Put Down The Chalk & Pick Up The Language

My road through the Chinese language has been a bumpy one full of roundabouts and dead-ends. In the more than two years I’ve been here I’ve not had any formal Chinese education, and I’ve really no excuse for it. I’m often praised and then quickly chastised by Chinese co-workers on my level of Chinese. When …

Conversations With 小i

No friends? No problem. John, at Sinosplice, has got an interesting post about a new little Chinese netizen called 小i, China’s first chat bot, who will happily be your chat partner. The little unisex critter offers up some quick responses to nearly anything you ask of it. John references Roddy’s post at Chinese-Forums.com, incidentally, a …

How to add a cool pinyin mouseover tooltip for WordPress

Alright, this post is admittedly narrow in the scope of people that might find it interesting, but with all the new in-China blogs starting up, I figured I’d throw a little help their way. Mind you, this is particularly for blogs that use WordPress. The desired result: Take a Chinese sentence, 这个博客真厉害!, and cause it …

Finally made it to the Guardian, sort of…

I’ve generally been a fan of The Guardian since becoming acquainted to it via Brits I’ve met while abroad. Now, as a journalist cum blogger, I’ve fallen out of like with the modern manifestations of traditional media and have started to rely on less “corporately suave” mediums for my news. However, generally speaking, I still …

Chinese Character Riddle

Hey, so my Chinese learning book (still level one, sigh) has a riddle in part of the homework. I have my suspicions of the answer, but am not sure. As such, I figured I'd post it here and see what you guys have to say (hover over for pinyin): 人有"ä»–"大 天没"ä»–"大 请问"ä»–"是谁? 你也认识"ä»–" My first …

Professional Translators Needed

Though my Chinese abilities are no where near "there yet", I thought this link might be cool for some of you that best my monolinguality. If you've considered breaking into the translation service industry or have been looking for a translator job, check out Translation Services. At the site, aspiring translators can create a profile, …

Firefly – Entertaining Chinese Lessons

I stumbled across a show last night that is just fan-frigin’-tastic. Now, like a lot of things, I have a feeling I’m coming late to the game with this and am generally braced for a bunch of “get with the program, Firefly is SOOOO three years ago” comments … but here we go. I remember …

What’s in a name…

“I view living the day-to-day grind sort of like smoking. It’s not cool, it’s bad for you and in the end, it just leaves you feeling dirty and used.” Names. A funny thing at the best of times, in China it’s a bit of an on-going practical joke that Westerners use to communicate to those …

The White Safety

I’ve been trying to write an update for about two days now, and I just keep getting side-tracked, so though it’s getting close to midnight, and I’ve got to be up at 6:30… I’m going to do this damnit. So what’s new, what’s new… Oh, right! I officially started my classes. I went to school …