Hi, my name is Niel, otherwise known as Confused Laowai. I blog about my exciting, yet often confusing adventure learning Chinese.
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 [...]
Chinese Characters in the Wild
I went through some of my photos of my trip to China in June/July last year. I remember encountering some really awesome signs and Chinese characters being a bit different. Chinese typography is quite interesting for me. Here are some pictures of interesting Chinese characters in the wild: This was taken in Shanghai. Can’t remember what area exactly (maybe Xintiandi?), but I was just strolling around the street looking for interesting things. It immediately caught [...]
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 [...]
So what color is 青 really? Blue? Green? Help!
Oh boy. Here we go again with Chinese confusing the hell out of me. Today’s culprit is 青. Yes, that one that appears in 青年 meaning youth. I almost want to make a knee-jerk old timer joke about how confusing the youth are these days, but I’d resist. So, why am I confused about 青, because it seems to represent so many different colors! From “nature’s color” to “blue” to “green” to “greenish black”… heck [...]
I have a drinking problem
Heyoooo. Gotta love sensationalist headlines right!? Don’t worry this is not a hungover post or drunk blogging, but rather an interesting thing I noticed the other day. I was busy creating a website (which will be online tomorrow, so expect another blog post tomorrow or Tuesday) when I typed the character for drinking. You all know it. It is written as 喝. However, something strange happened. The character was different. Now let me show you [...]
Oddities in Chinese: Hanyu Pinyin Syllables
I’ve been learning Chinese for almost four years now (a few more months to go). I still discover interesting things about Mandarin everyday. I remember back in 1st year of Chinese, we went through the Pinyin chart of syllables, getting the grips of Chinese pronunciation. Syllable after syllable we went: bo, po, mo, fo etc etc. Little did I know that now three years later I’m still finding some oddities in these syllable charts and [...]
Radtacular Radicals
I’ve been reading some academic papers lately. I’m trying to find research on the importance of radicals in Chinese Orthography. It basically confirms what we all know, radicals are important in Chinese character recognition and learning. Chinese Orthography is complex, thanks to its logographic writing system. However, I’ve been hard at work trying to figure out if there is a better way to learn Chinese Characters/Vocabulary than mnemonics/srs/rote repetition etc. The answer to me lies [...]
The plight of Hollywood Chinese
I must admit, I secretly hope for Chinese to appear in movies so I can impress my friends and smile big time, ’cause I actually understood what is being said. But not only that, but it is interesting to see how actors cope with speaking Chinese. In most cases they do a terrible job. The most recent fail I saw was of Bradley Cooper in Limitless: Gosh that sounded terrible. Even after analysing what he [...]
Feeling a bit stuck and lost
After coming back from China, I’ve been in a slump with my Chinese. Yes, I still read Chinese everyday and listen to some music, but I feel like I need a goal. A direction. When I was in China, all the new Chinese came easy. It was like I was on autopilot with improving my Chinese. Now… it’s effort. However, I did not feel it before. I guess it comes from getting things easy. What [...]
