Feed of posts from useful sites
Sinica - Edmund Backhouse in the Long View of History
PRC’s official rules for Pinyin: 2012 revision — in traditional Chinese characters
Last week I put online China’s official rules for Hanyu Pinyin, the 2012 revision (GB/T 16159-2012). I’ve now made a traditional-Chinese-character version of those rules for Pinyin.
Eventually I’ll also issue versions in Pinyin and English.
(Note: The image above is of course Photoshopped. I altered the cover of the PRC standard simply to provide an illustration in traditional Chinese characters for this post.)
Pinyin font: Chispa
Today’s Pinyin-friendly font is Chispa, by Joan Alegret of La Tipomatica. It’s freeware.
Crunchy
I tend to think of Hanzi being used to write English words as “Singlish,” after John DeFrancis’s classic spoof, “The Singlish Affair,” which is the opening chapter of his essential book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. But these days the word is mainly used for Singaporean English. So now I usually go with something like “English with Chinese character(istic)s.”
For a few earlier examples, see the my photos of the dog and the butterfly businesses.
Today’s example is “Crunchy,” written as ke3 lang3 qi2 (can bright strange). Kelangqi, however, isn’t how to say “crunchy” in Mandarin (cui4 de is); it’s just an attempt to render the English word using Chinese characters, probably in an attempt to look different and cool.
Crunchy, which is now out of business, was just a block away from the Dog (dou4 ge2) store, which is still around.
Pinyin font: Chonburi
Chonburi, by Cadson Demak, is a Pinyin-friendly font that also covers Thai.
Because of its relatively small size, it could work well on Thai-language Web pages that also include Pinyin. Maybe there aren’t many of those now, but eventually….
It is available through Google Fonts.
Learn Chinese Insights Podcast Episode 002: Elias Ek
In this episode, I interview Elias Ek.
Elias is from Sweden, but has lived in Taiwan for the past 25 years, where he runs his own company, Enspyre.
Listen to find out about:
- Elias’ first encounter in Chinese in Taiwan
- His first job in Taiwan
- Experience of working as a foreigner in a Taiwanese company
- His breakthrough in learning Chinese
- His experience on learning speaking without characters
- His use of Chinese while running his own company in Taiwan
- How he prepares for giving speeches in Chinese
- His approach interviewing new employees
- Why classroom language learning is broken
- Difference in western versus Chinese business culture
- How he elicits ideas from his staff
- What he would change about his strategy learning Chinese
- How Chinese compares in difficulty to other languages
Xin Tang 10
I’ve just added to Pinyin.info the tenth and final issue (December 1989) of the seminal journal Xin Tang. I strongly encourage everyone to take a look at it and some of the other issues. Copies of this journal are extremely rare; but their importance is such that I’ll be putting all of them online here over the years.
Although I’m giving the table of contents in English, the articles themselves are in Mandarin and written in Pinyin.
- FEATURE ARTICLES
- ZHOU YOUGUANG: The Next Step of Language Modernization
- CHEN ENQUAN: Experiments Should Be Carried Out on the Phoneticization of Chinese Characters
- LI YUAN: Romanized Chinese Must Be Finalized
- LI PING: To Be a Promoter of Script Reform
- ZHENG LINXI: Wu Yuzhang and Chinese Phonetic Spelling
- ZHANG LIQING: How Should the Tones of Chinese Spelling Be Indicated?
- LITERATURE
- LIQING: Elephants
- CHEN XUANYOU (Tang Period): The Wandering Soul
- WU JINGZI (Qing Period): Third Daughter Wang
- LU XUN: On the Collapse of Thunder Peak Pagoda
- RUI LUOBIN: The Adventures of Chunmei and Mimi
- COMIC DIALOGUES: Toad Drums
- WEI YIJIN: Dreams at Twenty
- DIAO KE: In Praise o f the Spirit of Bees
- GE XIAOLING: A Song to the Disabled Children
- YBY: The Story of the Magic Square
- SHORT SKETCHES
- DIAN EWEN: Interesting Tidbits about Script Reform Abroad
- LI YUAN: A Few Statistics on Tones Notations in Romanized Chinese
- LEARNING MANDARIN
- Asking the Way
- FROM THE EDITORS
- Farewell to Our Readers
Sinica - Hip Hop in China
Learn Chinese Insights Podcast Episode 001: Joe Westerhof
In this first episode of the new Learn Chinese Insights Podcast, I interview Joe Westerhof.
Joe came to Taiwan 17+ years ago from Michigan, US. He initially began teaching English but now works in a trading company in Taichung, doing import / exports.
In this episode, you will find out:
- What brought Joe to Taiwan in the first place.
- His background learning Chinese – what worked and what didn’t.
- His initial impressions of Taiwan.
- The benefits of living in a small town.
- How he transitioned from teaching to working in trade.
- Issues that westerners have, when working in Taiwanese companies
- Why Taiwanese companies don’t hire western employees
- What to focus on, when trying to get a job with a Taiwanese company
- What it’s like to be married with kids to a Taiwanese
- On dealing with the Taiwanese language versus Mandarin
- Joe’s theories on westerners who are fluent in Chinese
- Joe’s advice on learning Chinese (or any language)
Sinica - Parading around China's Military Legacy
Sinica - China's Millennials
Sinica - Bill Bishop: The Exodus
Sinica - The Tianjin Explosion
Changes to Course Outline Page
I recently made a couple of small changes to the Course Outline page.
The “Complete” links have been renamed as “Transcript” and have moved to the front of every lesson. I feel “Transcript” is a more descriptive label than “Complete” and moving it to the front better reflects the progression that most users make with the lessons: Start with the lesson, while following along with the transcript, then move to the Vocabulary page, followed by the Activity and other pages that follow.
Hope that makes sense and doesn’t cause too much disruption in your lesson navigation.
Sinica - Beijing's Great Leap Forward
Pleco Flashcards Support for iOS
One feature that many users have asked for, is the ability to export flashcards to Pleco, the popular dictionary app.
This could always be done of course through the Export page. However this required multiple steps.
I’m happy to announce that if you’re using an iOS device (iPhone or iPad), then head on over to the flashcard page and select the lesson range you want.
You’ll now notice a new button at the bottom called “Export to Pleco”.
Clicking on this will directly open the Pleco app (assuming you have it installed already). After a few seconds, you should see a message like this:
You’ll now have a list of CLO lessons inside Pleco that you can choose from.
Inside each lesson is the vocabulary, that you can then use to create your own flashcard lists inside Pleco.
Hope this is useful for you.
At the moment, Pleco says this function only works on iOS devices. We can add Android support when they do.
Sinica - Good Riddance, Monsieur Epstein
Sinica - Who will save us from the self-help revolution?
Sinica - The Brother Orange Saga
Sinica - The People's Republic of Cruiseland
