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1. Objects or products that exist in one society, but not in another

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1. Objects or products that exist in one society, but not in another

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2. Proverbs, idioms, formulaic expressions which embody cultural values

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2. Proverbs, idioms, formulaic expressions which embody cultural values

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3. Social structures, roles and relationships

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3. Social structures, roles and relationships

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4. Customs / rituals / traditions / festivals

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4. Customs / rituals / traditions / festivals

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6. Political, historic and economic background

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6. Political, historic and economic background

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13. The status of the written language in different cultures and the resulting strategies for reading a text

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13. The status of the written language in different cultures and the resulting strategies for reading a text

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Bonus: Any aspects not mentioned in this that could impede student understanding?

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Bonus: Any aspects not mentioned in this that could impede student understanding?

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Excerpt from Chapter One: For All The Iron Horses My Family Has Lost (p. 4)

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Excerpt from Chapter One: For All The Iron Horses My Family Has Lost (p. 4)

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In Taiwan, my home country, the word a person used for ‘bicycle’ once told you a lot about when they’d grown up or where they were from. ‘Auto-turn’ (jiten-sha) indicated a person had had a Japanese education. ‘Iron horse’ or ‘Kongming cart’ (named in honor of the ancient Chinese inventor Zhuge Liang), that they were a native speaker of Taiwanese. ‘Solo car’ or ‘self-propel,’ that they were from the south of China. But now some of these terms have spread while others have fallen out of fashion, so that they can no longer serve as historical or geographical identifiers.

If you ask me my own preference, I’d say ‘Kongming cart’ or ‘iron horse,’ because my mother tongue is Taiwanese. Especially ‘iron horse.’

What a beautiful term! ‘Iron horse’ includes the natural and the artificial. You can imagine the Lord who made all things leaving iron-rich rocks lying around in seams for people to mine and cast into horse-shaped carbon steel vehicles. What a pity ‘iron horse’ is on the decline. That’s the way the world is: something may be inherently superior but end up getting replaced anyway. So has it been with the decline of ‘iron horse’ and the rise of ‘solo car.’ It’s foolish, if you ask me, a kind of cultural regression. But what can you do?