Originally Posted by
Iron Palm
I've seen him carry a conversation with native Spanish speakers, but I actually wonder about his proficiency in Chinese languages. I don't know any Mandarin or anything myself, but I've seen some students who do have difficulty in talking to him.
Maybe it's a dialect thing, but some of his handwritten notes have bizarre-seeming translations as well. One example that comes to mind was a posture name along the lines of "Pequefo (sp?) Enters the Forest". I have never been able to find any mention anywhere of a "pequefo" outside of GMT's explanation of it being some kind of eagle/hawk-like bird. Additional oddities include references to a "Golden Cyborg" performing various actions in SD's version of Chen Tai Chi.
I find it unlikely that cyborgs are in any way relevant to the practice of Chen Tai Chi. However, I think the phrase could roughly correspond to what some non-SD styles refer to as a "golden statue." But as Syn7 and others have pointed out, he's supposed to hold a bachelor's and half a masters from an American university, and I'd expect him to be able to translate the word "statue".
I know from experience that his English is pretty good, so I'm guessing any difficulty would be on the Chinese side of whatever original he was attempting to translate from. Keep in mind these translations are written in his own hand and featured on photocopies of notes handed out as recently as in the last 5 years.