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Monthly Archives February 2008

Don’t take away our pinyin

Thanks to the Guardian, this video of the one of the founding fathers of pinyin, Zhōu Yǒuguāng 周有光, is meandering the blogosphere. Hat tip to pinyin.info for the reference.
Beijing Sounds doesn’t often pick up newsy memes cuz I figure you hear about them elsewhere. And maybe I shouldn’t in this case either, since if you [...]

Posted 22 February 2008 † syz § education § pīnyīn ‡ Comments (2) °

Wàiguórén xué zhōngguóhuà

Thanks to S.H.E. we Zhonglish-speakers now apparently have our own hit song, complete with rap lite and formulaic key change in the last refrain. Hat tip to Granite Studio for the reference to the song as it was performed for the new year.
Key phrase:
全世界都在学中国话
quán shìjiè dōu zài xué zhōngguóhuà
The whole world is learning Chinese

Posted 17 February 2008 † syz § MFL § běijīnghuà § youtube § zhonglish ‡ Comments (1) °

Woods, Pears and Jingle Bells

[Note from syz] Following up on exotic claims for tongue-twisting, deep-in-the-nasal-passages Beijing consonants, I’m pleased to present Beijing Sounds’ very first guest post. Or maybe we should call it an outpost, as our intrepid author, frequent BJS commenter, Sima, currently resides in the frigid northeast. In any case, although he doesn’t feature Beijing-R, [...]

Posted 17 February 2008 † syz § guest posts § linguistics § érhuàyīn ‡ Comments (8) °

Production is resuming

With crossed fingers, prayers to the gods, some rushed meditation, and the sacrifice of a small animal, Beijing Sounds hereby fires up the servers and commences production in a new facility (dreamhost) with an entirely new production staff (the chief editor had to go, and the scabs seemed about as good as the striking copy [...]

Posted 16 February 2008 † syz § meta ‡ Comments (0) °

If you can read this…

…then the technical integration team has somehow — in defiance of past experience and common knowledge about their ineffable incompetence — managed to connect you to the new hosting service with Wordpress. Welcome, thanks for your patience, and we’ll try to put all this technical crap behind us asap.

Posted 15 February 2008 † syz § meta ‡ Comments (0) °

Beijing Sounds is moving

Warning and plea for patience: I’m changing my hosting.
I guess it’s not really moving — we’ll still be here at bjshengr.com. But porting all the content over has left my mouse-hand contorted in carpal tunnel pain. Not entirely unlike a real-life house moving…
What I’m really attempting to do is use Wordpress in the background instead [...]

Posted 15 February 2008 † syz § meta ‡ Comments (0) °

#!%&@ technology

Apologies for the even-worse-than-usual color scheme and layout here at Beijing Sounds. Attempts to make the style easier-to-read have been thwarted. Although the head of operations has resigned under duress and there is mutiny brewing in the lower ranks, the blame falls most heavily on the long-ago upper management decision to use GoDaddy’s “Quick Blogcast” [...]

Posted 10 February 2008 † syz § meta ‡ Comments (2) °

Where NOT to look for beginning Mandarin lessons

All of us sad sack Mandarin learners get desperate now and again for some instruction, especially when we’ve just begun the language acquisition journey. With that in mind, I hope that some of you Stage 2 or better hànyǔ speakers can reflect on what you’ve gone through to provide some advice to the Stage 1ers.
To [...]

Posted 10 February 2008 † syz § MFL ‡ Comments (15) °