Last week John B. wrote about his thoughts concerning the simplification of Chinese characters.
Then, in the course of my varied and meaningless reading, I stumbled upon a character that reaffirmed my belief that, for all its faults, simplification was the way to go. The new word I encountered was 抓阄, meaning “to draw lots.” I [...]

A fellow Taiwan blogger, Todd, has just finished his first semester at Shida and written about his experiences. With about 5,000 foreign students, Shida is the biggest Chinese language program in Taiwan. From what Todd has written, the school now uses standardized tests across all the classes, unlike when I was there two [...]

Tonight I went to a Harbin restaurant that Martin found a few weeks ago. The cool thing about this restaurant is that the laoban actually is from Harbin. Unlike the other Chinese restaurants I’ve been to in Taiwan, this one is pretty authentic. There were great lamb kabobs, quite a few potato [...]

Several people have pointed me towards this piece, which is directed at Mark S. of Pinyin.info, and other Taiwan bloggers, including myself. In it, Tonyong Pinyin supporter, Mark Caltonhill (why oh why does he have to be named Mark, too?), tells foreign bloggers to “shut up and fit in”.

Another blog in Taiwan caught my eye today. It was so funny, I had to link to it. Ryan Whalen’s talking about the ridiculously nationalistic/Taiwan-aggrandizing maps in every classroom at Shīdà. Ryan ridicules the side by side placement of the flags of Taiwan and the UN (which doesn’t even recognize Taiwan). [...]

After not seeing any more feature requests or error reports on my tool for converting Chinese numbers, I’ve decided it’s stable enough to present to the Chinese-forums readers. At this point, I can honestly say it offers significantly more functionality than any other online tool for converting Chinese numbers into digits and it does [...]