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19 Nov 09
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Aspect, not Tense You often hear people saying that Chinese has simple grammar, and the most often cited reason is that “Chinese has no tenses.” It’s true that Chinese verbs do not have tenses, but Chinese grammar does have a formal system for marking... |
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16 Nov 09
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Thinking to Oneself Productively This is a follow-up to an older post of mine called Talking to Oneself Productively, and the advice this time comes from JP Villanueva. I recommend that you read the full post, but here’s the essence of it (emphasis mine):
Some functional L2... |
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12 Nov 09
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China Ruined the Android Experience I was pretty excited when I first got my Android phone. Yeah, the Hero a bit sluggish, but that’s been fixed, and the Sense UI is even being updated to support the latest version of Android. So far, so good.
Starting about a month ago, however, I... |
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09 Nov 09
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Hospitals and Train Stations The past two weeks, I’ve had occasion to visit two different hospitals in Shanghai. Both were large, public hospitals that served a huge volume of patients every day. I came away from both feeling that Chinese train stations and Chinese hospitals... |
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03 Nov 09
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No Longer Happy with DreamHost I haven’t been blogging much lately because I’ve been looking for a new web host in my spare time. I’ve been with DreamHost for years, but recently their service has become unforgivably bad.
My main complaints are:
My site was hacked... |
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27 Oct 09
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Michael Love on the Pleco iPhone App The following is an interview with Pleco founder Michael Love, regarding the Pleco iPhone app, which is now in beta testing.
John: The long wait for the iPhone app has caused much distress amongst all the Pleco fans out there. Any comments on the... |
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22 Oct 09
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The Pleco iPhone App (beta) I just recently had the pleasure of trying out the beta version of the new Pleco iPhone app. In case you’re not aware, Pleco is the software company behind what is regarded as the best electronic learner’s Chinese dictionary for any mobile... |
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20 Oct 09
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Slumming it with nciku I recently looked up the word 贫民窟 (meaning “slum”) in nciku. The definition included this example of usage:
She decided to slum it for a couple of months.
她决定去贫民窟待几个月。
The Chinese sentence, trans... |
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15 Oct 09
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Hong Kong Maternity Tourism I just learned recently that in mainland China there’s a whole business centered on getting pregnant women into Hong Kong to give birth so that the babies get extra Hong Kong citizenship privileges. This trend has been dubbed “maternity... |
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13 Oct 09
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Chinese Modal Verb Venn Diagram I’m a bit of a sucker for Venn diagrams. When I was recently asked by a student about the Chinese modal verbs 会, 能, and 可以 (all of which can be translated into English as “can”), I recalled a nice Venn diagram on the topic an... |
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10 Oct 09
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Chinese Telegraph Code I wasn’t expecting to find anything Chinese-related on the new site, Easier to Understand than Wave (referring to Google’s new software, called Wave). But this was the first thing I got:
Chinese Telegraph Code[Source: Wikimedia Commons]
Oh,... |
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06 Oct 09
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Slow Chinese It’s the October holiday in the PRC, and I’m enjoying a slooowww 8-day vacation. Fittingly, I recently also discovered a site called Slow Chinese (via Chinese Forums), and thought I’d share it here.
Slow Chinese, as far as I know, is... |
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29 Sep 09
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Can’t Afford Intermediate students of Chinese will be familiar with the following pattern:
V + 不起 = can’t afford to V
V + 得起 = can afford to V
This pattern is most commonly about money, the typical example being 买不起 (can’t afford... |
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24 Sep 09
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Two Perplexing Photos I was delighted to discover churros in Beijing, and with ice cream! (Sure, why not?) But the second English name threw me for a loop: “Kyrgyzstan Things Fruit.”
I don’t know why “churros” wasn’t enough, but... |
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22 Sep 09
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Three Tales of Two Cities During our recent trip to Beijing, conversation naturally turned to comparisons of Shanghai and Beijing. I don’t want to rehash that tired topic (again) here, but there were three particular anecdotes told by Chinese friends which I found amusing. ... |
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20 Sep 09
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Weekend in Beijing Light posting lately… I just got back from a weekend in Beijing. No sightseeing, no business… just hanging out, taking it easy, and seeing a few friends. Got together with Pepe, Brendan, Joel, Syz, Dave Lancashire, Roddy, and David Moser.... |
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15 Sep 09
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Sa Dingding is interesting You may have heard of Sa Dingding before. Shanghaiist wrote about her a long time ago, and fans of “world music” will have known about her for quite some time. As I understand it, she’s only recently been catching on in China in a big... |
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12 Sep 09
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Pushing the Limits of Transracial Adoption My sister Amy forwarded this thought-provoking article to me: Raising Katie: What adopting a white girl taught a black family about race in the Obama era.
