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 …
Fortune cookie fortunes
Some Americans, not realizing that fortune cookies were invented in their own country, are dismayed by the lack of fortune cookies in China. It’s a fun little tradition.
I was equally surprised, then, to discover fortune cookies in Shanghai recently. Some company was offering free fortune cookies at Zentral (a yuppie restuarant). The catch, of course, is that there’s advertising on one side of the fortune slips.
On a side note, one thing that really annoys …
Hank at Network Sense introduced me to TagCrowd, a site which takes a chunk of text and displays the highest frequency words as a tag cloud. He tried it out by copying all the text on the main page of several blogs. Interesting results. Here are two of his results and two that I did:
Sinosplice (before this post):
ESWN:
…
My critical discourse analysis class is getting interesting. The professor has assigned small group presentation topics. All five topics are related to homosexuality. Pepe and I have “homosexuality in the West.” Yeah, pretty huge topic. Other topics are pretty narrow, such as “lesbians in China.”
Just as a reminder about what we’re going to be analyzing:
Discourse analysis challenges us to move from seeing language as abstract to seeing our words as having meaning in a particular historical, social, and
…
Asian, Brunette, Blonde: that’s the order. A friend of mine recently explained this to me.
Most people with any China experience know that when there’s an Asian among a group of foreigners in China, Chinese restaurant/hotel/etc. staff will naturally approach the Asian in the group. This is very understandable; there’s no way of knowing that one of the white people has been in China 10 years but the Asian has lived in Idaho all his life and doesn’t speak a …
The other day as I was walking through my apartment complex I noticed what appeared to be a child of 3 or 4 and his grandmother. The child was on one of those little toddler vehicles, pushing himself along with gusto. As the child got farther and farther away from his grandmother, I heard her start to make some noises as she hurried to catch up.
I knew what was coming on. The kid was about to get a volley …
People’s Daily has an article on the changing Chinese language entitled 49 obsolete Chinese words (part 1, part 2, part 3). The really annoying thing about the article, though, is that it tells you the English translation of the obsolete words without telling you what the actual Chinese words are. (The second most annoying thing about the article is that some of the words are definitely still in use.)
After Ken of ChinesePod blogged about the …
John has lived in China for
11.5
years. He is a linguist focused on SLA and tech.
All Posts