When I was teaching English in China, I often wondered what portion of the difficulty I had was attributable to my incompetence, lack of training, and inexperience, and what portion to the students' ennui and burnout, the consequence enduring a rigid, authoritarian education only to end up at a small technical college out in the boonies. Now that I'm studying Chinese at a community college here in San Diego, I'm have the mirror question: what proportion of classroom dysfunction is attributable to the Chinese teacher's lack of teaching skill, and what proportion to the student body's immaturity and rudeness?

Clarification: the students in my class are all genuinely interested in learning Chinese. Sadly, they are less interested in supporting a learning environment in class, treating the teacher with respect, or doing homework.

The Joss Whedon tv show Firefly had many winning attributes. One of the most charming was that the characters frequently spoke in Chinese, usually to swear. Firefly is a western space opera. The episodes of the first reason run through many basic Western plots, but with a spaceship. It's notable for the excellent writing and frequently superior acting. The science is deliberately vague, and the overall tone is pretty much anti-Star Trek. The characters often interject in Chinese in a way that, based on my observations of how people in other countries include English in their speech, is quite typical in reaction to a foreign, dominant language. The original pitch, I'm given to understand, included a racial element in that the Han Chinese were the dominant culture and language. The captain was on the losing side of a war and presumably in the original context he would have been on the losing cultural side as well; the authorities on many planets would have been Han; the two upper-class fugitives who join the crew would have been Han; etc. All that remains of this very cool background idea is some mis-pronounced Chinese dialog and big Chinese characters stenciled onto the sets. The show was cancelled in the first year, though a medium-budget movie is due for theatrical release this year.

Meanwhile, this site with translations should be an invaluable companion to the DVDs.

Serenity, Part 1

Ta1ma1 de5!

他媽的！・他妈的！
Ta ma duh!
"F*** me blind!"
—Mal, on learning of approaching Alliance cruiser

• ta1ma1 de5
: [vulgar] Damn (it)!, F***!; ta1ma1 [literally] his ma (ta1 he; [understood de5 possessive marker]; ma1 ma); de5 possessive marker

This is one of the few bits I already know, and I question the translation. Ta ma duh is literally "his mother's", so I would think that a more ideomatic translation would be simply "motherf***er". I would certainly welcome more input on this point.