Tagged with mandarin

ChinesePod affiliate program back up

ChinesePod.com, one of the pioneers for learning languages via podcasts, has recently relaunched their affiliate program, and I gotta say, it’s better than ever. An affiliate program might not mean much to many of you, but I know a lot of folks that read this blog regularly also run their own China-related blogs and sites, …

January 22, 2008
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What Neverbeens don’t know about China

Well, I’ve returned to my chilly Suzhou apartment after a three week refresher in the “real world” and am slowly getting back into the routine of expat life in China. Though I still plan to post my wife Maggie’s impressions of Canada, that involves sorting photos and recollecting exactly what we did while away – …

January 6, 2008
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The Chinese Alphabet – it’s not THAT big

For as long as I’ve been in China I’ve been told, and have told others, that the reason the Chinese language is so impossibly difficult to learn is because of its alphabet of 50,000,000,000,000,000 characters, each strokingly more confusing than the last. However, I think it’s time to set the record straight. Comparing the number …

December 7, 2007
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Why not to study Chinese at university

As some of you may know, I’m enrolled at Suzhou University (or Soochow University, SuDa) studying Mandarin. Having just completed my mid-terms, I want to give a bit of a summary on the problems I see studying in this way. First, the title of this post is a bit of a misnomer, as overall I …

November 2, 2007
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The Laowai Psychological Street Fight

I’ve always been a lousy liar. Remembering whom I’ve told what to is difficult for me when it’s the truth, but add in the complexity of deceit, well… forget it. About five years ago my buddies and I started up a weekly Texas Hold’em game, and this taught me the “bluff”. Now here was a …

August 28, 2007
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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 …

April 22, 2007
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