Kakis, a regular commenter on Talk Talk China, recently left this one:
I always love to speak Chinese to laowais, in fact, I am really good at teaching, be it language or Engineering stuff.a lot of laowais like the way I teach them how to pronounce ’si & shi; zhan & zhang; lan & nan;….’. But the thing is, laowais like to show off their Chinese whenever they are in the meeting or some conferences. they think their
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It’s something I’ve wanted to implement for a while, and the new China Blog List made it possible. Although its main function is still to list China blogs written in English, The China Blog List now features a separate listing of non-English (non-Chinese) blogs about China.
If you’re interested in blogs of only one language in the non-English list, you can easily bookmark that one language (and RSS feeds are on the way). So far, the languages covered are:…
Winter has arrived in Shanghai, but it’s not yet in full swing.
My checklist would go something like this:
The Chinese media is way too excited about plastic surgery. It’s pathetic. Time is writing about the Asian trend too, although this “news” is far from new. But it’s not dying down.
I don’t watch much TV or read a lot of Chinese news, but even I have seen quite a few “丑女变美女” (“ugly woman turns into a beautiful woman”) stories. Here are two sample shots from an online story that came out last week:
In the “before” …
The other day Micah posted a list of vegetable prices, which I find very useful. Normally I would just link to his entry, but Micah’s permanent archives are on “Blockspot,” which is just a pain. So with his permission I’m reproducing the table here (and adding pinyin tooltips so that I’ve at least contributed something).
From Shanghai Evening Post’s “Metro Life” section called 蔬菜批发价格, or Wholesale Vegetable Prices:
| 品种 Type | 价格 （元/公斤） Price (RMB/kg) |
|---|
Talk Talk China is a site devoted to whining about China. That sounds like a bad thing, but the guys that run it do a good job of keeping it entertaining. I also appreciate how they make no pretenses about what they’re trying to be. It says right in their sidebar: “Dan, DD, and Dawanr are 3 laowai that have been here for way too long (collectively over 45 years!!) and this is where we come to just let all …
I recently stumbled across this Chinese webcomic called Old Wang through Baidu. It’s an odd mix. It’s by Chinese people, about China, but in English. Not natural English. The home page makes these claims:
The 1st English/Chinese Theme Cartoon Portal
A Career Life Forum for the Commuting Tribe
A lot of the comics seem like an attempt at a Chinese Dilbert. But they’re not really funny, they’re just sort of… odd. And yet I found myself reading a few more …
At first I was going to call this another Chinese pun, but now I’m not sure if it qualifies. It’s orthographically dependent (it won’t work when read aloud), and it involves grammar as well. But it’s still pretty easy for students of Chinese to understand.
Central to the understanding of this pun is the notion of the 多音字: a character that has multiple readings. The one you need to know for this pun is the rather basic character 都. …
Some of you may have noticed that the URL of my weblog has changed. It’s now /life/ instead of /weblog/. This is not because I think “Life” is a great name for my weblog, or because I think this is not a blog or something. I actually liked using the name “weblog” because it’s the simplest, most accurate description.
The reason for the change is Google. I had the word “weblog” in both the title of the HTML document …
I’ve been doing occasional translation work lately. It produced this IM conversation with Brad:
John: ARRGHHH… look what I have to translate into English:
学生：老师，有一个同学还没来呢。[Student: Teacher, one student isn't here yet.]
老师：他生病了。 [Teacher: He's sick.]
大家：啊？ [Students: What??]
老师：他昨天到家喝了冰的汽水，晚上就发烧，拉肚子了。[Teacher: Yesterday he went home and drank cold soda. That evening he came down with a fever and got diarrhea.]
Brad: hahahahahahahaha
John: I hate that [nonsense]!!!
John: fever AND diarrhea from a cold
…
John has lived in China for
11.8
years. He is a linguist focused on SLA and tech.
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