In case it’s not immediately obvious, here’s the focal point of the piece:
... |
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10 Sep 09
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A Character-Counting Challenge My recent post on the Wikimedia Commons Stroke Order Project prompted Mark of Toshuo.com to decry the relative dearth of traditional characters being added to the project. To this, David on Formosa reminded Mark that there are also a large number of... |
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08 Sep 09
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Fuzzy Pinyin This is a screenshot from the Google Pinyin installer:
If you’re learning Mandarin for real, sooner or later you’re going to need to experience the rich variety in pronunciation that Greater China has to offer. This simple “fuzzy... |
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03 Sep 09
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The Wikimedia Commons Stroke Order Project If you’ve checked out many online Chinese dictionaries or websites on learning Chinese, you’ve seen a variety of ways to present characters’ proper stroke order. Animated GIFs are a favorite, but they often fall flat in one important... |
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29 Aug 09
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Chaintweeting over the GFW to Twitter We live in a world of fascinating, interactive web services, but unfortunately, those of us in China are cut off from some of the leading websites. Most conspicuous among these are YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. None of these websites are currently... |
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27 Aug 09
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Google Pinyin for the HTC Hero I got the Google Pinyin input working for my HTC Hero Android phone. It turned out to be quite simple. The only two things holding me back were (1) a bad install of Google Pinyin, and (2) lack of proper documentation for switching input methods.
When I... |
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25 Aug 09
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The Tyranny of the Textbook Lately I’ve been working with Nick Kruse of Reign Design on a new project at work called OpenLanguage. Much of our discussion has centered on teachers and students, and the language-learning experience in general.
Nick related to me a story about... |
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22 Aug 09
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Buying the HTC Hero in Shanghai Photo by louisvolant
On Thursday I went with coworkers Hank and Jenny to get an HTC Hero. Jenny’s Taobao research had revealed lots of vendors advertising the new Google Android smartphone, but with fluctuating prices and changes in stock. (The... |
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20 Aug 09
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Jokes from Jiong.ws My wife recently introduced me to the humor site 一日一囧 (Jiong.ws). The videos she showed me were crude animations, each telling a single simple joke. Some were unfunny, some were Chinese translations of jokes I’d heard before, but a few ve... |
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18 Aug 09
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Learning Your Way to Yourself The acquisition of any foreign language comes with struggle. Not just the burden of memorizing a new lexicon or the labor of demystifying an unfamiliar syntax, but the struggle of making oneself understood in the target language. It’s not... |
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16 Aug 09
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Physalis: Another Weird Fruit in China One of the things I love about living in China is that I just keep on discovering bizarre things. I thought I had already seen pretty much all the “alien” fruits China had to offer, and then recently a co-worker brought some “姑娘... |
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15 Aug 09
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Unaccustomed Earth Today I was reading Unaccustomed Earth, a collection of stories which owes its title to this great quote from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Custom-House:
Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too... |
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11 Aug 09
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Tone and Color in Chinese In his book Chinese through Tone and Color, author Nathan Dummitt presents his system of color-coded tones. In his own words:
I hope that my system gives a context, even for non-visual learners, for distinguishing between the four tones in Mandarin... |
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08 Aug 09
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Translation with a Conscience Translation Party is a website built using Google Translate. The idea is to take an English sentence, translate into Japanese, then back into English, and keep going back and forth until an equilibrium is reached and the translation stabilizes.
