No offending there, this is just for my English practice.

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Although I've referred to some of articles but still was confused. Today I asked around in a chat room about this question, and finally I figured out 12-hour system. I will try to write down it here according to my personal understanding for your reference.

Let's have a look at the formation of a time first:

"12:00a.m. Feb. 2"

We can see the above information consist of two blocks, the time block and the date block. We all must be quite clear with the date block. In this case, we are on the day February the second no doubt.

For the other block, the time block, it consists of two parts as well. The time part, that is "12:00", and "a.m." part. The "a.m." is an abbreviation of the "ante merdiane". Let me make an introduce before we go further. In 12-hour time system, a day is separated into two time periods: the first period is from midnight to noon, which is indicated by "a.m."; the second period is from noon to midnight, which is indicated by "p.m."

As one day is 24 hours long, we are either in the period of "a.m." or "p.m.". Both of them are all indicate the CURRENT status of which 12-hour we are in. This is what "a.m." or "p.m." tells.

The other part of the time block is "12:00". This is a bad guy, really bad ;-) Beforehand, I'd like to ask if you may find "00:00" in 12-hour time system? Or, have you ever heard this kind of expression from anyone who is living within a 12-hour time system country or territory? You may find a truth that there's no 00:00 in 12-hour time system. Why? Because 12:00 means how long the time has passed till the current point of time. For instance, Feb. 2 8:00a.m., is it eight o'clock in the morning on Feb. 2? Yes, it is. BUT, actually the true description should be: "In the morning on Feb. 2, the time of today has been passed for 8 hours from the midnight till the current point of time."

Weird?! Of course, it is! The time value in the 12-hour time system try to tell you how long the time has passed by, not the exact point of time. Therefore, you may not find "00:00" in such time system. Because, 00:00 makes no sense to describe the time elapsed.

Then, I guess a big question mark comes to you, how can you describe Feb. 2 00:00? Right, it should be "Feb. 2 12:00a.m."

Whaaaaaat???? Yes, it is not my misspelling. As I said before, the time block try to describe a time elapsed, in the case "Feb. 1 11:59p.m.", you may say: Oh, we are on Feb. 1, and now is in the period of second half of the day. Hmmm, the elapsed time should be 11 hours and 59 minutes. Okay, that's fine. but what will happen in the next minute? As the date block and "a.m./p.m." are telling us the status of current point of time. Thus, when the next minute comes, these two blocks should go forward as "Feb. 2" and "a.m." - We are on the new day "Feb. 2", and now we are in the first half of the day. Then, let's focus on time block. Will it be "00:00"? As we said before, there's no "00:00" indeed. Will it be "0:01"? No, of course not. we cannot add 1 minute deviation into the time system. It's incorrect! Answer is "12:00". Woooow, amazing?! How can you explain this date and time? "Feb. 2 12:00a.m."? It's quite hard to describe?"

There is an app for helping people with reciting words. And it also has a feature to start a One On One words competition between users.

Today I had a Words-PK competition with a girl. We were stalemate at very beginning. But then I started to be lagged behind a little bit thereafter. Although I didn't have any wrong answer to the questions, I lost points just because I spent a little bit more time to make a choice than she did. The word "fume" took me about 3 seconds to guess its meaning. Eventually, she won the game by a narrow lead of three points. Bad luck!

[Revised]

This is a practice of making sentence.

In the earlier of the Great Depression,

- In the early stage of The Great Depression,

more and more people lost their jobs,

- more and more people lost their jobs(X ,)(V .)

and it was an evident sign that forebodes economic recession was imminent.

- This was deemed as a sign which foreboded the imminence of economic recession. Several months later, many companies went bankrupt one after another or were on the verge of bankruptcy.

Full:

In the early stage of The Great Depression, more and more people lost their jobs. This was deemed as a sign which foreboded the imminence of economic recession. Several months later, many companies went brankrupt one after another or were on the verge of bankruptcy.

