Hi, my name is Niel, otherwise known as Confused Laowai. I blog about my exciting, yet often confusing adventure learning Chinese.
Big Update to Social Mandarin
I’ve been thinking lately about where Social Mandarin should grow too. It’s current incarnation is good, but it needs more. After being featured on Penn-Olson, the author added that it would be cool to add more Chinese content with a difficulty tag. I postponed that advice for a while, but yesterday I just thought, why not? It’s a good idea. I took the whole Sunday to implement it, learning even more coding and discovering the [...]
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. [...]
Social Mandarin Newsletter
Just quick update on Social Mandarin. I’ve finally created a newsletter for Social Mandarin. It will feature the excellent links from the site and some more Mandarin goodies. It will go out every two weeks. If you want to stay up-to-date with Chinese and learn at the same time, please subscribe! You can do so by visiting the site and subscribing by adding your email address in the left sidebar. I’ve some exciting ideas for [...]
Quick Social Mandarin Update
Social Mandarin has been growing steadily over the past few months. This is one my first big web projects and it is an interesting experiment. First I had opened up the blogging section to people who want to post blogs there, but unfortunately it has not been too quick on the uptake. It also clashed withe main purpose of the site, for people to share resources and links. This has led to a bit of [...]
Social Mandarin Widget
I have finally tinkered around on Social Mandarin and managed to create a widget that shows the top 8 new links on the site. Ready to serve the best Mandarin resources on the web. Here is how it looks like. Simple, yet effective. If you are on RSS, clickthrough to the site to check it out in action. So, I’m asking you guys a small favour. If you have a blog or Mandarin related site, [...]
Blogs and Dictionaries
First things first. I have found this excellent new dictionary site that pulls examples from the internet! It has a really slick interface. Go check it out. In other news, I’m still actively developing Social Mandarin. A recent new feature that has been added, is the possibility to have your own blog on Social Mandarin. This will allow other users to more easily share their personal stories and anecdotes on learning Mandarin. Read more info on it [...]
Social Mandarin Testing
Since I started studying Mandarin in 2008, one of my first things I did was try and find some extra resources online. I also wanted to connect with other people going through the same process I was. I’ve somewhat achieved that. I’m following great people on Twitter and managed to find some great blogs in two years. However, I felt that there is a gap in social interaction between these people, to share these resources [...]
