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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 (21) °

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) °

Scary Hanzi Followup

C’mon, you remember a time when a page of hànzì looked like this:
Doesn’t this seem to parallel the 2nd, 4th and 5th levels of Hanzi Hell? If you buy the analogy of learning Hanzi as “texture discrimination”, the money quote from today’s Language Log post is:
The texture-perception literature is full of contrasts among local features [...]

Posted 25 November 2009 § Hanzi / writing system topics ‡ Comments (3) °

Sound off: Mandarin literacy, Chinese style

On a new blog with a different view of Mandarin literacy acquisition
No matter how fervently you sometimes wish it weren’t the case, Mandarin literacy requires learning hànzì (汉字 = Chinese characters). And literacy is an absolutely essential component of full language acquisition for modern Mandarin. Ergo about two years ago I embarked on a self-paced [...]

Posted 22 November 2009 § Blogroll ‡ Comments (2) °

Sound off: Your own private Hanzismatter for Halloween

On the demons that haunt the Hanzismatter netherworld

If you sample the pleasures of Hanzismatter, it’s hard not to hit the subscribe button. Once subscribed, the rewards are plentiful. The posting rate is leisurely, one every week or two, and the content is always nectar for the bee in your schadenfreude bonnet. [...]

Posted 28 October 2009 § Hanzi / writing system topics ‡ Comments (9) °