This morning i was traveling on the tube in London. I rarely have the pleasure anymore of this transport hub. I was making a long journey from Zone four in the north to zone four in the south. Not all of London is covered by the tube so i broke the journey with a bus trip. To pass the time i was reading Steven Pinker The Language Instinct. A great read if your interested in exploring language. Both ASL and spoken languages are compared and covered.

    So i'm reading to pass the journey time. The bit of knowledge which Mr . Pinker is imparting is all about American sign language courses between parents and their kids. He describes the uncanny ability of kids to pick up grammatically correct signing from an early age. 99% of deaf kids are born to hearing families. So the grammer of the parents who sign with their kids will be fine. They would have studied a sign language course once they'd discovered their child was deaf.

    However a study was conducted on a totally deaf family who had a son who was also deaf. The parents had taken up signing late in life and their grammer was not great. Naturally they start signing with their son to get him in to the language of hands. You might think that he'd pick up on their bad grammer and using it in a daily context. But no! This child was able without any outside influences to determine that the signing sentences which he was being taught were grammatically flawed and he was able to correct them!

    I'm really impressed by this revelation! The passage moved to how hearing parents get their kids to speak. The thing is, it's not parents who help their kids to speak! Apparently it's a almost like a preset function in humans to be able to form words. So the story goes that parents spend lots of time mouthing syllable by syllable words, with the misguided idea that this helps! (Don't shoot the messenger!)

    This woman with a pram arrives in the carriage and positions the pram so she can see the kid. I'm settled in to the book minding my own business and then it starts!

"Do you want this app ull?", "Does baby want this greee - n app ull?". Announciating those words just as the the book said. Over again she was trying to get the baby to say something back. I was astonished to see this sign language demonstration before my eyes! How weird is that? Has it ever happened before? Not to me! It's not unusual to see mothers with prams on the tube, but the coincidence is mind boggling!

Well here they are! Yes a few need some photo shop magic done on them, but in the whole they do give a good flavor of the craziness of the whole experience. From driving school tracks to Richard Nixon's famous question on his trip to China in 1973, we saw a lot. If you go over to Chinese Sign Language Course then you'll get a 46 photo tour of related photos. If you want to name a photo then leave a comment and i'll set up a page for named photos. Flickr doesn't seem to allow the titles of the slides to show or maybe i'm being dumb - any thoughts?

Hey folks! Today i hope to get those crazy photos on line for your comments and thoughts. We had a laugh last night watching our friends wedding movie. You see over in China it's not about churches and priests but forcing doors and finding shoes. Pretty nuts - i think you'll agree! Along with the road signage shots i'll put up some other stuff as well. Honestly it was the trip of a life time with a massive language barrier to boot! Can you imagine trying to haggle with someone who can only write in mandarin? It was all good though as our host and hostess put together a survival guide with phonics to help overcome the pronunciation hurdle. You see over there they don't have the same script or language characters! More to follow soon!

Holidays are very good for people. I returned from China on Saturday morning. I am in the throes of jet lag. I don't usually get up at 6am to work. That was hours ago. I thought whilst i was away of ways to improve my weebly offering. The one thing i knew about China was that you aren't able to hire cars over there because of the road signs being in mandarin. So this got me to thinking. We went on a road trip from Guangzhou province to Guilin. It's around 700 km. Along the way we passed many road signs which naturally we ridiculed! On the return trip i planned my photo shoot for this stretch of the journey.

At the moment my photos are on a friends computer but by Thursday i will have them. Being curious minded i wanted to see what Chinese road signs would look like at 100 km / hr! Most of the photos were taken on an excellent bit of road. This was not representative of our average speed! The results are not in yet! So what i thought it would be fun if i posted them here on the blog and site for you to vote which ones are best and what titles to give! It's a light hearted  start to 2008. If it keeps me from looking out of the window at the grey and rain soaked London skies then that's a good thing!

Here's your starter question ps i pinched it! Leave a suggestion for the title of this one and on Thursday the games will begin!