My personal experience of meeting strangers on the Net

In respond to Trinity's earlier post, gotta share a bit on Omegle.

Omegle is a website which offers you chances to talk to strangers around the world. When you click on Start a chat, another user at random will be picked by the system and then you can have a one-on-one chat with each other.

I was first introduced to Omegle by Trinity. She told me about how popular this website is in China as people use it to meet new friends and most importantly, to practise English. We were thinking about incorporating it into our wiki page. But before that, I suggested we ought to get on a trial before consdiering letting our students to use it.

In fact, it was my first time using website like this one to chat with strangers. But there got to be a first try. So... I started randomly chatting with strangers. The first two strangers were guys who weren't interested in chatting but only interested in asking about my personal information, wanted to get into even 'deeper' talk. Then, I quickly disconnected converstation with the two guys.

After playing around for 10 minutes, I was about to quit the site but I ended up giving one last chance to meet a 'more normal' person. I succeeded! I was randomly assigned to talk with a stranger from South Korea. South Korea has been one of my favourite cities, so that gave me extra motivation to chat with that stranger. She was an undergraduate studying English literature at uni. Bingo! Her major was similar to mine.We shared common liking about food and travelling. And now we've become friends on facebook.

By luck or whatever you call it, I have made a new Korean friend through Omegle. A friend that has a similar education background but different in cultures. A friend that we still get into contact on facebook. That's an interesting experience that I would tell my students.

But Trinity and I agreed not to introduce it to our students. The world is big, there isn't much people have a simple mind as we do, just hope to practise English on Omegle.

I would say, as an English teacher, we do take up an important role. We have the responsibility to protect our students from falling into traps on the Net.

Thanks to all teachers in the world.

Singapore VS Hong Kong

Sibling rivalry is breaking out all over. But not between kids; between countries behaving like kids.

The latest war of words is between Singapore and Hong Kong.









Two songs I came to listen to while I was reading a literature called A tale of two songs: Singapore versus Hong Kong. It's about the battle between the two cities. Which one do you think is better?

To be frank, I like the way Singapore incorporates their lahs in Singlish in order to show their identity. lah is a marker of their identity, it is a linguistic feature that reflects the very true side of one's identity. However, when we look at Hong Kong English we can't find any features of code-mixing. Most Hong Konger want to speak British English, the sort of 'proper' variety of English. It would be good for Hong Kong people to embrace the linguistic feature of Cantonese, the use of code-mixing and the use of particles like lor, wor.

Not sure who would like my idea. Anyways.

It would be fun to show these two songs to students while inrtoducing the cultural difference of Hong Kong and Singapore. Knowing about the language is the first step to knowing about the culture.

Hope that would give you some insights on your teaching.