http://www.sinosplice.com/life Try to Understand China. Learn Chinese. Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:59:05 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en This week I've been busy gathering paperwork so I can (1) go all the way back to the U.S. to get my new work visa, and (2) graduate for real, like... for real. (And you thought passing the defense was enough? Nope, sorry... Not nearly enough red tape to make ... http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2008/07/03/visa-games Thinking about it now, I find it strange that I've never written about James W. Heisig and his landmark work, Remembering the Kanji. It was in 1997 while I was studying in Japan that I came across the book. I was still in this "I must write every new character a ... http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2008/06/30/ode-to-heisig-and-rtk The new aggregator in town is Guy Kawasaki's Alltop, and it's almost four months old. I really have to wonder if there's still much of a future for aggregation sites, now that RSS Readers are so freely available. I'll put that debate aside for now, though. I became aware of China ... http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2008/06/28/china-alltop I've been asked many times: Which is harder to learn, Chinese or Japanese? Well, the latest time finally inspired me to make this graphic. I think it's pretty self-explanatory, but some notes will follow anyway. In case you couldn't figure out from the graph, both are difficult, but in different ... http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2008/06/25/learning-curves-chinese-vs-japanese It's Euro Cup time, and as soccer fans, the Chinese are loving it. This punny headline caught my eye: "欧，MY GOD！" 欧 is a character most often used to mean "Europe," but it sounds like the English interjection "oh." "Euro Cup" in Chinese is 欧洲杯. This headline took me back ... http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2008/06/22/my-god The Chinese internet has been all kinds of slow lately. Foreign sites load extremely sluggishly, and I can't upload to Flickr at all. Enter Firefox 3! The Chinese internet is still damn slow, but at least the browser is faster! Gmail works dramatically faster. The one problem with upgrading immediately is that ... http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2008/06/18/firefox-3-gladder I can recall a time when I desperately wanted to know what Chinese people around me were saying. It was perhaps narcissistic, but I suspected they were talking about me probably a lot more than they really were. When I got to the point that I could eavesdrop and understand ... http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2008/06/13/false-teeth I finally finished my masters, but I don't find myself with lots of extra time for blogging. Why? Because we're doing so much at work lately. So rather than working on my blog, it's time for blogging on my work: FrenchPod. I never planned to learn French in this lifetime ("international ... http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2008/06/11/link-love-for-languagepods Had lunch with a former co-worker yesterday. I hadn't seen her since my wedding. She told me she had recently had surgery to have a 畸胎瘤 removed. What is that? Well, 畸 means "deformity," 胎 means "fetus," and 瘤 means "tumor" (or similar growth). As far as I can tell, ... http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2008/06/07/cool-vocabulary-you-totally-dont-need David DeGeest pointed me (via Twitter) to an interesting article: Google vs. Baidu: A User Experience Analysis. I suspect most readers of my blog are already quite familiar with Baidu and much of the content of the article, but I did find several points very interesting. On searching "subprime mortgage" (次级房贷): ... http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2008/06/02/comments-on-google-vs-baidu