ChinesePod Video
Recently ChinesePod released its first video podcast: a visit to Shanghai’s Xiangyang Market (襄阳市场). The video is pretty entertaining and well done, and gives you an idea of how items are haggled over in a Chinese market.
The ChinesePod Weblog has some interesting topics, ranging from issues in applied linguistics such as the ‘lexical approach‘ to Chinese ‘buzzwords‘ (didn’t Micah used to have buzzwords too? What happened to those?).
The other video podcasts I discovered recently are by Ron Sims, a guy from Cleveland currently living in Fuzhou, China. His podcast series is up to three official episodes, and they’re not bad. So far there’s “the haircut” (can Chinese barbers cut black hair?), “street food” (he even eats stinky tofu on camera!), and the “breakdance show” (Ron was not impressed). Ron speaks Chinese, but the podcasts are mostly in English. I think he does a good job of providing a glimpse into life in China.
Ron’s videos are MP4s, so you may need either iTunes (which I hate) or a recent version of Quicktime to play them.
Actually the best software to play MP4 files is VLC media player. I think you can get it at http://www.videolan.org/vlc
March 22nd, 2006 at 10:22 amJohn,
Jeremy Goldkorn of Danwei.org has been doing some video blogging too. So far there are two episodes. The first one is about Beijing’s constructions, and the second one is about printed media.
http://www.danwei.org/archives/002485.html
http://www.danwei.org/archives/002473.html
March 22nd, 2006 at 4:04 pmIs that you in the pic w/ the city background? The one on the right, I mean.
March 22nd, 2006 at 9:00 pmTian,
Yes, true! Thanks for pointing that out. I think of what Jeremy does as a kind of reportage, so I don’t really group them in my mind.
March 22nd, 2006 at 11:10 pmTim P,
Nope.
March 22nd, 2006 at 11:10 pmI was amused by the words ‘ku bi le de ku zi’(cool pants).Some of them actually are quite cool. I don’t even use them quite a lot.
March 23rd, 2006 at 7:56 amI tried to podcast but my nose hair is too distracting and grows to fast for me to cut it in time for every episode. Kudo’s to these guys and their lack of nostril bush.
March 24th, 2006 at 2:24 amI know Ron personally, and I’m glad his podcasts are getting some recognition….cheers!
March 24th, 2006 at 12:44 pmMatt, Ron is pretty cool… I think he is very creative ;-)
March 24th, 2006 at 9:38 pmI suspect that ChinesePod get their buzzwords from the same place that the Shanghai Daily does. One of the Chinese-language Shanghai papers does the same thing, but in Chinese, and usually not very interesting.
My buzzwords are still there, but rarely updated.
March 27th, 2006 at 1:22 pm