I can’t deny that I’ve been using Facebook far more any normal person should. It’s like, if hotmail and crack were to somehow have sex and reproduce, the result would surely be something like Facebook. That said, it is most certainly a great way to stay in touch with people who would otherwise have fallen [...]
Learning Chinese Posts
Lost in Pinyin-ation
While in the Shanghai Museum a month ago, I picked up a museum guide flier “Treasures in museum’s collection” which featured this instantly forgettable sentence: “Yuan Ji (Shi Tao), Zhu Da (Bada Shanren), Kun Can (Shi Xi), and Zhan Jiang (Hong Ren) were the four monk painters of the late Ming and early Qing period.” [...]
Special English, another Christ, and Nazi
Time and again, I find the things I enjoy most about my job have little to do with teaching and everything to do with the absurdities I confront in the classroom. I wonder sometimes if this makes me a poor educator, but I don’t linger on it. My students have no books, their teacher has [...]
Introducing The LICtionary: a Life In China Dictionary
Living in China brings with it a number of occasions where most can do nothing but scratch their heads and say “WTF?” However, largely by the help of the English-language China blogsphere, we’ve started to create a dictionary that can assist in putting words to the weird, definitions to the disarray and captions to the [...]
Good Character, Bad Character
I love etymology. I’m not sure what about knowing “why” a word is what it is that steams my baozi, but I just dig it. I confess, I’m not hardcore about it, but do frequently visit www.etymonline.com for casual reading. For armchair etymologists like myself, the Chinese language is a fantastic source of wonders. Learning [...]
Active Chinese – Lazy Learners Welcome
I’m generally the first to admit I’m lazy. Perhaps it’s not lazy so much as being part of the Goldfish Attention Span Generation (GASG). I just can’t be bothered to focus on something for too long. This, perhaps, is why when I first heard of Active Chinese I was a little concerned it was a [...]
Back To The Future
Ah, Back To The Future. Great Scott did I ever ponder the title of that movie when I was a kid! It completely threw me for a loop. I’d just get to sorting out the direction it was pointing me when I’d hit that last word and all was lost. It is fitting then that [...]
Love China
It would seem we go in phases here at Lost Laowai. We get heated posts about people being beaten, then we move into nerdier territory with computer stuff. Well, I’d just like to say – BRING ON THE LOVE. At Lost Laowai, love is in the air. It’s months before Valentine’s Day, and months since [...]
Building Your Own Computer in China
Well, since my old pandapassport post about expensive real software in China is doing so fabulous on the newly created Chinalyst’s Popular Content page, I thought I’d balance here it with a new post dedicated to helping foreigners shop for cheap hardware in China. Anyway, I’ve been talking to some of my “people,” discussing my [...]
Chinese Language Software
Well, anyone that’s traversed this site more than just visiting the Hao Hao Report or reading the (still somewhat limited) posts of this blog will know that LOTS still needs to be added. Unlike the authorship of this blog, the rest of the site is all just one guy plugging away at it, trying desperately [...]
