Jonathan of The Art of Living has e-mailed me with a link to his report of the new HSK. Although not yet officially in use, the new Chinese proficiency test is apparently already being tested on groups of students.
Some telling passages from Jonathan’s report:
I have to say, it was a big improvement. The test was neatly organized into four sections that covered all aspects of communications: listening, speaking, reading, writing. The old test only covered listening and reading
…
I saw this Globe and Mail article today: Journalist Lancashire dies at 76.
I’m starting to wonder if one of my co-workers is a pirated person. I mean, come on. He’s also Canadian, from Toronto. He has a great interest in China. Oh, and his name is also David Lancashire.
Fishy indeed.…
What’s going on here?
It’s actually a case of subtle, punny Chinese dissidence online. Rebecca MacKinnon explains.…
Godzilla photo by Nanther
For reasons which will become clear soon, I was researching Godzilla recently. I was curious about the name. Godzilla seems like a great English name, but it’s a Japanese creation, and the Japanese name is ゴジラ (Gojira). So I had to wonder… did the Japanese start with the English name “Godzilla” and transliterate into Japanese, or did they start with “Gojira” and semi-transliterate into the fantastic “Godzilla?” The use of katakana for the monster’s name to …
I recently read an interesting and provocative article about a movement called radical honesty. The founder posits that everyone would be better off–that we’d be taking the steps to true communication–if we would all just say exactly what is on our minds. It’s not meant to be hurtful; you don’t insult people and walk away. After you speak your mind you stick around for the fallout, because radical honesty tends to beget radical honesty, and once you strip …
A recent ChinesePod podcast got me wondering: how many foreigners really learn all the forms of address for family members? I’m not ashamed to admit that I never did. Not only do you have separate words for whether they’re on your mom’s side or your dad’s side, related by blood or by marriage, older or younger than your parent, but there are also issues of formal vs. informal and regional variation. I think most of us give up on learning …
My wife and I would like to go to Turkey soon. However, over the past few weeks I’ve been discovering that it’s kind of difficult for Chinese people to go to Turkey. Difficult… but not impossible.
Now that we’re sure we can both actually get in, we just need to buy plane tickets, but we want to go during–you guessed it–the October National Day holiday. Somehow we kind of forgot that there are a freaking bazillion* people in …
Some may view Shanghai as glamorous, but it’s got its share of expat whiners. So how does it compare with Dubai, one of the richest, most exotic expat destinations?
According to this analysis, it’s got a lot of the same issues.
I’ll leave the item-by-item comparisons to you, but Shanghai still seems pretty good to me.…
The latest t-shirt design, inspired by an Economist cover (pictured below):
“Putin” in Chinese is 普京. 知道 means “to know.” If you think it doesn’t make sense, you’re thinking too much. It’s just a t-shirt.
The black t-shirt looks better, but the white t-shirt is a lot cheaper. Blame CafePress.
I’ve been busy writing papers lately, so I haven’t been working on t-shirts much, but there are others in the Sinosplice Shop, of course. Thanks for …
The Great FireWall of China (GFW) is quite a nuisance, but I haven’t been thinking about it much lately. That’s because all Flickr pictures display fine for me when I have the Access Flickr! Firefox plugin installed, and Wikipedia, Blogspot, and others display fine for me since I started using an automatic proxy trick for Firefox which I first discovered on Lost Laowai. The combination of these two tricks satisfies most of my regular browsing needs. They most likely …
John has lived in China for
11.8
years. He is a linguist focused on SLA and tech.
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