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URL Change and email updates

Email subscribers: you’re going to get an email from the new beijingsounds.com url and you’ll have to confirm it to stay subscribed. Apologies for the inconvenience.
Everyone else: don’t forget to update your RSS feed. This sinoglot.com/bjs URL will go dark pretty soon.
Oh, and a note on the new url about how, yes, Beijing Sounds is [...]

Posted 18 November 2011 § meta ‡ Comments Off °

Beijing Sounds URL move

The Beijing Sounds Studios are officially set to occupy the beijingsounds.com URL. Please update RSS subscriptions here: http://www.beijingsounds.com/bjs/feed/
Email subscribers should be OK: the technical team is manually porting you (caveat: see note below) over to the new install.
If you encounter other flotsam, email would be much appreciated: bjshengr <at> gmail <dot> com
——–
Before the celebrity gossips [...]

Posted 17 November 2011 § meta ‡ Comments Off °

Bike Detritus

If the Beijing Sounds Studios covered news, it would do stories like: why the hell is there a big pile of once-perfectly-decent-but-now-rusty rental bicycles taking up half the sidewalk leading to the Tsinghua campus, reminding campus-bound pedestrians that they have no wheels to help them cover the mile-long walk to class?
“But then, who’d want to [...]

Posted 09 November 2011 § radio ‡ Comments (10) °

Parlez-vous 中çais?

On Cheeky Monkey Theater’s 《铁哥们》 (Tiě Gēmen(r) = Iron Brothers), and Mandarin with French characteristics

Last week the unstoppable Elyse Ribbons (pic above bottom left), big enchilada at Beijing’s Cheeky Monkey Theater, approached the Beijing Sounds studios about spreading the word on her new play, written, as she puts it, “entirely in my version of Mandarin”.
BJS [...]

Posted 19 October 2011 § zhonglish ‡ Comments (3) °

Yanqing dialect on 23 quid — Part 3, IPA as the Pinyin of English

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Posts in this series:

“Earthy speech“
“A phonetics lesson: tones and erhuayin“
“Scripts: pinyin is just like the IPA” [current]
“Introductory language topics” [coming next week / month / season / singularity]

===================
Welcome back to you three survivors who’ve stuck with the Beijing Sounds Studios through this never-complete but never-abandoned project. Recall that our cabbie/instructor, a certified Yanqinger, is trying [...]

Posted 08 October 2011 § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (7) °

The Devil Went Down to Qinghe

If you’ve been in Beijing long enough to escape the cacophony of the Imperial Palace and the Badaling Great Wall, you’ve found yourself wandering through some regular old city park, serenaded by wisps of patriotic or traditional music. Here’s a sample from two years ago:
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]
The description back then was [...]

Posted 18 September 2011 § music ‡ Comments (4) °

Yanqing dialect on 23 quid — Part 2, Phonetics

In the first installment of the Yanqing series the other day (uh, that is, the other day in February), our cabbie instructor offered a few token words of Yanqing dialect. Today he digs into tones, hypothesizing that they are the first linguistic element to change as move out of Beijing proper. He also makes a [...]

Posted 24 May 2011 § Near-Beijing dialects § beijing-r § érhuàyīn ‡ Comments (5) °

Yanqing dialect on 23 quid

[apologies to email subscribers for sending out an early draft of this -- just the usual technical incompetence]
Oh, Yanqing! Can you see it out there in the mountains and the mist?

The taxi authority says it’s part of Beijing, at least for the purposes of counting its residents as Beijingers and thus allowing them to drive [...]

Posted 25 February 2011 § Near-Beijing dialects § pīnyīn § tones ‡ Comments (11) °