Laowai Chinese 老外中文In the United States, the charming southern accent is all about vowels that get swapped around or changed. I still remember this great game of Catch Phrase where the southern belle mother gave this clue “It’s long and thin” and someone guessed “pin!” She was delighted and passed the thing to the next player (her […]
Testing… 1, 2, 3… does this still work? Great! I still have a blog. Let me see if I can remember how to work this thing… Walking through the Guangzhou subway the other day I saw this advertisement for real estate. it’s one of those priceless looks into Chinese culture that is so valuable because […]
Since this is my first year working in business in China, I was introduced to a new tradition this week. Everyone (well, almost everyone) came back to work on Monday after being home with family for the Spring Festival holiday. I was told by the CFO that we need to do 开门利事 kāi mén lì […]
I was greatly encouraged to read in the news this morning that some Chinese reporter made the ol’ 2-syllable-mix-up mistake that’s been my Achilles heel these past 10+ years of speaking Mandarin. I get bizarre looks when I ask a store clerk if they sell any “honeybees” (mì fēng 蜜蜂) when I really mean “honey” (fēng mì 蜂蜜), but […]
(Now that my coughing fit has stopped after blowing the dust off this blog, I think I’m ready to write something.) After 10 years of teaching English at universities in China, I have made a career change (gǎiháng le 改行了) and jumped into the exciting world of business! This is the introduction to a new […]
(I… can’t… quite… remember how to use my blog… Oh yes. It’s coming back to me now. I type here, right?) I saw this fun article “The world’s languages, in 7 maps and charts” from the Washington Post today and wanted to mention it. Notice where Chinese shows up in each graphic, for example: It was also fun […]
It appears that every 7 years or so (that often?!), I update my blog’s appearance. This new layout, while feeling a bit… umm… “thick” to me, actually works much better for mobile devices so all my readers with smart phones (aka me and my mom) can enjoy all the non-stop action of this blog while […]
Yesterday a friend showed me Waygo, an app that uses your camera to read hanzi off menus in restaurants, etc. (By the way, that feature is called an OCR = Optical Character Recognizer.) What impressed was that it’s free! Here’s the catch: you get “10 daily translations” with an optional paid upgrade to “unlimited translations for […]
As I mentioned before, on July 17 Yangyang and I did a live broadcast answering viewers’ questions about learning Chinese. We had a GREAT time (and I hope the viewers did too). Just so you know how the technology works: viewers type in their questions, and then other viewers can vote for the questions they like […]
Yesternight, I was on the bus and saw this fairly typical sign: I’ve taken this same bus lots of times, but never really paid attention to this sign. I found I could read every character except the one I’ve circled in blue. I also couldn’t use my usual trick of guessing from the context (because this […]
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