Hi, my name is Niel, otherwise known as Confused Laowai. I blog about my exciting, yet often confusing adventure learning Chinese.
Mandarin Madness Review – A Chinese Vocabulary Learning App
The Chinese language learning technology space in my opinion is still under utilized. There are so much more avenues to explore in terms of aiding informal and formal learners of Chinese. There has been quite a lot of advances recently with excellent products (3000Hanzi and ChineseLevel) as well as great tools (HanziJS and Leiden Weibo Corpus) among others in the web space. The mobile space is very much an exploratory scene at the moment. There [...]
Introducing Leiden Weibo Corpus
My inner linguistic nerd is going crazy right now. This post released today from a member of Sinoglot, Daan, reveals that he has created a large Weibo corpus. For those not familiar with term, a corpus is a large body/collectinos of text, often used in linguistic research to study trends, frequency, discoure analysis and other interesting data. The LWC is an annotated linguistic 100-million word corpus containing 5.1 million messages from Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter-like [...]
Giving ChinesePod the deserved listen
Some kinds of media just don’t gel with certain language learners. Back in 2010, when I was still studying Chinese in undergrad classes, I gave ChinesePod a try. It just wasn’t for me. It was slow, not interesting and I just didn’t learn anything. But it wasn’t ChinesePod’s fault, it was mine. I took a terrible approach. Here’s why. I wanted to listen to everything, from the start. Looking back now, what a dumbass mistake. [...]
Introducing Chinese Basics
For the past three weeks I’ve been hard at work completing my final assignment for the academic year. After this, I start working on my research proposal for my Master’s Degree. The final assignment was to create a website on any educational topic. I decided to create Chinese Basics: a website that will teach you all the basics of the Chinese language. Think of it as a crash course into the world of Chinese. After [...]
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 [...]
How long does it take to learn Chinese?
I follow quite a lot of language learning blogs, either people on their own missions or people who are just interested in language learning. One of these guys is Benny from Fluent in 3 Months, whom travels to various countries and immerses himself in them to learn the languages. His dedication is admirable, and I wouldn’t mind doing what he does. Pretty awesome. His next goal is conversational Hungarian in 3 months. He chose Hungarian, [...]
