Tet, the Vietnamese new year.

So I planed to write a short post about Tet. But wait. There are plenty of articles about Tet that we can easily google (yes, Google for the win ) so there we go. With the key word “Vietnamese new year” off it provides thousands of online articles. Amongst which, Wikipedia’s is the very first [...]

Surprising Origins of Everyday Phrases

Careful: These are “everyday” phrases, they are meant to be used in casual talking, not in official occasion, such as (for us students) writing or speaking tests. Find out the unusual stories behind these 15 common expressions By Amanda Greene Posted September 22, 2010 from WomansDay.com Has anyone ever told you a “bare-faced lie?” Or have you [...]

We are no heroes

Let’s relax with this lovely song (Well… I could not embed it to this blog as WordPress does not support it. You need to click on this link to go to the song then. Happy listening ) WE ARE NO HEROES [Music and Lyrics: Dieter Bohlen] You’re (1) ____ in your heart And I swear [...]

Good Morning, Vietnam … er, Oklahoma

While checking my old emails I saw this interesting article from The NYTimes that anh Phú sent us long time ago. If you found this article difficult to read here, you may follow the link above to go to the original page and use the auto look-up of the NYTimes that I mentioned on previous [...]

I couldn’t give a monkey’s!

Vietnam coach Alfred Riedl’s response to being called a national hero is brutally honest: “I couldn’t give a monkey’s!” The Austrian was a little over 10 minutes away from going down in Vietnamese folklore before Qatar rescued a 1-1 draw in Thursday’s Asian Cup Group B game in Hanoi. Co-hosts Vietnam, playing in the tournament [...]

Norwegian Woods

A famous Japanese novel. I skimmed through the English and the Vietnamese versions last week. It’s worth reading. Now there’s an interesting thing coming up when I compare the two versions. Our language has so many pronouns so it creates something funny here. Since the two main characters are half friends, half boyfriend-girlfriend, it’s really a [...]

Harry Potter Grows Older and Darker

(From Time) Deep into the new movie Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, our teen wizard (Daniel Radcliffe) finds the strength to face down the dark lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) — and the wisdom to pity him. “You can never know love or friendship,” Harry tells the noxious, noseless one. “And I feel [...]

An earthquake in linguistics ?

I believe most of us have heard about Noam Chomsky from our language teachers. He revolutionized linguistics in the 50s so much that linguists have considered him as Einstein in their field since then. I heard that they even call the time before Chomsky B. C. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_colapinto?current… In the link above, you can see that [...]

Vài cau chuyện vui

1) A mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer are all given identical rubber balls and told to find the volume. They are given anything they want to measure it, and have all the time they need. The mathematician pulls out a measuring tape and records the circumference. He then divides by two times pi to [...]

TOEFL essay

An English teacher at a TOEFL center in Saigon complained to his colleague: “One of my student is really cunning!”. “How so?”, his friend asked. -I assigned him to write a short story about princes and princesses. He wrote: “A prince met a princess in the garden of his castle. He asked her: ‘Do you [...]

Life elsewhere ?

Discussion: Do you believe that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe?  If yes, what kind of mathematics are they studying over there  The following is one opinion on the first question by Douglas Keyworth As we all know, the Earth has everything that is needed for life to develop, which is why we are here. But four [...]

English trivia

I happened to see this page, thought it is interesting to know  Interesting Facts: 1. The longest one-syllable word in the English language is “screeched.” 2. “Dreamt” is the only English word that ends in the letters “mt”. 3.  No word in English language rhymes with “month,” “silver,” “purple,” or “orange.” 4. The symbol on [...]