My recent post on the Wikimedia Commons Stroke Order Project prompted Mark of Toshuo.com to decry the relative dearth of traditional characters being added to the project. To this, David on Formosa reminded Mark that there are also a large number of characters shared by the traditional and simplified character sets.
At this point I’ll interject a visual aid (gotta love them Venn diagrams!):
All this got me thinking about the following question: If “s” represents the characters …
So you’re at a party. It’s not some crazy kegger, it’s just one of those social mixers you go to every once in a while to meet people. A homely guy walks up to you and introduces himself as Craig. He’s a financial consultant. He soon moves on.
Photo by Wallie-The-Frog
A few minutes later, he walks up again, and asks, “Remember me?”
“Uhhh, Craig, right?” you reply.
“Yes,” he says. “And what do I do?”
“Uhhhh,” you say intelligently …
A while back I blogged about buying a PS2 in China, and there was a lot of interest. There’s not much to say about PS3, because it is so far uncracked/unpirated, so everyone who plays PS3 here imports everything. Games are 2-300 RMB each. XBox 360 has similar status re: pirating to Wii in China, but I have almost no experience with it, so will limit my observations to the Wii and its games.
Nintendo does not officially sell …
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 …
Chicken… or Scallops?
Recently Mark visited Shanghai. One night having dinner at my place, there was a conversation that went something like this:
Mark: This seafood is really good.
John: Huh? What seafood?
Mark: This seafood!
John: That’s not seafood. That’s chicken.
Mark: Really? Oh. In that case…
It wasn’t the first time that has happened. Sometimes chicken in China gets mistaken for scallop-like seafood. It’s not that the chicken tastes fishy, it’s that the texture is very …
I have mentioned before that my ayi Xiao Wang is from Dongbei (东北, China’s northeast). I like her a lot, and perhaps one of the reasons is her impressive capacity for bluntness.
A while ago I was setting up an electric fan for her so she wouldn’t be so hot when she’s cooking in the kitchen. At first I thought it was broken, because when I pressed any of the buttons from speed 1 to 3, nothing happened. …
A little while back I recommended that Mark of the blog Doubting to shuō make an online number conversion tool similar to his Pinyin Tone Tool and Cantonese Tone Tool. Well, Mark has done it. These are the kinds of conversions it can do:
| Input | Output |
| 五千八百 | 5800 |
| 兩百五十 | 250 |
| 三百萬 | 3000000 |
| 三百万 | 3000000 |
| 7十 | 70 |
| 九億 | 900000000 |
| 九亿 | 900000000 |
| 6.25亿 | 625000000 |
| 1500万 | 15000000 |
| 五億三千九百二十萬四千四百四十一 | 539204441 |
| 壹仟叄佰柒拾捌 | 1378 |
Note that the Chinese Number Tool handles simplified, traditional, and …
John has lived in China for
11.5
years. He is a linguist focused on SLA and tech.
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