(For those of you who can’t wait for the answer, it’s wulong tea.)
Today, I stumbled across a page called Tea From Taiwan, via Angelica’s blog. At first glance it seemed to be suffering from a serious case of over optimizing for search engines. Search engines from 1997, that is. On the home [...]

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”.

Tone Marks on Roadsigns Part I- Mark’s opening argument.
Tone Marks on Roadsigns Part II- Prince Roy’s opening argument.
Tone Marks on Roadsigns Part III- Mark’s rebuttal.
Tone Marks on Roadsigns Part IV- Prince Roy’s rebuttal.

What should the road signs have on them?

Mark was right, characters and pinyin with tones (42%)

Prince Roy was right, characters and pinyin without [...]

Dueling Lăowài is a new feature on Toshuo.com. This is my rebuttal of Prince Roy’s arguments against adding tone marks to roadsigns. If you missed the opening arguments of our friendly debate, be sure to check them out!

Dueling Lăowài is a new feature on Toshuo.com. Each “duel” will consist of four pieces by two writers: each writer will write one opening argument and one rebuttal.

Sometimes I can’t even fathom the world of self-delusion that CSL (Chinese as a Second Language) planners in Taiwan live in. Yesterday, I saw an article in the TaibeiTaipei Times titled, Teachers seek edge over China.
Great, I thought. A sense of competition will be great for us students. Maybe the schools here [...]

Everybody knows how confused Taiwan is when it comes to pinyin, that’s no news. Likewise, it’s not surprising that few of the foreigners who came here without prior study have a firm grasp on any method of romanization, let alone a standard one. But one thing I’ve been noticing more and more is [...]