When the government blocked another blogging service recently, I became nervous, because it means that the government continues to view blogs as a threat. Regardless, bloggers’ responses to the block reveal that they are not going to admit defeat so easily. As a result, I see two possible eventual outcomes: (1) the government decides to give up the blocking effort, or (2) the government steps up its efforts.
What scares me the most is the possibility that what we have …
Recently Typepad blogs have been added to the list of blog services blocked by the Chinese government. This is already old news. Some bloggers have responded by turning their blogs’ background color to black as a sort of “virtual protest.” I guess that’s cool, but I think they’re going to have to either get used to black backgrounds or just accept the blocks.
Just before the Typepad block, some major Chinese blog services were blocked temporarily. But before that, the …
I recently stumbled upon a fascinating article entitled Japan and China: National Character Writ Large (via Language Log) regarding the way the Chinese and Japanese languages render foreigners’ names in their own scripts. These are all things that I’ve thought about at one time or another, but it was nice to see it all brought together so succinctly.
It’s true: when I was in Japan, I had no choice about my “Japanese name.” My name was simply my English …
I recently discovered a very interesting site: ShanghaiNing.com. It’s designed specifically for the native Shanghainese. The tagline at the top says 侬白相啥？ That’s how you would write 你玩什么？ (roughly, “what do you do for fun?”) in Chinese characters to represent the particular words the Shanghainese use.
Translated excerpt from the about page:
…We represent the new Shanghai culture…..
We invite you to our website…
to discuss our concerns in our own language,
to sing our songs to our own
John has lived in China for
14.5
years. He is a linguist focused on SLA and tech.
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