After my last post for Lost Laowai, where I expressed my annoyance with the irritating and pointless public announcements in Chinese public transport, I will now move on to another aspect of life in China which I find irritating: the tendency of the Chinese to address foreigners in English even when it would be easier for both to speak Chinese.
This particular irritation is perhaps not shared by all the foreig…
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…
AllSet Learning, the Shanghai-based language learning consultancy founded by long-time China blogger John Pasden, has just released what is surely a boon for any mandarin learners who aspire to achieve better Chinese grammar -- the Chinese Grammar Wiki.
From the AllSet Blog: Web-savvy learners of Chinese have known for some time that there’s no single comprehensive grammar resource for Chinese grammar on the e…
I find it unlikely that there could be a foreigner in China that doesn't know the name Dashan, and there's certainly no Canadians unaware of the mystical Big Mountain of Chinese. 大山 comparisons, jokes and CCTV9 Chinese lessons have been a formative staple over the course of my time in China.
This past November the following question was posted on Quora: Why do so many Chinese learners seem to hate Dashan (Mark Row…
Recently the guys over at the Skritter blog (Skritter's an excellent tool for studying Chinese, by the way) did a blog on Famous Foreigners Who Can Speak Chinese Really Well. The 10 people they listed are a great inspiration to all of us who are studying Chinese. If they can do it so can we!
I thought it was terrific, but I had one little problem with their list. The 10 Famous Foreigners were all men! Not one woma…
Our Mandarin Monday interview for this week is none other than well-known blogger, podcast host and translator, Brendan O'Kane.
One of the original founders of Paper Republic, Brendan is a host of the Mandarin Chinese language learning podcast Popup Chinese, and teaches a course in Chinese-English literary translation at IES Abroad Beijing.
He also (and far too infrequently!) blogs at bokane.org (English) and 在…
For this week's Mandarin Monday, we've hit up the juggernaut of Chinese learning, John Pasden.
John surely doesn't need much introduction for anyone studying Chinese. In China for more than a decade, John's been mastering the language for most of that time, including securing a masters in applied linguistics in Shanghai. He pens the popular Sinosplice blog, oversees academic content and serves as host at ChinesePo…
Wha?! Mandarin Monday on a Wednesday? What the hell is going on. Yeah, I screwed up and totally forgot. Hopefully a bit of mid-week mandarin is just as good though.
For the third installment in our weekly Mandarin Monday series that discusses Chinese learning we've hit up David Flynn. Dave is originally from the UK, he's been living in Taiwan and learning Mandarin Chinese for the last five years. He founded and ru…
What follows is the second in our weekly Mandarin Monday series, that discusses Chinese learning. The series will deliver advice through interviews with long-time Mandarin learners, sharing resources and discussing learning techniques.
This week we speak to Kellen Parker, co-founder of Sinoglot, an organisation of Chinese linguistics researchers. Kellen is an American linguistics researcher who's spent the last fe…
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,…
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