In 2015, I moved to Shanghai, China to work for a couple of years. One day after work I stepped out of the office with my friend at work explaining the contents of this book. AI had left the copy I had in Toronto. And I left him saying that I will be visiting the English bookshops that was closer to our office. While browsing the collection my luck struck me again. At the bottom of a pile of book I recognized the spine of this book and bought that too immediately.

Indeed, this book helped me a lot in understanding habits and culture of those who I came across during my stay in China, the best two years in my life I would say with no hesitation. To the surprise of my friends I exhibited my knowledge of the day-to-day cultural practices.

I failed once with my habit of clearing the dinner table to help the host to bring in more dishes. My intention was to help the host. But my friend quietly warned me that my doing so may be mistaken by other guests as a hint to indicate the gathering is coming to an end.

I thank the author for this book that contributed to my happy stay in China.

People who are fluent in more than language say that the language they use influences how they talk, behave and even think.

I don’t understand your question about losing some ability because you are learning a language that doesn’t feature that attribute. Of course you don’t lose it. Why would you? You already have those skills.

If you are learning a language that doesn’t have a word for a certain color, you will still be able to see it easily. It is just that the native speakers won’t be able to or at least not without great difficulty at best. If they are able to see it they will claim it is actually some other, different color.

Why should he dissect it to your satisfaction? He said he wasn’t going to and explained why. Maybe you should dissect it if you think that is the appropriate thing to do.

Well, yes, it’s a book recommendation! It’s not meant to be an in-depth discussion of all topics covered in the book, although I have included a link to a detailed summary as well as provided my own, shorter version. In a perfect world, all information would be free and you wouldn’t need to buy this book or any other, but that’s not the world in which we live, so buying books is still necessary, both to get the information and to support the people who wrote them.

I’d guess he wants people to buy the book rather than completely disect it on a public webpage.

I think it’s a little silly to have to buy a book to learn something, but that’s how people want to live.

In general it is claimed that bilingual people tend to be smarter than monolingual. It seems that the broader abilities come from not having one’s thinking restricted to one culture and its language idioms.

Recently I am making a lot of progress with retaining and recalling Chinese characters. I am using the traditional tool of association of all the elements in the character to some sort of story or image. But I am finding that the more I can employ irony in the creation of the association, the easier it is to have good recall. I think I am one to something.

I have gone back into a deep review of Reading and Writing Chinese as it has the ‘bits’ that build characters that come from historical character usage AND culture. One can’t really learn Chinese without learning something about thinking like a Chinese. Unlike European languages that share so many common cultural events, Chinese has a very different point of view.

The so-called ‘bits’ are of critical importance for remembering and recalling characters … do I dare say that they are The Alphabet of Traditional Chinese? These include the Ten Heavenly Stems, the Twelve Earthly Branches and quite a few characters that are noted as ‘no longer used independently in modern Chinese’. I started with the McNaughton and Li book some 25 years ago, have built up a big library of other books to learn from … but I keep returning to this one.

thanks for this! I’ve heard about the geography of thoughts 4 years ago but then forgotten it, I’ll buy it!

I write a lot of book reviews and never put the summary… I don’t see the point. I think it’s better to talk about your opinion on the topic as you did : )

I do agree with your graphic. Culture and language influence your “thoughts,” but so do your characters and personal experience.

Cheers