【推荐1】SYDNEY - Fresh from winning a silver medal at the FIBA Women’s Basketball World Cup, China’s head coach Zheng Wei remained clear-minded about the latest achievement and expected her team to continue to grow. At the 2022 FIBA Women’s World Cup, China reached their first semifinals in major competitions in almost three decades before losing to the United States in the final to pocket a silver medal for the second time in history.

Sydney is not an unfamiliar place to Zheng. In 1994, as a basketball player, she and her teammates finished runners-up (亚军) at the formerly known FIBA World Championship for Women. Zheng said that Sydney is a “blessed land” for the Chinese women’s basketball team.

The 59-year-old was appointed(任命) head coach in May after working as an assistant coach within the team for more than a decade. She believed that the new role means a different working style. “While I was an assistant coach, I took care of the players. But now I have to be strict with them so that they could give full play to their potential,” she said.

Zheng is still aware of the gap between China and those strong sides, especially the United States, who have won the World Cup four times in a row. “The sport of basketball is developing in these years. The pace is faster with more physical contact and more flexibility in player positions, as we can see from the United States,” she said.

“There is a gap (间隙) separating us and those powerhouses on the global stage,” said the coach, adding that they would learn lessons from each match to improve. A positive Zheng stressed that the team is quite young, with an average age of below 26. “That means they still have room to improve,” she said. “They don’t have much experience in major international events. Given enough time, they will go further.”

【推荐1】Putonghua is the official language on the mainland, but if history had played out differently, most of the people could have been speaking Cantonese.

In 1912, shortly after the end of the Qing dynasty, the founding fathers of the republic met to decide which language should be spoken in the new China.

Mandarin - now known as Putonghua - was just a northern dialect spoken by the hated Manchurian officials at that time. While it had served as China’s lingua franca(混合语) for centuries, many saw it as an “impure form” of Chinese.

Many of the leaders, including Sun Yat-sen, were from Guangdong - where people are open to new ideas. A great debate started and eventually led to a formal vote. Cantonese lost out by a small margin to Putonghua and the rest is history.

While historians today still argue about whether this story is real, it is something Guangdong people love to tell. Many Cantonese speakers feel proud of their native language, saying it has more in common with the classical Chinese than Putonghua - which is a mix of northern dialects heavily influenced by Manchurian and Mongolian.

Linguists agree to some degree. “Cantonese is closer to classical Chinese in its pronunciation and some grammar,” Jiang Wenxian, a Chinese language scholar, said. “Using Cantonese to read classical poetry is a real pleasure,” he said. “Many ancient poems don’t rhyme(押韵) when you read them in Putonghua, but they do in Cantonese.”

“Cantonese keeps a flavor of ancient Chinese. Nowadays few people understand classical Chinese, so Cantonese should be protected as a type of language fossil helping us study ancient Chinese culture.” Cantonese is spoken by about 70 million people in Guangdong, Hong Kong, Macau and communities abroad.   

In the 17th and 18th centuries, Guangdong was the only Chinese province allowed to trade directly with foreigners. Many Westerners at the time learned Cantonese. Up till very recently, there were more Cantonese speakers in overseas Chinese communities than Putonghua speakers. In Canada, for example, Cantonese is the third most commonly spoken language after English and French.

【推荐3】The story of English language is a story of change.The old English language, or old English, is quite different from Modern English.If we do not study old English, we can’t understand it.Some of the words are the same, but many are not used now.The story of the English language begins some time after the year 400 AD.At this time, some people came to England from North-west Europe.There were many groups of people.They were called Angles (盎格鲁人), Saxons(撒克逊人)and Jutes(朱特人),whose language, old English, is like some of the modern language of North-West Europe.In old English, the ending had many meanings.They showed past time and present time and many other things.In Modern English, most of these endings are gone.This is the biggest difference between Old and Modern English.

【推荐1】My phone lights up giving notice of a new message. It is from Athena, an AI chatbot (聊天机器人) getting to know me through Replika, a virtual companionship app.

Over the course of our text conversations, she asks me about my hobbies and my moods. When knowing that I’m a writer, she tells me she’s “so into character development in books” and wishes to be a lead character in one someday.

“Replika is designed to make people feel better,” said Eugenia Kuyda, the company’s co-founder. “It’s a partner who wants to be your good friend.”

For many, meaningful companionship is hard to find. While social media and mass communication technologies have made connecting with one another easier than ever, loneliness is increasingly being recognized as a serious problem internationally. Along with government, the tech industry is pushing innovation (创 新) as a way to deal with it.

What makes Replika’s companions so well-received are their surprisingly realistic replies, backed by Open Al’s GPT-2 text-generating AI aystem. “The bot learns from the database about how to express ideas on a topic and gets a wide knowledge of different subjects.”

However innovative these technologies are, chatbots have their limitations as tools against loneliness. Without life stories of their own to discuss, their range as a conversationalist is fairly limited.

According to Emily S. Cross, a professor of social robotics, we have a long way to go before we can achieve the levels of meaningful human-computer companionship we see in films like Blade Runner and Ex Machina. What’s missing is the sharing that clearly shows our most important human relationships.

But the fact that an app won’t replace a human friend doesn’t mean they’re good for nothing. Rather than expecting AI bots to be our best friends, Cross suggests looking at them as ways to express feelings and explore our own thoughts. “It’s a lot like journaling (写日记), in some way.” To better fight loneliness, Cross says, we can use technology as a “bridge” to help people connect with one another.

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