Hi, my name is Niel, otherwise known as Confused Laowai. I blog about my exciting, yet often confusing adventure learning Chinese.
Mandarin Madness Review – A Chinese Vocabulary Learning App
The Chinese language learning technology space in my opinion is still under utilized. There are so much more avenues to explore in terms of aiding informal and formal learners of Chinese. There has been quite a lot of advances recently with excellent products (3000Hanzi and ChineseLevel) as well as great tools (HanziJS and Leiden Weibo Corpus) among others in the web space. The mobile space is very much an exploratory scene at the moment. There [...]
BreakFAST! – An entertaining Taiwanese shortcom
Herman (from ChineseLevel) linked this on his Facebook a week or so ago. BreakFAST! It’s a short sitcom style comedy (hence the name shortcom) surrounding the lives of people in Taiwan. It’s short, funny, entertaining and has a nice upbeat atmosphere to it. Also it makes me hungry every time I watch an episode. There are currently 4 episodes online. I quite like the second episode. Check out the Shakespeare soliloquy in Chinese and the fail [...]
A visit from Beijing JiaoTong University and how 姜 trolled me
Last week, a few professors from Beijing JiaoTong University visited the lab I’m doing research at. I was nervous the whole week as I knew I’d have to talk in Chinese to them. I hardly get speaking practice in South Africa, which I know is my worst ability in Chinese at the moment! I looked up a lot technical terms yesterday, which I didn’t even end up using when I talked. Yes, I’m nervous like [...]
Introducing Leiden Weibo Corpus
My inner linguistic nerd is going crazy right now. This post released today from a member of Sinoglot, Daan, reveals that he has created a large Weibo corpus. For those not familiar with term, a corpus is a large body/collectinos of text, often used in linguistic research to study trends, frequency, discoure analysis and other interesting data. The LWC is an annotated linguistic 100-million word corpus containing 5.1 million messages from Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter-like [...]
Giving ChinesePod the deserved listen
Some kinds of media just don’t gel with certain language learners. Back in 2010, when I was still studying Chinese in undergrad classes, I gave ChinesePod a try. It just wasn’t for me. It was slow, not interesting and I just didn’t learn anything. But it wasn’t ChinesePod’s fault, it was mine. I took a terrible approach. Here’s why. I wanted to listen to everything, from the start. Looking back now, what a dumbass mistake. [...]
Benny’s 3-Month Mandarin Mission: A Follow Up
Benny’s Mandarin mission ended about two weeks ago. Here is his post and interview with John from Sinosplice. I did a big post when he started his mission, detailing my thoughts and concerns about learning Chinese in 3 months. Like many others, I was skeptical. Why wouldn’t one be? I talked about specific Chinese problems, but I also detailed my thoughts on why I think it’s hard to compare learning methods and an inherent paradox [...]
Clear the Stage for Banmaxian《斑马线来了》- Hit Chinese Web series by Feichang Fresh member
I just watched the first part of a web series called Clear the Stage for Banmaxian (《斑马线来了》). The creator is Antoine Shapiro, the same guy who’s part of Feichang Fresh. It got 650, 000 views on it’s first day on Youku. I’m seriously impressed. Feichang Fresh sings some of my favourite Chinese songs. Now Antoine has created another awesome Chinese show!? Who are these guys. Their Chinese is amazing. The show itself is also really [...]
Introducing Hanzi – A Character Decomposition Tool
I’ve been a bit busy lately. Doing lots of coding. One of my personal projects this weekend (which will eventually be used in my research) was to create a Chinese character decomposition tool. I’ve always had this problem. I was never sure how to decompose Chinese characters into their radical components. I set out to solve this problem. Say 你好 to Hanzi. To avoid being overly technical: Hanzi is a Chinese character dictionary lookup (still [...]
Introducing 3000Hanzi
I’m just loving how more and more awesome sites are popping up in the digital Chinese learning space lately. 3000Hanzi is the next resource that’s helping learners with reading Chinese. It not only has a great online reading system, where you can add links or text, but also has annotation, word frequency and more. It was created by Steven Daniels, who is no stranger to the online Mandarin learning community, as he is behind Lingomi too. [...]
Logograms, mysticism and why people get terrible Chinese tattoos
We all know those people. Those that get Chinese tattoos (纹身). The amount of fail that comes from bad Chinese tattoos are hilarious. There’s even a blog dedicated to it: Hanzi Smatter. But why do people get these tattoos? There are two answers: they are stupid and/or they don’t understand the Chinese language. I won’t go into the reason of why people are stupid, but rather I’ll look at why Chinese lends itself to these [...]
