please speak Mandarin
Some of you may have noticed that when I put up my new Tone Pair Drills I added a new Products section to this website along with it. I’ll introduce one of the items here from various fascinating sociopolitical angles.
The shirt says 请讲普通话 which means “please speak Mandarin” (rather than some other local dialect). The inspiration for this shirt can be seen at countless bus stops all over Shanghai: completely ineffectual “请讲普通话” propaganda. The Shanghainese continue …
It’s been a while since I’ve added significant non-blog content to Sinosplice, but I’ve just completed something that could be really useful to learners of Mandarin Chinese. That something is Mandarin Chinese Tone Pair Drills.
I actually began this project all the way back in 2003. I put my ideas together into a rough form and some friends (including John B, Brendan, Greg, and Alf) helped me test them out. They gave me good positive …
As I explained before, my wife and I are learning Korean here in Shanghai. Progress has been slow, though, because our tutor unexpectedly had to return to Korea for the summer. Dedicated students that we are, we seized the opportunity for a two-month break from our studies. She’s back now, though, so we’re back in the saddle. We all decided we needed a good textbook.
the book
We textbook we decided on with our tutor is 新韩国语基础教程（上） (New Korean …
Thank you, Andy Lau (刘德华), for one of the funniest Chinese music videos I have ever seen. Greg and I witnessed this amazing recording of a live concert while lunching at the “Kowloon Ice House” in Zhongshan Park’s “Cloud Nine” (龙之梦) mall. A search on YouTube turned up nothing, but thankfully the Tudou.com results had a clip of the exact video we watched:
For those of you too lazy or too foolish to watch that clip, …
When I mentioned a presentation on homosexuals in the West for my critical discourse analysis class, I gave the Chinese translation of “metrosexual” as 都市玉男. That’s not the only translation, though. In his research, Pepe turned up quite a few other translations currently in use online. Here are the ones Pepe collected, along with their literal meanings:
“Metrosexual”
handing out tissues in Japan
When I went to Japan in 1997 to study for a year, it was my first time out of the United States. I knew Japan would be different, but I had very few expectations. I went out there with a year’s worth of Japanese, eyes wide open, and a brain ready to soak it all up. Of the many, many cultural peculiarities I noticed in Japan, one of the most convenient was the tissue pack …
These were all spotted on t-shirts on the streets of Shanghai:
I have no explanation for the first two, although to be fair, “labial” is a legitimate linguistics term, and “herpes clubs” actually do exist (although I can’t imagine there being t-shirts for it). The second one is obviously a knock-off of the Taiwanese clothing company “Naturally JOJO.” The last one is confusing …
IPTV advertisement
I’ve been seeing and hearing a lot about IPTV lately. The image at left is the ad I now see every month in my phone bill from China Telecom. So what is IPTV? According to Wikipedia:
IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) describes a system where a digital television service is delivered using the Internet Protocol over a network infrastructure, which may include delivery by a broadband connection. For residential users, IPTV is often provided in conjunction with Video on
…
我最近看了一片文章叫“Imagine Earth without people”（《想象没有人的地球》），也看过一张相关的图片。我觉得内容很有意思，所以翻译成中文，跟大家分享。
（点一下看大图）
有时候觉得我们的地球很可怜，人类的灭绝就会是最大的正义。…
I recently came across a webpage which compares the populations of Chinese provinces with that of other countries’ entire populations. It’s fun to mentally connect these provinces with the countries below, using population as the basis:
| Chinese Province | Country |
| Shandong | Mexico |
| Guangdong | Germany |
| Hunan | Iran |
| Anhui | Italy |
| Hubei | France |
| Liaoning | Spain |
| Shanxi | Canada |
| Inner Mongolia | Australia |
| Tianjin | Sweden |
| Ningxia | Finland |
Note that the figures used come from the 1990′s. For the actual numbers, visit the source page supplied by the …
John has lived in China for
11.5
years. He is a linguist focused on SLA and tech.
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