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 …
John has lived in China for
11.8
years. He is a linguist focused on SLA and tech.
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