It’s spring, and less grittily so than usual. Not that the air is clean, of course, but the days are warming and lengthening, and the skies are blue or something like it, and we appear to be in the middle of Beijing’s spring allotment of nice days.
Li and I went out to a late showing [...]
bokane.org
Longer Pieces —
Category Archives: Longer Pieces
99 Days: And All That Mighty Heart
White Guy Speaks Chinese; Film at Eleven
I’ve had my eye on ChinesePod for a while. I don’t necessarily agree 100% with the way they’re going about things, but they’re doing wonderful work in popularizing the study of Mandarin and helping demolish the notion that Chinese is unlearnable, and they’re producing supplementary materials that I would’ve loved to have when I was [...]
searching-thought-earth-skin-virtue.
Via the chinese@kenyon.edu listserv, two articles in which American journalists write lazily about Chinese in ill-considered English. The issue at stake: whether or not Massachussetts should provide ballots on which candidates’ names are rendered phonetically into Chinese characters. (Everybody seems to agree that voting instructions, at least, should be provided in Chinese.)
First, excerpts. The [...]
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 [...]
Egad, a meme!
The old “Five things you don’t know about me” meme is going around again, and I’ve been tagged by the China Blog Mafia’s representative in Taiwan Province. Normally I wouldn’t deign to post something like this, but hey, it’s a meme. I’m powerless to resist. Five things that you probably don’t know about me:
1. I’ve [...]
There and back again (2)
I came home to an empty house: my parents were in Ireland visiting my brother, and wouldn’t get back for another couple of days.
It had been a longer trip than usual: a six-hour layover in Narita, then a three-hour layover in Dallas that stretched out to four when the plane was delayed. By the time [...]
there and back again (1)
I think it was Douglas Adams who said that there’s no language on Earth with the expression “as beautiful as an airport.”
Not all airports are bad, I guess. Belfast Airport used to have a nice little breakfast place. Vancouver Airport seemed OK the one time I was there. Heathrow is awful and soul-crushing, but [...]
Celebrity through smack-talking
I’m sure this will disappoint Prince Roy, whom I’d promised not to write about the whole stupid, boring, pointless Chinabounder thing (people unfamiliar with the whole affair should consider themselves lucky, but can click on that link if they feel like killing some brain cells), but my Chinese newspaper column this week is all about [...]
“鬻”
I remember one of the things that I really enjoyed when I was still actively studying Chinese (as opposed to “learning by osmosis,” or being lazy, which is more or less all I do anymore) was finding new characters that were just flat-out cool. Wenlin helped with this, since its character dictionary has got all [...]
Nan Luogu Xiang (I, II)
I’ve never been able to find a satisfactory translation for “neighborhood” in Chinese. There are some words, like 社区 or 邻里, that get one of the aspects - the “location” aspect, generally - but there’s nothing with the dual etymological heritage of “friendly/neighborly conduct” (the original meaning of the word) and “place where people live [...]