On Learning Chinese in 3 Months
[P.S - you are in for big post here! But do read please] So, the language learning community is buzzing, especially the Chinese one, with the news that Benny is attempting to become fluent in Mandarin in 3 Months. Now, phew, where to start on this doozy of a topic. I remember writing about this [...]
Chinese Ligatures
After browsing the Chinese New Year wikipedia page (I was looking about for some greetings) I was instantly struck by the odd character close to bottom. My initial thought was that it was the Biang Biang noodle character, but lo and behold I was greeted by a ligature! This is when two or more graphemes, let’s just [...]
Chinese Rage Comics
If you spend as much time on the Internet as I do, you might have come across Rage Comics. It started on 4chan, became hugely popular on reddit and is now hitting mainstream via sites like 9gag. It features a homogenous group of “characters” and people create their own stories or “rages” using an online editor. [...]
A Chiptune Song I wrote while travelling in Shanghai
I don’t normally cross-post my creative projects, but this one is relevant to my China travels this year. While I’m not doing research, learning Chinese, browsing the web and a million other things, I compose music. Sometimes really strange music. Like 8-bit music or otherwise known as chiptunes. I use a Game Boy. You can [...]
Confused Laowai blog turns two years old
I seemed to have missed the birthday post for last year. So without further ado, happy two years for me and this blog. 生日快乐 and all that jazz. Since the blog has started in December 2009, 88 posts have been published. Hooray. Not that much, but I prefer quality over quantity. :) This blog has [...]
Pinyin Sudoku
I found this blog somehow through a blogroll grapevine, which very cleverly combines Chinese and Math Puzzles: Pinyin Sudoku. The author posts Sudoku puzzles made up of similar sounding characters. So not only do you get to learn the differences in homophones, but you also bust your brain doing Sudoku puzzles. Check out this out [...]
Big Update to Social Mandarin
I’ve been thinking lately about where Social Mandarin should grow too. It’s current incarnation is good, but it needs more. After being featured on Penn-Olson, the author added that it would be cool to add more Chinese content with a difficulty tag. I postponed that advice for a while, but yesterday I just thought, why [...]
