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 [...]
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 [...]
Defining the Sinosphere
I stumbled across this interesting wikipedia link the other day: The Sinosphere. It’s an article on a collective of countries (area?) that forms the sinosphere. Sino is a prefix used often to relate to China and its close knit Asian geography. Its etymology comes from the latin term: sinae, which is Latin for “The Chinese”. [...]
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 [...]
The strange abyss of Chinese Characters
Yesterday, a friend of mine contacted me, saying he was doing a project for his Computer Science degree. He was playing around with encryption. He encrypted the sentence, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” and then subsequently decrypted it. He apparently did the coding wrong and the program spit out this message: [...]
If you want an SRS program, Skritter is the way to go
I knew about Skritter for some time now, but never really got around to actually checking it out. After Sara’s recommendation I couldn’t resist anymore and signed up for the trial. Another factor was that the lab that I’m working in now had a Wacom Bamboo tablet lying around. I installed it and never looked [...]
Your Mandarin Learning Experience
So, 2011 is in full force. I’m back at University, however it is a bit different this time around. I’m doing a Master’s degree in Hypermedia for Language Learning. For info on my degree you can go read this page. The interesting thing is, I have no classes. All my assignments are done online. However, [...]
