Rossoneri

It does take a lot of time and diligence, hence the younger generation of Chinese Singaporeans are getting disinterested in learning it properly. (Which, IMO, is a shame.) One of the head teachers in my alma mater warned us last time that the amount of time we set aside for studying Chinese should be equal to the amount of time we set aside for ALL the rest of our subjects, so studying Chinese was equivalent to studying 8 other subjects...I definitely spent a lot of time memorising phrases and idioms and remembering how to write words! Even then, I would probably be very happy if I knew half the words in the dictionary. That aside, Chinese characters are usually made up of different parts. These parts have all evolved from pictograms used in ancient times so there is usually some reason why a character is written as it is. So you can have words which have the same pronunciation but written slightly differently based on the context. Think of it as putting prefixes and suffixes on root words. So it is not that easy, but not that hard either.

53) 1 54) 1 55) 2 56) 1

Think I only got the last 2 right?

English is my first language, which comes as a shock to most people here in the UK because I'm ethnically Chinese after all. But then few people know that English is the first language in Singapore. (Although Bolo Santosi would make you think otherwise!) Mandarin Chinese is my mother tongue and so a second language (although I did it in school at the "first language" level). The funniest thing is, a few weeks into my first year, some Chinese coursemates were seated next to me and one of them asked the other in Mandarin what the lecturer had just wrote. I answered the question in Mandarin and the guy next to me said, "You can understand Mandarin!" and I was like "Of course!" So yeah, after coming to the UK, I have had some people thinking I don't understand English well and some people thinking I don't understand Mandarin. Other Chinese dialects I understand, in decreasing order: Hokkien (Similar to Taiwanese, the main dialect group of Singaporean Chinese), Foochow (my mother's dialect), Cantonese (my father's dialect, and I am really hopeless in understand much) I also studied Malay for 2 years so I understand some very basic words. My Malaysian Chinese housemates are proficient in English, Mandarin, Malay and their own dialect, so I really pale in comparison to them...

All 3 direct free-kicks scored so far all scored by Asian nations. Whee :)

49) 1 50) 1 51) 1 52) 1

Good thing I put SA to win.

Weierstrass FTW.

Yeah, some of the Ivory Coast players should have walked instead. Towards the end, they looked like they were more interested in fighting than playing football.

33) 1 34) 2 35) 2 36) 2 37) 2 38) 0 39) 2 40) 2 41) 2 42) 0 43) 2 44) 2 45) 1 46) 1 47) 2 48) 0

I got merked badly.

If anything, there were about 3 US players being held rather tightly around their waists. Quite right, if there was any foul, it should have been a penalty for USA!

C sounds good. If not, then A.

17) 1 18) 0 19) 2 20) 1 21) 0 22) 2 23) 0 24) 0 25) 1 26) 1 27) 2 28) 0 29) 0 30) 0 31) 2 32) 0

Carragher couldn't keep up with Altidore. Looks like England are going to have trouble dealing with speedy forwards...

you are the only one who got the USA match right :blink: Yeah, I clearly did not bank on Rob Green being so helpful! I must say Onyewu's pretty impressive despite only playing 30 minutes for Milan all season.

Happy Birthday!

Wonder which European club is ringing up Enyeama's agent now?

Have I not seen wrong? Everyone else thinks Brazil will draw N. Korea and Spain will not beat the Swiss?! BTW, I once partnered the uncle of Danny Feilhaber (USA) for a bridge session...

Not that difficult IMO. Netanyanhu is pretty hardline partially due to the death of his brother during the Entebbe Raid.

So what do you mean by "Apartheid"? From the way this word is being bandied around, I can easily claim that "apartheid" is happening across many other countries in the world.

1) 2 2) 1 3) 0 4) 0 5) 0 6) 2 7) 0 8) 1 9) 0 10) 1 11) 0 12) 2 13) 1 14) 0 15) 1 16) 0

How do you cook pasta? Btw, even after 8 months in Britain I didn't get used to it (the lack of salt). I don't eat bacon, never liked it. But then again, I'm not a fan of pork in general. Even after nearly 2 years in Britain, I'm still not used to the lack of salt. But then again, I'm Chinese and I love my soya sauce way too much...

This quote from the article sums up my sentiment: A friend of mine showed support for the protests in London on Facebook. So I asked him, North Korea killed 46 when they sank the South Korean naval ship without provocation, so why are you not protesting against them? His reply was highly unconvincing.

Firstly, I'm not sure if you've read their disclaimer that some of their treatments are rather controversial. That being said, your questions raise a few good points. For the first sequence, how do you play your 1♣ openers, and what would X mean in that situation? It's difficult if we have no idea what your 1♣ opening shows.