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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 § 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 § 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 § 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 § MFL ‡ Comments (15) °

Nope, not firecrackers…

I figured it’d be cheap of Beijing Sounds to record the one sound that’s deafening the city tonight, so here’s one you probably haven’t heard this new year’s eve, unless, maybe, you have grade school children attending a Beijing elementary.Kid culture has always fascinated me — how stuff gets made up and passed on through [...]

Posted 06 February 2008 § kid culture ‡ Comments (4) °

Zhonglish — Revenge of the Non-Native English Speaker

The first in a series [see all Zhonglish posts]. Part 1 — Tones
There’s really nothing fair about growing up as a native English speaker. The world wants to learn your language, no credit to you. But you, personally, get to reap all the benefits. You are invited to go to exotic places like oh, say, [...]

Posted 28 January 2008 § tones § youtube § zhonglish ‡ Comments (20) °

Super female students. How much money? An ex-con

No, it’s not sex industry, just sexy běijīnghuà. Who’s responsible for the cheap headline tricks? Blame sexybeijing.tv…
Why had I never come across SexyBeijing.tv before last week?! The hostess, Anna Sophie Loewenberg aka Su Fei, is both forever-single and singular. Whether it’s her sundresses, pretty darned good běijīnghuà, or disarmingly candid questions and commentary — she [...]

Posted 22 January 2008 § běijīnghuà § consonant elision § linguistics § street § érhuàyīn ‡ Comments (11) °

Obsessives on Beijing Sounds

Thanks, all, for the feedback this week. Between huffing virus-laden recirculated toxic fumes (aka flying) and battling a drooling-in-meetings case of jet lag, I’ve only had time for a few responses up until now.
It’s kind of shocking what happens to email/comment volume when well-trafficked blogs give you a plug. Special thanks to recently unmasked Jeremiah [...]

Posted 19 January 2008 § beijing-r § běijīnghuà § meta § érhuàyīn ‡ Comments (1) °