I tried... |
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06 Aug 09
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The Spaced Repetition Party So you’re at a party. It’s not some crazy kegger, it’s just one of those social mixers you go to every once in a while to meet people. A homely guy walks up to you and introduces himself as Craig. He’s a financial consultant. He... |
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04 Aug 09
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Making Family Vocab Personal Learning Chinese family relationship words is a huge headache. It’s way too complicated and tends to come far too early in a typical Chinese course. Really, who wants to memorize the word for “father’s older brother’s wife”... |
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01 Aug 09
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Small Personal Victories in Language Acquisition Inspiration pt3 by Stephen Poff
Tae Kim recently had a great blog post titled Memorable Moments in Language Acquisition. It’s a great idea, both examining the various emotional victories that are part of the language acquisition process, and also... |
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28 Jul 09
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America through In-laws It was a great trip to the States. I had been bracing myself for wacky cross-cultural antics, but nothing particularly noteworthy transpired. I didn’t have many surprises of my own, either. Rather, this time I enjoyed seeing my country through my... |
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25 Jul 09
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Backwards Website Promotion on a Van In China and Japan, it’s common to see company names printed in Chinese characters on the sides of buses and vans. Unlike English, which is always written left to right, these names frequently appear left to right on the left side of the car... |
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08 Jul 09
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Busy July I’ve spent the last few weeks reexamining my priorities and trying to free up a bit more time to do the things I enjoy most. Work remains both rewarding and demanding, but progressing in piano and continuing to work on Sinosplice are important to... |
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30 Jun 09
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Chinese-English Bilingual Ambigrams These have been around a while on Dr. David Moser’s website, Cognitive China. Just in case you haven’t seen them, though, be sure to check out these Chinese-English bilingual ambigrams.
Two samples:
Good stuff. See the rest on Cognitive... |
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28 Jun 09
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Michael Jackson Matters to China I wasn’t planning on writing anything about Michael Jackson’s passing, but when it came up again and again and again in my conversations with Chinese friends, I was forced to acknowledge something: although the average American pop star goes... |
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22 Jun 09
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How to Pronounce nciku The online Chinese dictionary everyone is using these days is nciku. Newbies and veterans alike all seem to dig it. The quality of the dictionary entries is a refreshing change from the deluge of unimpressive CEDICT clones. One common difficulty among... |
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16 Jun 09
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10 Vegetables China Taught Me to Love I’ve always been good about eating my vegetables, but coming to China was a total game-changer for me, vegetable-wise. Here were veggies I’d long since written off as “nasty,” forcing me to reevaluate them in their new oriental... |
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11 Jun 09
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Asian Poses is Hilarious It might make you nauseous, but it’s also hilarious: Asian Poses.
Via Adam Schokora (via Twitter). |
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08 Jun 09
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Translating Mispronunciations I was recently watching an episode of the once-popular TV series Everybody Loves Raymond where the plot involved the main character’s mispronunciations of a few words. Naturally, I was curious how these slips of the tongue were translated into... |
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07 Jun 09
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RJ’s Reasons for Learning Chinese ChinesePod recently published an elemntary lesson called Why are You Studying Chinese? The lesson content itself was quite simple, but it led to an outpouring of thoughtful responses from the community. I especially enjoyed star user RJBerki’s... |
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31 May 09
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Obama and Bush on Pinyin News If you liked Obama as an English teacher, you’ll probably enjoy him as a Chinese/Taiwanese-speaking punny cartoon spokesperson for a Taiwanese vitamin drink with his pal Dubya:
View the entire post (with full explanation of the Chinese and... |
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30 May 09
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Dealing with a Hacker on Dreamhost Earlier this year, my Dreamhost webhosting account was hacked. I’ve been dealing with it for months, but I’m no programmer. The information provided by Dreamhost customer support, while helpful, has been far from sufficient to actually resolve... |
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24 May 09
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Sinosplice in a Webcomic I meant to blog this earlier, but my vacation got in the way. Magnus of MandMX.com drew a comic about Sinosplice (English and Chinese) which is relevant to Sinosplice this month only!
Thanks, Magnus. This is a first for me, and I’m flattered! |
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23 May 09
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Learn English with Obama At the book store last night this book caught my eye:
The book [link on DangDang] claims to teach English using nine of Obama’s famous speeches, teaching you how to speak English like Obama. It even comes with an MP3 CD of audio content.... |
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15 May 09
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Two Kinds of Communists While on vacation this past week, I finally had a chance to dig into Orhan Pamuk’s novel Snow. This passage jumped out at me:
There are two kinds of Communists: the arrogant ones, who enter the fray hoping to make men out of the people and... |
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13 May 09
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Many Eyes on Language The “Language Speakers” bubble chart image below was created as part of IBM’s Many Eyes project:
It’s a really cool project which enables the creation of various types of visualizations given certain data sets. Language lovers... |
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