Via Sean at NeoChaEDGE, here’s a cool visual representation of the Chinese characters of various food items.
Answers after the jump:
There have been a number of interesting responses to my recent post at Lost Laowai that asks this question: does location within China matter when attempting to learn Mandarin?
My view, unsurprising for a Yunnan resident, is that it does not. There are exceptions, of course- parts of rural Xinjiang or Tibet would present few opportunities [...]
Allow me to direct your attention to an excellent Danwei post (via an equally interesting post by James Fallows) detailing a new proposal for China to revert to traditional characters, the writing system abandoned on the mainland in the 1950s.
To summarize: a representative named Pan Qinglin proposed junking simplified characters due to three reasons, [...]
At a weekend dinner party I attended, two neologisms were coined:
1. slogo- a combination “slogan” and “logo”. Think “I’m lovin’ it” written on top of McDonald’s golden arches.
2. expatronize- a merger of “expatriate” and “patronize”. Many long-term laowais regularly expatronize newbies, particularly in pubs. Example:
Newbie: “I just can’t get enough of rice noodles! They’re delicious!”
LTLW [...]
A friend of mine who is in graduate school in Canada recently said that he sometimes writes papers while driving thanks to speech recognition software he installed on his Macintosh, which he keeps in the passenger seat next to him. What a boon for us procrastinators of the world! Apparently, though, the program isn’t 100% [...]
As I’ve said before, I believe mastering tones is the most difficult aspect of learning Chinese. Most people I know- even good speakers- typically don’t bother learning them; after awhile you intuitively figure out which tones to use because they “sound right”. This mainly only works for the most common words. For example, most Chinese [...]
Recently I took a job as an intern with a company called the China Intel Organization. We mainly specialize in providing information and analysis on logistics and infrastructure within China, often for larger corporations or for trade publications and journals.
One of our recent tasks was compiling country profiles for various east and south Asian [...]
ESWN flagged this funny banner, hoisted by Nigerian soccer fans at the Olympics
It says: “Our gymnastics are no good. Our ping pong is no good. But our soccer is good!”
Praxis, the company behind the LanguagePod series, has started a cool new blog called Learning on Your Terms. It’s written by John Biesnecker, a veteran of the China expat blogging scene and a Praxis employee. For insight into learning a foreign language (not just Chinese), there’s a lot of interesting material there.
Through a link on [...]
I came across an interesting thread at the excellent Marginal Revolution blog that wonders how “loan words”, or foreign words inserted into conversation for particular effect, are used in various languages.
In English, the majority of our borrowed words and phrases come from French. Some are more useful than others. For instance, the term “faux [...]