21st August, 2008 |
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Karen Christensen
email:karen [at] berkshirepublishing.com
skype:karen_christensen
Not only have I seen my first Beijing Olympics tshirt–bright red and extra large, on a man eating breakfast in Charleston, South Carolina, the week before last–but the 2008 Olympics are being mentioned even in the free paper you get on the Tube here in London:
Other bizarre phrases you may encounter include ‘no noising’ […]
Posted: November 29th, 2006 under Chinese language.
Comments: none
Our friend and colleague Jonathan Qiang Li has written instructions for setting up Chinese keyboardinginstructions for setting up Chinese keyboarding in Windows. I have Chinese characters on my PC but haven’t done adding the keyboarding yet. I have seen Tom using it though and it is amazing: a small box appears into which he types […]
Posted: August 18th, 2006 under Chinese language.
Comments: none
It’s funny and small-worldish to be browsing online, come across an interesting article like this, “Lily Learns Mandarin,” about a child adopted from China, and then realize that the author, Julie Michaels, is a freelance journalist who works down the hall from us.
Even stranger–but consistent with guanxi–is that Julie’s college roommate is also friends with […]
Posted: August 1st, 2006 under Chinese language.
Comments: none
I was writing an abstract for a talk I’m giving at the Wikipedia conference in two weeks and used the phrase “dirty laundry.” I went online to check on equivalents, because it’s not really the kind of term one uses in conference abstracts, and the word ‘dirty’ is far stronger in English than in American. […]
Posted: July 24th, 2006 under Chinese language.
Comments: none
In any learning process there are phases, and moments of discovery. I had one of these in my Chinese studies on Friday. I knew, as you do, that there are four tones in Chinese (and I’m actually starting to hear them and be able to use them), and that the same word said in different […]
Posted: July 11th, 2006 under Chinese language.
Comments: none
Qiang’s provided comments below about the writing of pinyin (PinYin), and I heard this week from a journalist, Michael Erard, who specializes in language about a Shanghai-based website called Chinesepod, reviewed here for Slate. I’ve just signed up and will report after my trial week.
In the meantime, Liz and Tom have been drilling me, gently, […]
Posted: July 8th, 2006 under Chinese language.
Comments: none
Here’s an answer to my question about putting Chinese into the blog. Not, mind you, that I really know Chinese to put in. But I do know how to use Babelfish. (Yes, you can translate into Chinese, and it’s probably as bizarre as a translation into Spanish or French–languages which I can read. But never […]
Posted: July 5th, 2006 under Chinese language.
Comments: 3
I was reading about the “measure words” or counters used in Chinese and it seemed very complicated. Ben is the counter is you’re talking about books; ping is the counter if it’s bottles of wine being talking about. Then I remembered about English collective nouns. Here’s something a student of English might read from the […]
Posted: June 27th, 2006 under Chinese language.
Comments: none
Instead of spending an hour a day simply studying Chinese, I find myself buying yet another thing to help me–even when I know that time and discipline is the key. But yesterday something happened that seemed to promise good fortune.
I received a box from Amazon with a set of Chinese flashcards (I knew that […]
Posted: June 25th, 2006 under Chinese language.
Comments: 1
Every day we hear that Guanxi is needed and timely, and articles like this confirm our view about “Red Hot China”. I’m especially glad to say that we’ve decided to add tone marks to all our transliterations of Chinese starting with the July issue. Not that you need to read a word of Chinese to […]
Posted: June 19th, 2006 under Chinese language.
Comments: none
