Laowai Chinese 老外中文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 […]
Resources
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 […]
I’m currently back in the USA for a short trip and Yangyang from Yoyo Chinese has invited me to do a live Google Hangout with her tomorrow. I’ve never done this before, but from what I understand she and I will sit in front of the camera and anyone who “tunes in” (how THAT works, I […]
WARNING: This article is an explanation of the footnote in my conceptual breakdown of foreign language teaching. It’s really written more for language teachers and testers than learners. Language instruction is typically divided into four skills: 4 Skills for Most Foreign Languages Aural Visual Reception Listening Reading Production Speaking Writing But for learning Chinese, the […]
Umm… it’s not often that I update something as quickly as I’ve updated my Blog Bank. It was just after I published that last post that I realized I can actually add far more than just blog RSS feeds. I can add EVERYTHING. This has been a problem I’ve long wanted to solve: When someone […]
[Update: See Blog Bank updated to be Resource Bank] With the upcoming demise of iGoogle (see image above), I’ve decided to explore better options for what used to be the “Learn Chinese” iGoogle Page. The best new thing I’ve found is NetVibes. So I’m very happy to announce the release of the “Learn Chinese” Blog Bank (which […]
I’m very pleased to announce that I’ve taken a position as “course designer / script writer” at Yoyo Chinese. I’ve only been doing it for a little while so none of the lessons that I’ve written have been posted yet, but I’ll probably refer to some of them in the future. It’s been really great […]
(As promised here, this is my separate post about hanzi.) Anyone want to make some money? You’re welcome to my idea about how I think hanzi should be taught: Inspiration If you’ve never had the chance to play an adventure video game (or even some RBGs), you’re missing out on the virtually-fueled feelings of constant […]
[Update: Bizarrely, comments weren’t allowed on this post at first (they are now). I don’t know why.] Someone want to make some money? Well you’re welcome to this idea if you can figure out how to do it and monetize it. (Maybe it’s already been done, although I doubt it.) For years we’ve had lists of Chinese […]
Subscribe to Laowai Chinese via RSS
