I recently had a ton of dental work done so to heal I’ve been sitting in bed catching up on tv shows.

I was watching an episode of Fringe, the JJ Abrams show that early on was likened to the X-Files. Anyway, in a particular episode in the third season, a character is kidnapped and held in a secret lab in Chinatown. She escapes, runs through the neighbourhood looking for help, and whatever. As I was watching, I was thinking, “wow, they didn’t fuck up so much with the Chinese on this one”. I just assumed it was because they filmed it in a real Chinatown and were therefore not responsible for any accuracies or inaccuracies.

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I’m poaching this from Danwei. But I feel like if I failed to post about it here I’d be doing our readers a disservice. From Danwei:

Water calligraphy is a poetic activity that you can observe in many Chinese parks: Artists use a large brush to write Chinese characters using water instead of ink. Minutes after the characters are written, they disappear.

Media Artist Nicholas Hanna built a tricycle that writes Chinese characters on the ground as it moves.

His tricycle is part of an exhibition for Beijing Design Week: You can see it at the Northern Electric Relay Factory in Dashilanr, south of Qianmen gate. The exhibition opens 6pm on Saturday September 24, 2011, and runs until October 3.

Read the original post to see a larger photo as well as a video explanation by the creator.

Apologies to our readers, but comments seem to be down as of today. We’re aware of the problem and looking in to it. If you have made comments and they are not showing up, please email us here or here.

The problem has been fixed. The theme should be back to normal now. Apologies for any inconveniences for the past week.

Warning: what follows is a shameless use of this blogging forum for personal reasons.

<update>

I’m up and typing 汉字! Thanks much to the kind readers who wrote with suggestions, including one who apologized about being slow to follow up with a phone number because, well, she’d just had a baby and had been in the hospital!

I’m not sure why it worked, but in the end what did the trick was installing the multiling keyboard per Alastair’s comment below — not because I’m using that keyboard per se, but because during the setup process the system started recognizing that Google Pinyin (the one I originally wanted to use) was installed.

Anyway, thanks!

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I’ve got an HTC Mytouch slide 4g I just brought back from the US that refuses to use the Google Pinyin IME (输入法) I’ve installed. I tried Sogou’s IME and can’t get it to work either.

Need I say that life in Beijing is not harmonious with a Chineseless cell phone? After numerous Factory Resets, an attempt at rooting, and plumbing the depths of my unapproved-for-10-year-old-daughter lexicon, I’m looking for a miracle.

If there’s a kind-hearted Android whiz out there who would be willing to sort through the fetid details with me, I’d be forever indebted. Just email me (syz AT sinoglot DOT com).

Tangentially, why does this always happen the same week you discover your second mouse is going haywire (the first one’s fresh in the trashcan that hasn’t even been taken out yet) and your laptop with the only functioning soundcard in the house gives up the ghost?

I’ve been redoing the various logos for the site, adding in a number of scripts and languages that had otherwise been missed the first time around. More on that later. In doing this I’ve been spending a fair amount of time looking at Sogdian and Arabo-Persian derived scripts being used for languages within modern China’s borders.

In the 5th century the Sogdian alphabet was used to write Old Uyghur, but this eventually evolved into the Old Uyghur alphabet some centuries later. There are some inscriptions written in the Orkhon-Yeniséy alphabet, a script resembling runes, which was eventually spread to Southern Europe.

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中秋節快樂! Happy Mid-Autumn Fesitval (中秋節). Happy Peh Goeh Che (八月節). Happy Chuseok (추석). Happy Tsukimi (月見)?

1. In the spirit of the holiday, there’s an LA Times article about mooncakes 月饼 being the fruitcake of China. Frankly we’re big fans of the red bean mooncakes.
2. The Independent has an article about language learning in Pakistan, among other places. A quote:
   

   There’s been some noise this week in the southern Pakistani province of Sindh following the announcement that from 2013, learning standard Chinese will become compulsory for all students

3. Time has an article on why some languages sound so fast, touching once again on the topic of syllable loads.
   

   Mandarin, which topped the density list at .94 [with Vietnamese arbitrarily set as 1], was the spoken slowpoke at 5.18 syllables per second.

4. A proposed Linguistics site is up on StackExchange, a question and answer site that’s an offshoot of StackOverflow, a programming Q&A site. There’s also a proposal for a Chinese Language & Usage site. Both of these need more votes in order to be made official. Have a look.
5. Finally, if you don’t like the Starbucks mooncake, maybe you’d like a green halal mooncake.

The image on the right is of a crosswalk speaker. I’m not actually sure what these are called. Unlike in America where you press a button at the crosswalk to make yourself feel like the light is changing faster, in Asia these buttons play sounds to let people who are visually impaired to know when it’s safe to cross. This particular one, located by Taipei Main Stations 台北車站, reads as follows:

⠝⠧⠂⠕⠴⠈⠑⠨⠐⠒⠕⠌⠐⠅⠌⠈⠊⠵⠄
南北向－布穀聲
⠙⠯⠄⠑⠡⠄⠑⠨⠐⠒⠝⠪⠈⠅⠪⠐⠊⠵⠄
東西向－鳥叫聲
⠑⠽⠂⠛⠥⠄⠁⠻⠄⠖⠐⠑⠡⠄⠊⠶⠐⠊⠵⠄
行人專用－蟋蟀聲

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I don’t remember how I came across this a little while back. It’s not the newest thing out there anyway. At any rate, it’s something I thought I’d share. Rather than describe it myself, here’s the intro from the site itself:

I began studying the Dao De Jing in college in 1980. I lived in Taiwan and China for 3 years in the mid 1980s and immersed myself in the subject. In 1988 I received an MA from Yale in Asian Studies. I’m not sure if this background makes me more or less qualified to say anything profound about the Dao De Jing. The Dao De Jing Warns against trying to define it. Ironically, it is one of the most translated and discussed texts in the history of literature.

For this blog I have selected lines from Laozi’s text. Each illustration includes my chinese calligraphy version of the text incorporated into the painting. I translate each line and discuss it in an informal way. There are literally dozens of worthwhile english translations of the Dao De Jing. Google it if you want a taste.

Feel free to comment in any way you are inspired to.

Pretty killer for a visual interpretation of a book I’ve read a thousand times in my grad studies. If you dig the style, the artist (Dante Cohen) has another site that’s worth checking out.

A quick post during another of my few breaks these days. I just dug this up from my photos as I clean my hard drive out. No one ever teaches you how to deal with numbers when you’re getting ready to head to China for the first time. Sure, 一二三四 is all well and good, and maybe even banking numerals are covered in your undergrad Mandarin class, but 1G.P?

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I worked at a place in a kind of shopping mall back in 2008. With very VERY few western foreigners in town, there was no shortage of funny English signs, and this often meant signs in public restrooms pleading for one behavioural change or another. But actually, it’s the signs in Chinese that I really appreciate. Two of the first characters I ever learned were from such a sign: 匆匆冲冲, flush quickly.

Anyway, I stopped by a private Chinese academy the other day to see a friend who studies there and saw this above one of the urinals:

走进一点儿
zǒujìn yīdiǎn’er

不然我就告诉大家，
bùrán wǒ jiù gàosu dàjiā,

我看到了你的一切。
wǒ kàndàole nǐ de yīqiè

“step forward a bit, or I’ll tell everyone I saw your junk”

I was trying to remember if I’ve seen any particularly poetic bathroom signs, such as you find about grass on public parks (the sleeping grass has delicate feelings, or whatever), but I couldn’t think of any.

How about you guys? Got any good Chinese language signs you’ve seen in the local public restroom?