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 [...]

真的 sung by 張韶涵
Hover your mouse over the lyrics for pinyin and English translations.

真的
詞~深白色
我努力的仰著臉孔
試著讓眼淚不往下流 別往下流
不安的感覺到什麼
在我生活中不再相同 很不相同
想要說 卻還沈默 伸出手 無法觸碰
天空突然一片突然 原來你是真的已經離開我
在我不熟悉的世界 過新的生活
閉上眼 讓淚水滑落
此刻你真的已經永遠離開我
在另外一個
沒有我的世界
自由的走
．．．
我努力的仰著臉孔
試著讓眼淚不往下流 別往下流
不安的感覺到什麼
在我生活中不再相同 很不相同
想要說 卻還沈默 伸出手 無法觸碰
天空突然一片突然 原來你是真的已經離開我
在我不熟悉的世界 過新的生活
閉上眼 讓淚水滑落
此刻你真的已經永遠離開我
在另外一個
沒有我的世界
自由的走
天空突然一片突然 原來你是真的已經離開我
在我不熟悉的世界 過新的生活
閉上眼 讓淚水滑落
此刻你真的已經永遠離開我
在另外一個
沒有我的世界
自由的走

One thing I haven’t written about recently is what I’ve been doing job-wise. There’s quite a bit to blog about, but I’ve been so busy actually working that I haven’t had the chance. I’ve also wanted to sort out my ideas mentally before putting them to print.

Recently, I’ve seen a huge increase in the number of complimentary comments from Chinese people in my comment moderation queue. About 95% of these comments start with

写的不错，

and then go on to talk about something else. At first glance I felt pretty good, until I realized that they are ALL spam! They invariably [...]

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 [...]

Have you ever wanted to know how to order food at Subway in Chinese? If so, then read on!

When John recently designed a “please speak Chinese” T-shirt, I was immediately tempted to buy one. I always love it when locals talk to me in Chinese, instead of trying to use English first.

请讲普通话。

Putting this on a shirt worn by a foreigner is cool on multiple levels. Not only does it demonstrate that [...]

紅豆餠 Hosted on Zooomr

In the past all of the email I’ve gotten from Chinese people regarding my blog has been extremely positive, but last night, I received the first critical one.
I am not understand why you like writing the chinese character speech. Is very not colloquial, stiff, foreigner translate to the chinese from the english not seeming to [...]

In a recent Chinese-English and Arabic-English machine translation competition, Google’s entrant demolished the competition, taking first place in 35 out of 36 different categories. Unlike typical teams, not a single person on the Google team speaks either Chinese or Arabic. Their technology is based completely on computational analysis texts written by native speakers. [...]