Hi, my name is Niel, otherwise known as Confused Laowai. I blog about my exciting, yet often confusing adventure learning Chinese.
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”. Even some popular Mandarin/Chinese sites use this as a prefix: Sinoglot, Sinosplice. Chinese fans would often call themselves Sinophiles. However, [...]
Chinese Superman Comics
Dave, from Chinese Hacks, posted a link to these awesome comics on Social Mandarin: Chinese Superman Comics. It’s the world’s beloved hero and saviour Superman himself… saying rather strange things in Chinese. Odd, but funny! Although they are in Tradtional characters, I can read most of the dialogue via guessing the context if the characters are unfamiliar in traditional script. These comics must surely be edited, as I doubt these are real Superman dialogues. Nonetheless, [...]
Chinese-Ordered English
I found an interesting Wikipedia article today about Chinese-Ordered English. While, I’m sure many Chinese learners have come across this phenomenon some way or the other, it is an interesting teaching/learning technique to keep in the back of your mind. It is the way of ordering Chinese in English. As in literal translation. I take the example from Wikipedia: Here is an example of a Chinese sentence, Pinyin, COE and English: Hànzì : 昨天 我 和 [...]
Is Chinese a good choice for your first foreign language?
Now that I’ve come to the end of my formal Mandarin studies, I am starting to reflect on Chinese. I am now thinking of starting another foreign language – Spanish is in my sights. Chinese was first! Mandarin is my first foreign language, I speak two other languages, Afrikaans and English, but I grew up with them bilingually. So, Mandarin was my first active effort in acquiring a new language. I have come to learn [...]
Holiday Time
[Note: I'm going to try and mix my Mandarin and English a bit more. Ultimately I want to start blogging in Chinese. So, expect some random sentences and words mixed in between posts from now on. If I make errors please correct me!] So, I’m currently on my University holiday. 最近我和我的兄弟去了伊维萨 (Ibiza)，这个地方有很多的夜总会，虽然太贵了，但是很好玩儿。Also, visited my older brother in London. However, I’m back in my hometown (家乡), and still have 3 weeks left before University starts again. [...]
Soccer World Cup South Africa
My country is hosting the 2010 Fifa World Cup and it’s happening pretty soon. Kickoff is June 11. So, I decided to create a blog post with some soccer and South African related terminology in Chinese and English and for healthy measure my other native tongue, Afrikaans, which also spoken widely in South Africa. 1) Soccer: Mandarin: 足球 (zúqiú) Afrikaans: Sokker 2) World Cup: Mandarin: 世界杯 (shìjièbēi) Afrikaans: Wêreldbeker 3) Score A Goal: Mandarin: 进球 (jìnqiú) Afrikaans: [...]
Google Chrome Translator Plugin – Zhongwen
I have found it! After seeing this post on Social Mandarin about a plugin for Firefox, I was on the hunt for a similar plugin for Chrome. Lo-and-behold. Welcome Zhongwen. It works amazingly well. Just install it on Chrome, click on or off and you’re set. I tested it on Slow Chinese and this is how it looks like. Just hover your cursor over the words. It looks at the characters next to it very [...]
5 Mistakes I made when I started learning Chinese
I’ve been studying Mandarin at University for about two years and 3 months. The mistakes I made, might not be mine particularly, but perhaps the way our course is structured. However, these mistakes can be applied to anyone starting to learn Mandarin. These “mistakes” are not necessarily bad, but it’s part of my current shortcomings in Mandarin that I still struggle with. Perhaps you can learn from me and try to fill those gaps earlier [...]
Watch Chinese TV Online
I found this amazing site. PPTV It has Chinese TV programs available to stream online. It has movies, series (even some of your favourite English ones in Chinese), cartoons, sports and to my surprise even a gaming section! There is a huge variety. Being, a gaming nut, I first watched some Warcraft matches, then watched the first part of District 9 (第九区). And there’s so much more. Unfortunately the quality is not perfect, but it’s [...]
Getting creative with 汉字
I’m following this rad dude on Twitter, @puerhan and he just posted this really creative card design for the festive season. He uses the character 木 (mù) which means tree. With the touch of a star on the top, symbolizing the Christmas tree, I thought this was really creative! Seeing as Chinese characters often started as pictographs, it just shows that some characters still represent what they mean. If you want to retweet this or [...]
