For this week’s Mandarin Monday, we’ve hit up the juggernaut of Chinese learning, John Pasden. John surely doesn’t need much introduction for anyone studying Chinese. In China for more than a decade, John’s been mastering the language for most of that time, including securing a masters in applied linguistics in Shanghai. He pens the popular …Read More
Wha?! Mandarin Monday on a Wednesday? What the hell is going on. Yeah, I screwed up and totally forgot. Hopefully a bit of mid-week mandarin is just as good though. For the third installment in our weekly Mandarin Monday series that discusses Chinese learning we’ve hit up David Flynn. Dave is originally from the UK, …Read More
What follows is the second in our weekly Mandarin Monday series, that discusses Chinese learning. The series will deliver advice through interviews with long-time Mandarin learners, sharing resources and discussing learning techniques. This week we speak to Kellen Parker, co-founder of Sinoglot, an organisation of Chinese linguistics researchers. Kellen is an American linguistics researcher who’s …Read More
This is the first in a new series of posts, called Mandarin Monday, that will discuss Chinese learning. The series will deliver advice through interviews with long-time Mandarin learners, sharing resources and discussing learning techniques. Our first guest in the series is John Biesnecker. John is an American software developer who has been in China …Read More
In a recent post, the Atlantic’s James Fallows talks about a song and video by a group of Harvard Chinese language students. The song, “HÄfó/Harvard Welcomes You! 哈佛æ¡è¿Žä½ !”, has the American students singing in Chinese, praising their studies and teachers in Chinese Bb – Elementary Modern Chinese. Fallows draws a good comparison between the style …Read More
If, like myself, you’ve ever had trouble visualizing the concept of time in Chinese with its “behind day” and “ahead day” paradoxically meaning “the day after tomorrow” and “the day before yesterday” respectively; be sure to check out…Read More
John at Sinosplice has a review of a (gasp!) new update of Wenlin, the software dictionary that first introduced many a lost laowai to the wonderful world of Chinese characters. I was certainly one of them. I remember a few years back complaining to another foreigner in Kunming about my inability to learn characters well. …Read More
I first heard of MandMX.com back about a year and a half ago when they featured Lost Laowai in a comic of theirs. So when Magnus, the “M” of MandMX, contacted me to let me know they’d compiled their large collection of bilingual, China-themed comics into a new book, I was excited to get my …Read More
Here’s a situation likely to be familiar to Chinese-speaking foreigners in China. You walk into a bar, cafe, or shop in a reasonably fashionable district of a big city. The guy or girl behind the counter greets you with a ‘hello!’. You reply in Chinese. They reply in English. You reply again in Chinese, attempting …Read More
Now back to my regularly scheduled language beat, I’d like to share a couple of links with you that should help put the study of Chinese into perspective. First, Ben Ross debunks the myth that Chinese is the hardest language to learn in the world, even if it certainly seems like it at first. And …Read More
Chinese names, to the untrained ear, may sound somewhat similar. They jumble together in a scrambled binary of Changs, Wangs, Wus and Hus. They are hard to remember, since they are all 2-to-3 segment K’NEX sets of syllables that fail to strike a strong note with western minds. Yet upon further intensive (albeit unscholarly) investigation, …Read More
I’m sure everyone has heard the story of the friend of a friend from X country at X university in China, and the story is so remarkable you almost don’t believe it. Here are a couple I’ve picked up from different people, I don’t know if they are true or not. They are both very …Read More
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