Hi, my name is Niel, otherwise known as Confused Laowai. I blog about my exciting, yet often confusing adventure learning Chinese.
Introducing 3000Hanzi
I’m just loving how more and more awesome sites are popping up in the digital Chinese learning space lately. 3000Hanzi is the next resource that’s helping learners with reading Chinese. It not only has a great online reading system, where you can add links or text, but also has annotation, word frequency and more. It was created by Steven Daniels, who is no stranger to the online Mandarin learning community, as he is behind Lingomi too. [...]
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. [...]
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 back. I’ve used Anki before as a way to learn some extra vocabulary while I study. Now that I don’t [...]
L-Lingo Review
So being a niche blogger does have its perks. Like being offered to review premium services free of charge. Not only, do I have an interest in language learning, but I’m very interested in how hypermedia and new media can be used to aid the language learning process. That’s basically what I’m aiming to study next year as well: an MPhil in Hypermedia for Language Learning. L-Lingo is one of those sites that utilize various [...]
My Future in Mandarin
I’m finishing my University degree at the end of this year. It will probably conclude my formal Mandarin studies. I first wanted to go the China (specifically back to Beijing) to just mission around for a year or two. However, due to some change in plans within my family and friends, I’ve decided to remain in South Africa for at least one year, maybe two years. The reasons for this are because of the fact [...]
