My Awesome Textbooks

For my Chinese classes, we use several different textbooks- one for our reading class, one for writing, one for listening, and our main course book. Of these four, the reading book hands-down has the best pictures. The Chinese people don't usually look that bad (except for the creepy old guy, which I included), but the foreigners are pretty incredible. Almost every week we have a new story about "Mike" and "Mary"'s latest escapades in China, where they meet with varying degrees of success. It gives a lot of insight on the illustrator's (and perhaps some of his compatriots') perspective of foreigners. Also, they think this was an appropriate word list for a beginning Chinese class to learn:
















-so we still don't know how to say some basic words like "more" and "far", but now we do know how to describe what's going on in this picture:

(It took us a while to figure this one out, but "Mike" is going shopping for eggs, but doesn't know how to say eggs in Chinese, so he mimes a chicken laying an egg.)

Note- if you are wondering about the noses, westerners are often referred to as "big noses" by the Chinese- I don't know why it was never so obvious to us- Mary seems to notice right away.