Real life and the day job have been keeping me busy of late, but there’s some cool stuff coming up. Eric Abrahamsen, Cindy Carter and I have started up a new blog, Paper Republic, that aims to be a resource for Chinese literature and translation. The site is still somewhat in the process of getting [...]
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missionaries
So John was in town with his folks over the weekend, and I had the pleasure of hanging out with him while his parents and wife visited the Forbidden City. John was quite understandably unenthused at the prospect of visiting the Forbidden City a third time. It may have been the seat of power for [...]
Live Ink and Chinese Literacy
A long time ago I noticed that even though I’m much more comfortable with simplified characters than I am with complex-form characters, I find columnar Chinese to be much more comfortable to read than horizontally printed Chinese when it comes to avoiding eye strain, brain strain, and the problem of losing my place in a [...]
Why I’m not afraid of Google
Sure, Google may be beating up Yahoo and Microsoft and taking their lunch money, and it may be plagiarizing part of its Pinyin IME wordbank from Sogou, and it may be growing and spreading into every industry it can find — but I’m pretty sure that its machine translation systems aren’t going to be putting [...]
OMG teh promised one!!!!1!
On my way to the subway this morning, I passed a guy sitting on the steps of the local branch of the Construction Bank with his head in his hands. He was a large - hell, a fat - Chinese gentleman, apparently middle-aged, with a shaved head and a long, flowing gown. He was just [...]
Google Sogou Pinyin is also pretty good
After the whole kerfluffle where it turned out that Google copied all or some of its wordlist from Sogou’s Pinyin method, I decided to download the Sogou IME at work and give it a spin. Results: 听完了这个消息我便下载了搜狗的拼音输入法师施. There’s only one mistake there — the misidentification of shishi as 师施 rather than 试(一)试 — and it [...]
Google Chinese Input
And just as I prepare to go to bed, I see in my inbox, via the Chinese@Kenyon.edu listserv, that Google has just come out with its own Pinyin-based Chinese input method. This looks awesome — if only they could put out a Mac version.
Chinese input on the Macintosh is about where Chinese input on [...]
Standard Chartered needs a better Chinese name
I’m getting ready to go to Hong Kong for a couple of days for visa reasons — not the usual visa run, as I’ll explain later — but first a quick post:
At my soon-to-be-former job today, we did a report on the four foreign banks — Citibank, HSBC, Bank of East Asia, and Standard Chartered [...]
Classics and a beer and the best cabbie ever
I’ve been trying to clear my plate of all of my freelance gigs and other obligations as I prepare to take on a new job next month, so over the past couple of weeks I’ve pulled more than a few all-nighters on things. All-nighters tend to be easy for me; in part because my body’s [...]
Idea!
Trendy restaurants are all the rage in Beijing these days - both fancy-dress joints and “high-concept” restaurants. Among the latter are places like the all-new “dark” restaurant, romantically named “Whale Insides,” where diners pay top dollar to eat their food in pitch blackness (the waiters wear night-vision goggles) and old favorites like the 忆苦思甜 restaurants [...]