Yesterday morning, I was waiting in line to get on my train to office. A young woman with her child stood beside me. The line went too slow, and the woman began to be anxious. After a while, she began to cut in line, try to move forward a little bit further. Maybe her move enraged the man who was in front of her. The man said to her angrily, 'don't haste, okay! There's enough time to let you get on the train.' Yeah, I thought that was right, it was a lot of time to get on the train indeed. But, obviously, the woman didn't buy it. She glared at the man and said, 'You idiot! I have to get on the train earlier than others, otherwise I have no chance to grab a seat for myself. I got the ticket without a designated seat.'

I'd like to say that any action or habit of a group of people you may see apparently must be formed based on the way how people grab the resources in a particular period of time or circumstances. We may think that the woman bad, but, on her side, it is reasonable, isn't it? Resource deficiency may compel people to compete with each other. The unfair distribution of social resources in China in the past years develops people the habits to grab resources without caring about others. And this is why people living in other countries cannot understand. They are living in different world, and they have different ways to live their lives.

Bruises are not like lesions, you may not find any trauma from the surface of the skin but see only a piece of black-and-blue.

Please see the following sentence:

I had had an English training for one year long since I joined in the company five years ago.

And what exactly I want to say is:

I had an English training five years ago when I joined in the company. And the training lasted for one year.

So, question comes. Is my sentence correct? And how should I correct it?

Thanks in advance.

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Hi all,

First of all, many thanks to rysperski, cause I think he just answered my question. And I'd like to quote his comments here, just for your reference.

One of the english grammar rule says that when we are just reporting something that happened in the past, we should use Past Simple [ usually with time clsuses like: yesterday, two weeks ago, last sunday...etc]...so, in this particular case I most willingly would have written:

   When I joined my present company five years ago, I had a one-year training to improve my English.

Translating "biding document" to Chinese words its pronunciation sounds like "Biao Shu", funny thing is in Chinese words, "Biao Shu" can also refer to another meaning, a very different meaning, that word is "Uncle Biao" in English. Apparently, people call it like that just for fun.

The story behind:

Recently, Shanghai gov has announced a new traffic control policy. According to the policy, the cars(vehicles) which have not Shanghai local car plate are not allowed to drive through several main roads in the urban area and beltways as well.

This policy pushes more and more people to go and grab the Shanghai local car plate. Shanghai as a modern metropolitan in the world has been gathering many talented people living here in the past decades. However, in contrast to the hike in the real estate price, the car price has not increased but going downhill. So it means that most of people living or working here can afford a car, and the car plate as a kind of scarcity resource can be very costly as a result.

If you want to participate in the car plate auction biding, you have to get a piece of biding document first. Gov sells it for 2000RMB(approx. $320) per set, including 1400RMB for guaranty and the rest 600RMB for the charge of bidding(You have 6 times to bid).

One of my friend is going to participate in the auction. Today he spent 4 hours to queue up, and fortunately he got it finally.

Okay, that's it.

Just right now, an unexpected phone call had interrupted my work. I was just in coding when my phone rang up, and then I picked up the phone spontaneously. At that time I didn't realize that the phone call came from Canada. So I answered the phone in Chinese. The caller in the phone began to speak English with me. Suddenly, I was shocked as I'd never had a phone call come overseas. I even forgot how to say hello to the other side. The girl who called me must have thought me a rude and impolite guy. Very embarrassed! I need to watch more US movies or TV plays to get more sensitive to English.

The Chinese words here really mean: dried vegetables.

For Chinese characters， we have mainly 4 tones for almost each of characters. Different tones for different meaning. The first character shown above in the picture should be pronounced in the first tone. The English translation here obviously ignored this key point. And, to be honest, even though the first chinese character were pronounced in the forth tone, here it couldn't be translated to "F**k", because this meaning only goes for dirty words.

This morning one of my colleague sent me a picture shows a series comparison between DE and CN. The last one catched my eyes. It shows the difference of leaders between two countries. At DE side, you can see the leader marked as white is merely a little bit higher than others(guys under managed), on the contrary, leader at CN side also marked as white is extremely higher than others.

At the end of this term, we are asked to finish a composition in the final exam. That is about writing an invitation to invite somebody you are looking forward to meet in your graduation ceremony.

