WHO IS BATHROBE?

"Bathrobe" is the nom de guerre of Greg Pringle, an Australian who has spent 16 years living in Japan and roughly 15 years in China, and just over one year in Mongolia.

Greg has been interested in Asian languages since he took up the study of Japanese at the age of 17 at the University of Queensland, where he also studied linguistics (mainly Chomskyan), some German, and some Chinese.

In Japan, Greg studied for one year at Hokkaido University (linguistics). He eventually obtained his MA at Osaka University of Foreign Studies in the field of Japanese linguistics.

After graduating, Greg worked in Tokyo as a translator at the Australian Embassy, followed by a stint as a research executive at Japan Market Research Bureau (now Japan Kantar Research).

Greg left Japan for China in 1993 from a personal conviction that there was more to Asia than Japan and that one of the keys to understanding modern Japan lies in its ancient links to China. He studied Chinese for one-and-a-half years at the Beijing Normal University Chinese language school before starting work at a rather chaotic Sino-Hong Kong joint venture in the clothing industry, followed by a position as PR manager at the Beijing New Century Hotel, which at that time was an All-Nippon Airways/Beijing Tourism Group joint-venture.

In 2002 he went to Hainan to work as the personal assistant to Mr Jiang Xiaosong, developer of the Boao Aquapolis and Vice Chairman of the Boao Forum for Asia.

In August 2004 he came to Macau and Beijing, to work for Winsway, a Chinese trading and logistics company dealing in petroleum, petrochemicals, and coal. In April 2007 he was posted to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, but moved back to Beijing in July 2008 and is now living there.

Greg speaks fluent Japanese and more-than-competent Chinese. He is interested in Vietnamese after several visits to that country but as yet has made very little progress in learning the language, partly due to a lack of Vietnamese teachers in China. He struggled for a while with Mongolian.

Greg began this website out of a fascination with Asian languages, especially those that have been deeply affected by Chinese. The site combines a number of passions: a love of comparison, a love of language, an interest in the mechanics of translation, an interest in words and their multi-faceted meanings, an interest in history and how it is reflected in language, a desire to tell others about the riches of Asian languages, and a streak of cynicism that sometimes makes him want to challenge conventional ideas and approaches. He has tried to make the site accessible to all, even those without a knowledge of Asian languages, without trying to dumb the site down. The site reflects his belief in the power of concrete examples rather than abstruse theory.