Hi, my name is Niel, otherwise known as Confused Laowai. I blog about my exciting, yet often confusing adventure learning Chinese.
Languages on the Internet [Infographic]
Awesome infographic time! This great infographic by Today Translations highlights the interesting statistics of languages on the Internet. It might be no surprise to see that Chinese is one of the fastest growing languages on the web. It’s whole different world out there. Sometimes I wonder what non-Chinese learners miss out on.
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 see me using it in the about page. I started writing this song while chilling in the hostel at nights [...]
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 become a turning point in my dedication to learning Chinese. It’s amazing to have a community that helps you figure [...]
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 not? It’s a good idea. I took the whole Sunday to implement it, learning even more coding and discovering the [...]
Now with more Social Media & Beer
I have created a Facebook page. Join me there too. I’ll be posting lots of other links (not just my blog!) to interesting China stories and content. Sometimes I just like engaging with people on Facebook. Twitter is a little limiting sometimes. Hmmm. So yes, that’s all I wanted to say, but I hate wasting this delicious blog post space with just those links. Wait I know! Here is a video of Tsingtao beer and what makes [...]
The Epic Adventures of Princess Moonface
One my lab buddies linked me this Kickstarter Project yesterday: The Epic Adventures of Project Moonface I’m a big fan of Kickstarter and have already pledged to other projects before (not related to Chinese), but this it the first time that I see something exciting like this within Chinese learning. The basic gist of this project is to create a fascinating story centered around Princess Moonface (Mei) that is coupled with different multimedia aids and [...]
Tencent’s Intelligent Eye Appears
A new app for iPhone and Android has been released on 8 September created by Tencent Labs. Some of you might recognize these kinds of applications, in for instance Wordlens and Pleco’s App. Although Pleco has released an experimental version (which I haven’t tested yet, but will do soon), Tencent’s 慧眼 is ready and free for any iPhone and Android member right now! It has various translate options: French, German, English -> Chinese and then Chinese -> [...]
Social Mandarin Redesign is live
I’ve been using a slightly modified stock drupal/drigg theme that came with the site when I started Social Mandarin a year and a half ago. Recently it has started to annoy me. The redesign has been coming a long way. I’m not the best coder, but I know how code works. I can easily backwards engineer things. Drigg, the Drupal module that Social Mandarin uses, has been deprecated, thus there is no more support for it. [...]
