More good work from carlgene.com: 33 Proverbs that translate well between Mandarin and English.

Learning Mandarin in India, from WSJ. No big surprises in the approach at the featured language school:

The school’s focus is strictly conversational. Rather than learn Chinese characters, Indian students work with the easier-to-look-at transliterations in the Roman alphabet, a system known as “pinyin.” Teachers use both Hindi and English to help students get the tones right, one of the biggest hurdles to learning the language.

From Frog in a Well, another Google Ngram post — and by the dateline apparently Alan beat Sinoglot to the punch. An interesting comment there from Vladimir:

if one tries to look at really early periods (before 1800), the data quality deteriorates because of a large number of comparatively recent books mistakenly assigned early dates.