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Only those you trust can bleed you dry — repost for RSS readers

Since some folks noticed the RSS feed never updated for the last real post, here it is in all its weary glory.

Posted 27 March 2010 § meta ‡ Comments Off °

Comments temporarily closed — No Longer

Sorry. Technical team, in its usual incompetence, thinks it has a way to solve technical issues. Should not involve too much down time, they say.
Update: live again! Holler if it gives you issues (bjshengr <at> gmail <dot> com)

Posted 26 March 2010 § meta ‡ Comments Off °

Only those you trust can bleed you dry

Listen to the whole show with this file:
Audio: [Audio clip: view full post to listen]
Or take it section by section and grab popcorn at the intermissions.
Part 1: Introductions, Perfunctories
Or, how a Zhonglish speaker works to break the Beijing record in nèige-to-content ratio.
Audio: [Audio clip: view full post to listen]

1
SYZ
Nín hǎo! Nín zhīdào nèige zuìhòu [...]

Posted 25 March 2010 § taxi ‡ Comments (9) °

Sinoglot: more about China and language

In language, as in every other aspect of human activity, China sometimes gets presented as monolithic when it is anything but. Just consider the term “Chinese” which includes, by some definitions, multiple language families.
Chinese “not being a monolith” goes much further than saying it’s made of distinct chunks, of course. A bit of the catalyst [...]

Posted 11 February 2010 § Blogroll § meta ‡ Comments (0) °

The elusive IF

It turns out to have been a trap. In the course of reminiscing about the cheap and delicious radish peel deals Beijing street vendors used to offer, YU started her soliloquy like this:

Guòqù Běijīng a, jiù jiùshi nèige, jiùshi, wǒ, wǒ shì mài luóbo de,
过去北京啊，就就是那个，就是，我，我是卖萝卜的
In the past in Beijing, uh, well, I, if I was [...]

Posted 11 January 2010 § Chao Yuen Ren 赵元任 Zhào Yuánrèn § Grammar of spoken Mandarin ‡ Comments (22) °

Hang the wall on the gun

Scene: A towering glass and granite building located in Shangdi, suburban Beijing, the Silicon Valley of the capital city, not far from the comparatively puny corporate campuses of Google, Baidu, IBM, etc. The building top’s massive, fengshui-correct sculpture is only slightly obfuscated by the awkward bulk of the Beijing Sounds Studios name rendered in two [...]

Posted 06 January 2010 § beijing-r § běijīnghuà § consonant elision § taxi § unexpected érhuàyīn ‡ Comments (19) °

Cheap AND delicious

The YU cafeteria is one of the best audio links to Old Beijing. Over the clink of dishes and the munching of radish tucked inside your bǐng (饼 = pan bread) you can listen idly to the deals that the city used to offer.
[Transcript linked to audio available on this page -- click on the [...]

Posted 23 December 2009 § Beijinger Checklist / BJSLBC™ § Yuèmǔ U. ‡ Comments (12) °

Waiguo in a shoe

On knowing rub-a-dub-dub, Beijing style
Maintaining a solid barrier between dreamland and reality seems like the best way to avoid doing a Carl Jung. As Sara Corbett described his mental state in 1913:
Jung, who was then 38, got lost in the soup of his own psyche. He was haunted by troubling visions and heard inner voices. [...]

Posted 10 December 2009 § EXMARaLDA transcriptions § kid culture ‡ Comments (25) °