They roamed the streets of her hometown, knocking their sticks along to lay a path in that endless shade. What they could not see with their eyes the cards showed them by touch. Lu Jun was little when her mother made them show her her future. They rambled on for awhile, illshapen words boiling down to one sentence: she will be happy at a great school.
She never forgot this.
In primary school they took their les…
I'm a busy guy. Or at least that's been my long-running excuse as to why I don't spend more time practicing my Chinese. Fortunately Skritter is making it harder for me to live by that self-defeating mantra with the release of their new iOS app.
Out just yesterday, the Skritter mobile app is set to revolutionize the way we study written Chinese. Already a popular browser-based resource, the app puts touch character…
This is the first in a new series of posts, called Mandarin Monday, that will discuss Chinese learning. The series will deliver advice through interviews with long-time Mandarin learners, sharing resources and discussing learning techniques.
Our first guest in the series is John Biesnecker. John is an American software developer who has been in China since 2003, and has been working on his Mandarin since 2001. He,…
People ask you how young you were (几岁) when you moved to China
You start shaving your eyebrows and stop shaving everywhere else
You think American clothing is very plain
Everything you are wearing was purchased in China
You don’t know the conversion between CNY and USD
People ask you where you are from and you say the Chinese province/city where you live
Your E…
I'm sure everyone has heard the story of the friend of a friend from X country at X university in China, and the story is so remarkable you almost don't believe it. Here are a couple I've picked up from different people, I don't know if they are true or not. They are both very motivating.
The turtle wins the race
So when my roommate was studying in Beijing before she came to Xi'an, there was a foreign guy…
London, not quite my hometown, but a city I know very well, has its own peculiar culture called Cockney, which is evident as an accent, in traditional clothing, and in the idiosyncratic 'Cockney rhyming slang'.
The Cockney accent and mannerisms were famously mis-represented by the actor Dick van Dyke in the Mary Poppins movie, and has also been butchered by Johnny Depp as the pirate Jack Sparrow. But forget all t…
Chinese is a really difficult and frustrating language to learn, but it always helps to laugh at yourself to get you through the process.
My confessions 我的自白:
Injuries
I have, in frustration, banged my head against my Chinese textbooks.
I’m pretty sure I’ve ruined my eyesight by staring at Chinese characters for too long.
I once got frost nip on my toes from studying for too long in my unheated Chinese apar…
"Generation gap" (代沟) , "supermarket" (超级市场), "honeymoon" (蜜月) and "breakdance" (霹雳舞). These words are all newcomers in the Chinese language. In fact, all of them have appeared after China started unfreezing its relations to the rest of the world with the Reform and Opening policy, embarked upon by Deng Xiaoping in 1978. In a fascinating book called (roughly translated) "Chinese Vocabulary in The Time of Reform …
The other day I was listening in on a class of Chinese students who were taking an evening course in my native language, Swedish. Their task for the day was to change nouns written in singular form to plural, (that is: “cat” to “cats”). This can be complicated enough in English: How do you now that a bunch of small rodents are called “mice” and not “mouses”? In Swedish matters get even worse, since there are five dif…
I was watching this video (see below) of some dude reading a Chinese passage. I don't know about you, but when I hear Chinese spoken in this way it gives me that nails-on-a-chalkboard feeling. Sorry no, it gives me that I-want-to-kick-you-in-the-nads feeling.
I have not met anyone in real life that speaks this way, aside from a few certain people who often have to speak in public. My point is that this sort of "…
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