Through a family connection* I’m looking for an experienced tutor to teach English to a prominent physician in Guangdong. Probably 1-2 hours per week in the Sun Yat-sen University (中山大学) area. If you’re interested, please contact me directly (hence closed comments): syz <at> sinoglot <dot> com.

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*Which is to say, no, we’re not turning Sinoglot into a web-based billboard, at least not until the price is right. But that reminds me of the story about when we were approached by a media company that wanted to pay us for “text only” advertisements. Discrete, unobtrusive, all that. I checked out the operation and they seemed legit, and since they were paying money up front, it hardly seemed like I could go wrong. Hey, who wouldn’t sell his soul to defray server costs and all that. All was visions of harmoniousness and lucre until I got this email:

Hi Syz,

I now have the advert copy for your site. I hope you’re not that busy and that you can get this up today. Please refer to the details below.

EXISTING CONTENT :
A bit of the catalyst for Beijing Sounds was the gradual realization, as I soaked in more Mandarin, that I had happened into the realm of deep Beijing dialect and that there are folks here whose manner of speaking and choice of words distinguishes them from neighbors even 15 miles away. Travel a bit farther and you’ll find some long-time Beijingers are effectively unintelligible even to fellow Mandarin speakers, if the latter happen to be from, say, deep Sichuan.

UPDATED CONTENT:
A bit of the catalyst for Beijing Sounds was the gradual realization, as I soaked in more Mandarin, that I had happened into the realm of deep Beijing dialect and that there are folks here whose manner of speaking and choice of words distinguishes them from neighbors even 15 miles away. <a href=”http://someaddressaboutPOKER.com/“>Poker Online</a> Travel a bit farther and you’ll find some long-time Beijingers are effectively unintelligible even to fellow Mandarin speakers, if the latter happen to be from, say, deep Sichuan.

I literally responded with “You’re kidding, right?” The rep was professional enough to respond that he wasn’t, and offered to consider other options if that would help, but I decided at that point that even my soul had some sort of minimum value.