Hi, my name is Niel, otherwise known as Confused Laowai. I blog about my exciting, yet often confusing adventure learning Chinese.
Omnipotent Youth Society – 万能年青旅店
I found this band a few months ago. They are from 河北 and make hauntingly beautiful Chinese folk rock. Not only do they incorporate the usual band mix of instruments, but add violins, trumpets and harmonicas. They have a Chinese flavor, but it’s devoid of the pop fluff that is often heard in Chinese pop music. Not only that, but their lyrics are amazing. Very advanced for a Chinese learner, but it’s just so poetic [...]
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 briefly last year, asking How Long does it take to Learn Chinese? A few others have already posted their thoughts on [...]
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 letters, or characters in this case are merged to form one unit. The Chinese New Year greeting in this case, [...]
Tonally Orthographic Pinyin
I found out this really cool way to write Pinyin while browsing the Chinese Stack Exchange (ps. which you guys must join!). It’s called Tonally Orthographic Pinyin. Its main aim is to make tone marks redundant. The creator said this: The TOP system is redundantly marked for tones: with colors, with capital and small letters, and with the standard Hanyu Pinyin tone marks. So, where you would get “Nǐ huì shuō yīngwén ma?” in TOP [...]
