speaking Mandarin at home. However, I was not at all prepared for what met me the year we spent in Beijing when my father headed an international program for a small group of American students. At the time, though I spoke Mandarin without a foreign accent, my vocabulary did not extend far beyond a grade-school level, and I was next to illiterate. Well aware of that, my parents, fond followers of the "sink or swim" theory, dropped me off at the local Chinese school the first day of classes and promptly
Founders' Accents August 2013 Recently Inc published an interview in which I said we'd noticed a correlation between founders having very strong foreign accents and their companies doing badly. Some interpreted this statement as xenophobic, or even racist—as if I'd said that having a foreign accent at all was a problem. But that's not what I said, or what I think. No one in Silicon Valley would think that. A lot of the most successful founders here speak with accents. The case I was talking
Vampires are known as mythical beings with white pale glittery skin that drain the essence of life known as blood. As unbelievable as it sounds they actually did exist centuries ago. They weren’t anything like the vampires we see in movies, shows, books, and video games today. A vampire or something analogous to it can be found in most culture and folklores going back to the beginning of time, but it is a mistake to think they have familiar attributes of Count Dracula. The term “vampire” appeared
Some people think that music programs and playing instruments are useless, but there are many advantages of music programs that people often overlook or do not care enough to even try to understand. When I heard about how schools in other states wanted to take music programs out of their schools because they felt it was unimportant and a waste of time, I could not understand why anyone would want to do that or why anyone would think that way. Whether one realizes it or not, taking away music programs
The Impact of France on the World France occupies an exclusive place in the world, and could accept nothing less. It is, its President declares, a beacon for the human race. The nation and its people may be loved or hated, but they can never be ignored. This, after all, is the land which gave the planet Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, Charles de Gaulle and Gérard Depardieu, the Musketeers, Madame Bovary and Cyrano de Bergerac, Brigitte Bardot and Joan of Arc, claret and the cinema, the Cancan