I caught two sixth grade girls passing notes in class today (which I think is far better than just chatting and disrupting the class), and they unexpectedly didn’t try to hide the note when I approached them when the class was over.
I was quite surprised at what I saw. I recognized the script, and had long thought it would be perfect for this sort of thing because I haven’t found many people in China who can identify it, let alone read or write it.
Kellen and I are very excited to announce, first to our Sinoglot friends, the beta launch of an entirely new project* that we hope will be a rich source of scholarship, activity, and (geeky) entertainment for years to come.
Phonemica (乡音苑, xiāngyīnyuàn), to quote the tagline, is “a panorama of Chinese, painted by its speakers through their stories.” In less poetic terms, the website is a group-sourced collection of carefully transcribed, high-quality recordings of both Standard Mandarin (putonghua) and local varieties of Chinese. Continue reading
怀着激动的心情，我和柯祎蓝（Kellen Parker） 向《神州万语》（Sinoglot）的朋友们郑重宣布：《乡音苑》测试版正式上线了！我们希望在未来的日子里，乡音苑能成为大家共同学习、交流和娱乐的园地。
乡音苑就是“所有讲中国话的人们用他们的故事绘制的一幅中国话全景图。”讲得直白一点，这个网站就是一个经过多方收集、精心录制整理的，包括普通话和各种方言在内的所有中国话的集合体。 Continue reading
In the earlier post, Shurely Shome Mishtake, I talked about how I came to pronounce the Mandarin sounds, zh, ch, sh too far back in the mouth. This is basically not a good thing. But before moving on to just how those sounds ought to be produced, I’d first like to draw your attention to the Chinese dentals.
Many people will be aware that Chinese students of English initially have considerable difficulty with the two English dental fricatives /θ/ and /ð/, the ‘th’ sounds in ‘thin’ and ‘then’. Indeed, many Chinese students are very aware of this, and use the humorous Chinglish abbreviation, 3Q (sān - Q = thank you). Continue reading
If you’re reading this blog you’ve already heard that Chinese is So Damn Hard, but I sometimes wonder whether we make it more difficult than it need be.
Getting it wrong from the start
One of my clearest memories of those early baby steps in Pinyin was the strange obsession some teachers had with the difference between two groups of easily distinguished sounds:
zhi chi shi
zi ci si
Obviously, these syllables seemed pretty exotic with the so-called vowel represented by the letter ‘i‘ being nothing like any vowel I’d ever heard. But even as I started to make that fricative-cum-vowel, I was regularly reminded that the distinction between the 平舌 (píngshé, flat tongue) and 翘舌 (qiàoshé, cacuminal or retroflex, sometimes called 卷舌, juǎnshé) sounds was terribly important. Continue reading
For the 1% of readers who actually visit the Sinoglot website, as opposed to you lazy Google reader bastards our valued RSS users.
You might recall that after a break-in several months ago, we decided to move SG headquarters to a more hopeful neighborhood*.
Problem was, in our haste, we left some things behind at the old place, such as email subscriptions. No problem, right? We’ll just have folks resubscribe, as soon as they notice something missing in their life. Great solution, except for the minor issue of having no working email subscription system.
We fought valiantly with the WordPress theme about getting the subscription box to show up, to no avail. So for now, it’s out with the old WordPress theme, and in with, well, the most unimaginative theme available. Yes, thememaster Kellen is going to kill me, but there you go.
However, email subscriptions are up and running again. Just put your address in the box on the top right of the home page and enjoy months of low-cost subscription goodness.
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*WebFaction is the name of our hosting service. So far so good, with appropriate incantations against webhosting’s evil spirits.
While Kellen and Steve are still working hard on their fascinating new project, I just wanted to tell Sinoglot readers about my new corpus of Sina Weibo messages.
In the past few months, I’ve been building the Leiden Weibo Corpus (LWC), and I’m now proud to announce it has become publicly available. The LWC is an annotated linguistic 100-million word corpus containing 5.1 million messages from Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter-like microblogging service. It’s freely available online at http://lwc.daanvanesch.nl/.
Because I collected the data for the LWC in January 2012, the LWC contains many linguistic phenomena that may not be found in older corpora, such as suffixation with “-ing”, an aspectual marker borrowed from English (covered on the Log and on Pinyin.info). Furthermore, Sina Weibo messages come with valuable meta data, such as the gender of the user and their location. This means the LWC can show how often words are used in different provinces and cities across China, which may be useful if you’ve always been wondering where that pesky 方 word in your dictionary is really used 
Continue reading
I knew it’d been a while since we wrote much. I didn’t realise it was over a month.
Steve and I have been working our asses off on a new project that should be good to go next month. I think it’s save to say that it’s consumed all of our free time, and lately there’s been less free time than usual anyway.
Irregularity kills blogs because the audience gives up. We’ll make it up to you I promise.
Full disclosure: Sinoglot earns not even 一分钱 (one cent) if you click on the link below and buy the book. However, we do accumulate good vibes from the improvement of Zhonglish around the world.
Title: 500 Common Chinese Idioms (成语五百条)
I first found out about this book from Carl Gene, who gave it a ringing endorsement. When I received it for Christmas last year and started thumbing through, it wasn’t hard to see why: they have done chengyu right for the second language learner! The 500 are selected by frequency from six corpuses* of spoken and written language. For each chengyu, two example sentences are constructed – and very well constructed! And of course there is lots of detailed explanation about history and usage.
I was so smitten I wrote the authors a mash letter and asked for a Sinoglot** interview, which they were kind enough to accede to. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Liwei Jiao and Cornelius Kubler: Continue reading
