Against the social norm...

I am totally impressed with an SMRT-189 Bus Captain who greets every boarding passenger loud and clear, and with a smile. He really takes pride in his work.

This is really something extraordinary. It is rather common that bus captains smile at boarding passengers, but to smile at the passengers and greet them one by one, "Good Afternoon, Sir!", "Da Jie, xia wu hao!" etc is at least something I have never come across.

I am sure, there will be people who would think and say that he is hypocritical or what he does is "lame" or "extra". But, say what you like, this is the problem with the society now! When someone does something that is out of the norm, he will be perceived as being funny or hypocritical as I mentioned earlier. The same applies to the speaking of English. When one speaks good English with correct pronunciation, he would be critically perceived as "showing-off".

There is much we have to learn to stand up tall when we are doing the right thing, and not being pushed down by the social norm and social pressure.

The uniqueness of Chinese characters ...

Against the backdrop of the long-standing Chinese civilisations, the Chinese characters, written as 汉字 (in Simplified Chinese) or 漢字 (in Traditional Chinese) are so unique, significant and profound that they are even used in the Japanese and Korean Language, where they are referred to as Kanji (漢字) and Hanja (漢字) respectively.

The most significant and amazing thing about Chinese characters is that the same character can be pronounced in as many different ways as there are number of dialect groups in China. Every dialect group pronounces the same character quite differently.

For example, in the first picture, the character, "黄" is typically used as Chinese surname, which means yellow, and it can be pronounced as Huang, Wong, Wee, Ng etc. depending on your dialect group or which province one comes from in China. The Japanese and the Koreans would pronounce it differently, too.

The second picture displays two characters, "安康" which collectively means peaceful and healthy. They can be pronounced as An Kang, On Hong, An Kong etc. depending on the dialect group again. Literally, it means that a Chinese newspaper can be read and understood by every Chinese but the characters in the newspaper are pronounced differently from province to province.