Language
Language
Summer in China
Travel
French Learners in Hefei
If you’re a foreigner in China, especially in a relatively tourist-free city like Hefei, you’ll be asked this rather often: “你为什么学中文?” (Where are you learning Chinese?)
This is less the ‘I don’t see why you’d bother’ sort of question than it is the ‘I’m genuinely curious’ type. I’m quite sure of this because I found myself [...]
Language
Deconstructing Basic Mandarin
A presentation deconstructing the basics of standard Mandarin, from the point of view of a beginning learner (first semester Chinese at uni). The presentation looked at interesting features of the grammar, plurals, questions, how dates are handled, classifiers
Language
Technology
Google Lets You Type in Nepali
Using Google’s Indic Transliteration tools, you can type in romanized Nepali and have the software convert it to devanagari characters.
Language
Summer in China
Travel
Mandarin Overview: Two Weeks In
In this post, I look at Mandarin Chinese from the point of view of a beginning learner and compare it to English, French and Nepali.
Pǔtōnghuà, the first lesson (dì yì)
I had set four alarms on my iPod touch so I couldn’t miss our first 9am class with Zhang Yi, but I woke up before any of them at 7am.
Having figured out the shower situation the day before (or so I though), I decided to brave into the common bathroom (the one in our room [...]
