This Sinosplice silence has gone on for too long! Time for a personal post.
Leading up to Christmas, I was preparing to make a trip back to the USA. This time that involved not only the usual gift-buying, but also getting a good lead in the recordings at ChinesePod, and also making sure that all of my AllSet Learning clients are properly taken care of the whole time as well.
What was meant to be a “short and sweet” …
Well, it’s that time of year again. People are looking for Christmas songs. I try to add a little to my collection every year. This year I’ve got a couple new videos at the bottom.
Enjoy this Sinosplice Christmas music content from the archive: The Sinosplice Chinese Christmas Song Album (~40 MB)
Photo by Luuluu
I rarely blog about current events, but this one is too interesting and concise to pass up: The Top Ten China Myths of 2010, by Evan Osnos of the New Yorker.
Quick and dirty list of the 10 myths:
I’ve been asked a number of times: if Mandarin Chinese is a tonal language, what happens when you sing in Mandarin? Well, the answer is the melody takes over and the tones are ignored. Pretty simple.
However, it may not quite end there. I recently discovered a paper called “Tone and Melody in Cantonese” which asserts that Cantonese tones are set to music in a somewhat different way:
For Chinese, modern songs in Mandarin and Cantonese exhibit very
…
Check out this crazy rubik’s cube, refitted with Chinese characters, print-block style:
The only thing is, if you actually use ink with this thing to print characters, and then you twist it around, you’re going to end up with ink all over your hands all the time. Minor design issue, though. Cool concept!
The three-character combinations are designed to match lines from the 三字经 (Three Character Classic). Nice!
Thanks to Gaijintendo for pointing me to this. Photos from …
I noticed these ads recently in the subway. They’re sponsored by the Shanghai fire department. It makes sense to want to raise fire safety awareness in light of the recent tragic fire, but I don’t really get the whole “firewall” thing. Like in English, the Chinese term 防火墙 seems to be used primarily in the IT industry these days.
P.S. My dictionary says “firewall” is another word for “Chinese wall.” Hmmm.…
I’m organizing an event that takes place tonight in Shanghai at Xindanwei (details here):
If you’re familiar with Tom, you know he puts a lot of thought into his songs. This talk is going to be kind of like a real-life “director’s commentary” version of a DVD, except the commentary comes after the content. Tom is going to play three different songs (one of them in Chinese) while the lyrics are displayed, and then he’ll talk about the …
A while back Albert of Laowai Chinese visited Shanghai. We met up for lunch and had a good chat about our experiences in China learning Chinese. He asked me an interesting question: what did I think was the biggest problem with the field of Chinese language instruction?
I told him that in general, I felt that there was way too much teaching adult foreign learners as if they were Chinese children, and I felt that more (non-Chinese) learner perspectives were …
Legendary animator Chuck Jones is said to have offered budding young artists this piece of advice, in one form or another:
We all have at least 10,000 bad drawings inside of us. The sooner we get them out and onto paper, the sooner we’ll get to the good ones buried deep within.
Chuck apparently didn’t make up this quote; although the exact number varies, the advice is frequently heard in interviews with any Chouinard or CalArts graduate. This little gem …
Spotted in the electronics market at the southwest corner of Huaihai Rd. and S. Xizang Rd.:
The 256 GB drive is fake. The vendor in the electronics market admitted to me that the actual hardware was a 64 GB drive (pictured to the right). He said he wouldn’t sell a fake USB drive to foreigners like me who speak Chinese. (Get ripped off less: Another reason to learn Chinese.)…
John has lived in China for
11.8
years. He is a linguist focused on SLA and tech.
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