Muninn has made my Pinyin Tone Tool into something more useful– an OS X dashboard widget!
I’m happy to announce the results of a few hours of tinkering: The Pinyin Tone Widget. This OS X dashboard widget will take a series of Chinese pinyin words with tone numbers appended at the end of each syllable and [...]

It’s about time Brendan got some love for his skills! When he showed me around Beijing the summer before last, I was amazed at his Chinese. To me, he sounded completely indistinguishable from a native Beijinger. Admittedly, coming from Taiwan, the Beijing accent is a bit hard for me to judge, but [...]

At PR’s request, here are a couple videos of Australia’s new Prime Minister speaking Chinese. This first one is a CCTV interview (part 1 of 3), in which we get to hear him speak at length in Chinese.

This second video is bit harder to make any sense of. It’s a comedian making fun [...]

I wasn’t kidding when I said I liked the new dictionary at labs.chinesepod.com. After getting used to using it all the time via the search bookmark I made last week, I started wondering why I still had the MDBG searchbar up on my page.
After I quick consultation with David (CPod’s CTO), I had [...]

As you may have noticed, my Chinese blog has become completely wrecked over the last couple of weeks. It happened when I restored an SQL backup (made through phpmyadmin). 道聽塗說 became é “è ½å¡—èªª, and all the other Chinese characters (i.e. the whole blog) became similarly corrupted. I’ve tried deleting the whole [...]

Since regaining my motivation to learn languages a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been trying out some of the methods from Barry Farber’s text, How to Learn any Language.
study stuff Hosted on Zooomr
There are several components in Farber’s system, but the one that has helped me the most is the use of what he calls [...]

For the first time in years, I’m absolutely floored by a new Chinese IME. Google just came out of nowhere, slapped their Google Pinyin up for download and humbled the competition. Like other IMEs, Google Pinyin uses a word’s context to figure out which character to input. It’s just a lot better [...]

David, turned up a surprisingly balanced article from the Taipei Times about learning Chinese in Taiwan. In the past, I’ve found most of that papers pieces about tourism or learning Chinese in Taiwan to be little more than advertisements, this one was long and pretty well thought-out.
Learning Chinese is hot, but you would hardly [...]

Does the ability to write with a pen and paper matter? Apparently not, to quite a few Chinese as a second language learners. “Nobody really writes by hand anymore,” says one.
“Writing by hand is useless; I can just type everything at my computer,” explains another.
I disagree both arguments. While it is possible [...]

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