And today I got a news from team leader, he said the boss asked me to go on a business trip at someday in Sep. As I mentioned above, I have a final exam so that I'm afraid I could not set off this time.

Chinese Spring Festival is the biggest festival in a year in China. This year, the festival begin at Feb 9th.(two days left.)

According to the wikipedia, the "Year" pronounced as "Nian" in Chinese Pinyin, was a monster in ancient times in China. The monster appeared and broke into villages to hurt people at the end of a year. In the beginning, people didn't know how to prevent YEAR from entering, and then, at another end of a year, when Year appeared again, a burned bamboo (cracker) just blew up and the big noise scared Year away. From that time, firing crackers is getting to become a tradition when an end of a year is coming.

These years, because of the bad air pollution problem, the government has announced to limit firing crackers, but most of people think that that would decrease feelings of the festival than before. However, this year, sales of the cracker are dropped dramatically.

Beside the story of the monster Year and crackers, there're a lot of striking things in the Spring Festival.

One big problem of these is transportation. For example, there're 7 days for Chinese Spring Festival vacation. Everyone has his vacation begining at a same day. What do you realize now? Yes it is population. In China, we have about almost 1,500,000,000 people, and almost half of them are working or living in the eastern coastal areas, and 45% young people are working or studying other cities far from their hometown. Spring Festival means reunion, members of a family are used to go back to home, stay with family or some relatives. Therefore, chinese public transportation system must to meet its enormous challenge during this holiday. According to the statistics from NBS, last year, China railway system had carried more than 300,000,000 travellers from southern China to the north. several days later, almost the same number of people were carried from north to the south, because they need to back to their original life as before when holiday ends. Although government has been improving effects of our public transportation, there also are many people cannot have the ticket for backing home in time.

2yrs ago, I bought a nice car, Ford Focus. Recently, I just noticed that the amount of miles are only 6,600. My car is only used for carrying me and my wife back to my hometown during the Spring Festival. I really dont wanna queue in line through whole night just for buying two tickets back home. That's really a nightmare!

If you are interested in this, come on, welcome to China, and you are certainlly to get to understand why chinese people sometimes don't like to queue in line for sth. Resource are less, but population are keeping increas. That must drive you crazzzzzzzzy asap.

And I wouldn't like to scare you, every year, during Spring Festival, more than 100 people died in traffic accident only for 7 days.

Last year, government made a policy that all expressways are free for use during holiday. And then hundreds thousands cars got the traffic jam on the expressway. At last, some drivers got off the car and even pushed the car going forward, because they can only drive the car for 2 meters in 30 minutes. LOL

Okay, that's all for today's report, I'm Rick, from Shanghai, China. Please looking forward the next post on EC.

Thank you.

There's a guy, he is my teamleader. He often feel good and to make decisions for others' business. We all guys in the office don't buy it and extremely hate what he did like this.

Our boss hired a foreign teacher to help us improve our English skills. And the teamleader has maaaaaaaaaaaany problems with lessons. He always said to teacher what should to do and what should not to be, as if his English were very well. He get used to take control of people, even the teacher.

You must wondered why do we tell him or complain to him? In China, we employees know that to challenge authorities (usually, the boss) is foolish.

Okay, let's show out what I learnt in here today.

Firstly, the combination of "ache".

Generally, we have five words often combined with ache to express a pain of parts of body. They are headache, earache, stomachache, backache and toothache. And there also are two combinations with parts of body, but its meaning are a bit different to the literal words. They are heartache and faceache. Heartache means an emotional pain, doesn't mean a physical pain in the heart. Faceache does not mean a pain of body, it describes a person who is ugly or miserable-looking.

Second, I figured out how to disconnect from chatroom and vice versa.

I also got to know Viviana, a mother of three, from Indonesia. And she told me that her gov always tries to make people to have their own house, of course with a low price.

Speaking price, today I learnt a word from the news "Obama re-elected". That is costliest, means much more expensive, the most expensive, it's an adjective.

That's all.

I have to leave, it's 10:22 pm now.

It's a long day!