Chinese President Xi Jinping’s recent visit to Serbia made headlines all over the world. 

As the second stop of his first trip to Europe in five years, many questions were asked and many interpretations were offered. 

It was especially important to point out that this trip was on a day when China’s embassy was bombed by NATO 25 years ago.

I use my phones often.

While it offers great benefits, the excessiveness is not good. My solution is to block certain time periods for me to be phone free.

I’m not alone. The double edged effect of smartphones has become a hot topic everywhere. If you’d like to share your opinion, come and join the next “What Is Your Opinion” session.

The Oscars 2024 was just over. 

The film "Oppenheimer" was a major winner, taking home awards in several major categories including Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Picture.

Do you think that was a good pick? Why or why not?

Come and join the “What Is Your Opinion” session and share your move preference and more.

The recent Tucker Carlson Putin interview is an important one, to say the least. 

Have something to say about it?

Come and join the “What Is Your Opinion” session and talk about your understanding and takeaway lessons from the interview.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is here to stay and it has become better and better very quickly. 

Have something to say about this?

Come and join the first “What Is Your Opinion” session and talk about your perspective on an increasingly important question: Is your job threatened by AI?

I hope this is not too confusing.

Last week, I received a memo from the office building management office that the name of the office building was going to change.

One bizarre thing happened last month after Hong Kong DSE (Diploma of Secondary Education) English exam, which used some excerpts from the former US First Lady Michelle Obama’s memoir Becoming in one reading section.

After the exam, many students went on to Michelle Obama’s social media account and left unseemly comments, blaming her for the exam being too difficult and for their own failures.

Despite harsh penalties, cheating has never been stamped out in schools. The advent of ChatGPT, or generative AI in general that is widely available, is making the situation worse. 

Before ChatGPT, the following ways are considered cheating: students pay someone to write papers for them; they copy papers from other students; they plagiarise sections from other sources; they present translated materials from a foreign language as their own; they describe ideas of others as their own; they do not give proper credit to others.

I’m not a bar person, but I regularly visit a nearby bar on Tuesday evenings. It is because that night is the jam night. Each musician gets to choose two songs to play or to sing. Other musicians will go along with these choices and stage a performance. The sounds of keyboard, guitars, bass, drums, vocals, and sometimes a saxophone, are fused together and exemplified by loud speakers.

Although I am always a spectator, I find the whole experience fascinating.

On the surface, it may not look any different. But MSL Master website had just went through a massive software upgrade over the weekend. I was told that there were many benefits that this new upgrade would bring. However, an immediate problem is that the upgrade seemed to be able to rewrite old URLs, and my tech support guys couldn’t figure out why.

I admit that it is very very “disruptive”, a fitting term used so often in the technology community. And I’m very sorry about the problems that readers will likely to experience when browsing the website, a ton of “404” pages.

Meet Luiz Antonio Gonçalves Neto, everyone!

Last year there were a few beautiful poems included in Easy-to-Read Chinese Short Stories, Book 2, a collection of the best entries of Chinese Writing Contest 2022. 

And I said to myself, wouldn’t it be nice if at least one of these poems could be made into a song?

Thanks to Luiz, it’s going to happen.

What has magnificent 2023 brought us?

A new office!

MSL Master just moved in to its brand new office, located at Bonham Strand. It’s a very lively neighbourhood with so many restaurants, shops and convenient stores. It is very close to the old neighbourhood where the previous office was, about five minutes on foot, yet it’s so different. It is definitely appropriate to say 新年新气象!

Have you ever thought about learning classical Chinese but are discouraged by its difficulties? Here is a good news. A series of mini video lessons that teach some must known classical Chinese is now available! 

Learning Chinese has so many layers of meanings. To capture some of them, new products are now offered at MSL Master. They are printable posters with drawings and printable Chinese character posters. 

Occasionally I receive some good questions about learning Chinese. I never thought about publishing any until today, as it suddenly occurred to me that other people might also be interested in these questions. Below is one I received from a 79 years old grandma from Australia, Pat.