Chinese “not being a monolith” goes much further than saying it’s made of distinct chunks, of course. A bit of the catalyst for Beijing Sounds was the gradual realization, as I soaked in more Mandarin, that I had happened into the realm of deep Beijing dialect and that there are folks here whose manner of speaking and choice of words distinguishes them from neighbors even 15 miles away. Travel a bit farther and you’ll find some long-time Beijingers are effectively unintelligible even to fellow Mandarin speakers, if the latter happen to be from, say, deep Sichuan.

I set out to document what I heard, and that’s been Beijing Sounds for the last couple of years. But this blog hasn’t been just about my writing. It’s also led to friendships with some great writers and tenacious researchers who also ran blogs narrowly focused on some aspect of language in China. As we talked we realized we all wanted to keep our focused blogs but also were looking for a place to put other research and questions and ideas that were less related.

Sinoglot is the result of those conversations, and it’s actually two things:

1. A group blog about language and China
2. An affiliation for the independent blogs we continue to operate (including, of course, Beijing Sounds — see below for others)

My erudite co-bloggers (from the about page) are these folks:

Duncan maintains the Naxi Script Resource Centre, and works as a translator for various publishers in the UK.

Kellen runs Annals of Wu, xiǎo ér jīng and Nothing Undone. When not doing that, he’s busy being a graduate student.

Paweł is a contributor to Echoes of Manchu and our resident expert on Mongolic and Tungusic languages.

Randy runs Yuwen and writes for Echoes of Manchu. He runs a language school in northeast China, and is the author of Open Me, a textbook that teaches English reading.

Sima writes for Echoes of Manchu and resides in Chinese Manchuria. Little else is known about him.

Enjoy.

PS: Rest assured that Beijing Sounds will continue its usual mind-numbingly slow posting rate — all the better to serve you with the highest quality érhuàyīn (儿化音 = rhoticization / Beijing-R).

Without too much simplification, the path to (yet-to-be-achieved) full language acquisition could be described roughly as follows:

Verdict from 20/20 hindsight? Mistakes were made. Specifically and most outrageously, it no longer seems reasonable to believe that you can recognize your way to literacy, i.e. know the characters when you see them but never have to actually, physically, painstakingly write them out by hand. Well, maybe it works for someone — this is, after all, a sample of one — but since I began to write characters myself, my grasp has gotten firmer (bad pun intended). The once ever present danger of misrecognizing the simplest character has receded somewhat; the muscle memories complement the neural memories in a way that makes it much more difficult to draw a blank. It’s not even really that hard, arguably not as hard as the work that was put into avoiding the task in the first place.