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Author Archives syz

Does the Beijing-R mean anything?

I happened to have lunch the other day with some university students, a couple of Guangdongers and a Shanghainese, in one of those Rolex-Louis Vuitton malls that clutter central Beijing, the kind where shopgirls outnumber customers 23 to 1 on gleaming floor after floor of luxury goods, until you get to the food court and [...]

Posted 14 January 2008 § beijing-r § běijīnghuà § linguistics § érhuàyīn ‡ Comments (45) °

Beijing’s Absurdists

Sometimes the holidays bring unplanned entertainment — the best kind. Uncle Fred and Aunt Helen re-gifting to your sister-in-law the Christmas ornament she’d so lovingly handmade them three years ago. Your father and father-in-law exchanging giftcards of the same amount to the same store.But who would have thought that a holiday season show in Beijing [...]

Posted 10 January 2008 § TV § society ‡ Comments (3) °

Blogroll — China-related blogs

UPDATE: Newer, sexier blogroll can be found here
Q: Why have a blogroll?

A1: Cuz “news” is just so much digging a hole to fill it in anyway. A blogroll helps you ignore the events of the world.
“…journalism largely consists in saying ‘Lord Jones Dead’ to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.” — [...]

Posted 06 January 2008 § Blogroll ‡ Comments (4) °

Update: Mandarin edges out Fyem

An earlier post mentioned no tense in Mandarin as a bonus for the second language learner. It compared Romance languages and English. Now you can be happy you’re not learning Fyem, which I just came across here:
“Fyem, spoken in Nigeria, has, as well as a past tense, tenses for precisely yesterday and precisely earlier [...]

Posted 28 December 2007 § linguistics ‡ Comments Off °

A bird flaps its wings near 工人体育场

[Sound files are all at the bottom of the post]

Wallowing is a vile, unworthy habit. You inevitably get sucked into it from time to time. But too often and you become, as GB Shaw put it,
a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you [...]

Posted 25 December 2007 § personal § street ‡ Comments (6) °

Did your holiday party sound like this?

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]
OK, so the BJ office party makes free use of merry-making accouterments. Makes sense; they’re all made here.

This was my first Beijing holiday party, and my expectation was that, like everything else in the world, this cultural phenomenon would be heavily internationalized and sterilized, taking many cues from US [...]

Posted 18 December 2007 § business § society ‡ Comments (2) °

Mandarin is easy; 中文 is a pain in the…

From the recent deluge of email*
Dear SYZ: Is it unfathomably hard to learn Chinese, or is it actually laughably easy?
- Tone-deaf in Dōngzhímén
Dear TD in DZM
I feel your confusion. Daily. The short answer is, Yes. Another common answer is “Go to hell” (if you happen to ask someone who has just misread 农 for 衣 [...]

Posted 16 December 2007 § beijing-r § běijīnghuà § linguistics § érhuàyīn ‡ Comments (7) °

On knowing what to listen for

In your hometown, you pretty much know what everyone’s going to say before they say it. There’s really no new thing under the sun. In Eden Prairie, MN, the grocery bagger’s going to ask me about paper or plastic, the restaurant greeter’s going to apologize for my wait, and so on. It’s the [...]

Posted 12 December 2007 § restaurant § speech acts ‡ Comments (3) °