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Category Archives: EXMARaLDA transcriptions

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 † syz § kid culture ‡ Comments (25) °

Is the pirate’s Beijing Paradise in danger?

For those of you new to Talk Like a Pirate Day, it was first declared a Beijing Sounds staff holiday in 2008 when, reminded by Pinyin.info, a post was created to celebrate the R-ful Mandarin of the most rhotic city in Asia [feel free to quote that last phrase to your friends]. This year the [...]

Posted 18 September 2009 † syz § Beijinger Checklist / BJSLBC™ § Talk Like a Pirate Day § beijing-r § érhuàyīn ‡ Comments (6) °

Biang Biang Mian / Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Noodles (Tourism Series)

Tourism part 1: On embracing complexity [all in series]

About Tourism, the series
Engraved into a sizable hunk of Labrador granite, on a pedestal in the executive anteroom at the Beijing Sounds Studios:
Tourist, n. One who favors packaged over live, who inches squeamishly past the teeming fauna of his own backyard — with its outrageous comedies, its [...]

Posted 02 September 2009 † syz § Tourism Series § speech acts ‡ Comments (4) °

Sand Diapers

On the dispensability of disposable paper products

Beijing Sounds management comes from a strong anti-paper tradition, having grown up with cloth napkins (non-matching, mostly) rolled into individually labeled napkin rings. There was also the spasm of late 70s anti-paper-product activism that accompanied the arrival of First American Uncle Beijing Sounds, when Grandmother Beijing Sounds threw in [...]

Posted 02 July 2009 † syz § Beijinger Checklist / BJSLBC™ § Yuèmǔ U. ‡ Comments (11) °

Sound off: EXMARaLDA

On the beauty of EXMARaLDA for “computer assisted transcription and annotation of spoken language”
[Warning: path ahead slippery with geek guano]
Let’s say you were thinking about putting your piddly little Mandarin transcripts and sound files into some more accessible format. Gosh, wouldn’t it be cool if you could milk the data a bit, since you [...]

Posted 09 June 2009 † syz § ‡ Comments (8) °

Silkworm husbandry

On conversation topic universals

Spend too long with Beijing cabbies and you might think they were all…

Posted 08 June 2009 † syz § běijīnghuà § taxi ‡ Comments (10) °