- Chinesepod.com. Podcasts for learning Chinese.
- Popup Chinese. More podcasts
- Pinyin.info. “Most of what most people think they know about Chinese — especially when it comes to Chinese characters — is wrong.”
- Laowai Chinese. “I’ve been busy not losing my job (teaching) and not ignoring my publisher. What I mean is: I’ve been working on the editing and layout of my book Chinese 24/7. I’m glad to announce there are now over ten people outside my family who have expressed interest in my book.”
- Sinosplice. “There are some seriously rank odors out there on the street. Rotting organic matter, urine, feces, stinky tofu…. But don’t worry, soon you’ll be gleefully playing “name that odor” with your Chinese friends!”
- Imagethief. “Chinese netizens were outraged when Gong Li played a Japanese woman in “Memoirs of Geisha”, alongside fellow crypto-Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi.”
- Beijing Sounds. A linguist blogs. “The final indignity comes when you utter a phrase that incites peals of laughter. Ignoring your request for explication, your [Chinese] spouse goes over to tell the in-laws (did I mention you’re living with them?) and the lesson comes to an ignominious close with the stern father-in-law, who rarely chuckles, doubled up on the couch, tears rolling down his cheeks.”
- Danwei “Today’s New Culture View reports that the People’s Supreme Court approved the death sentence of Yang Jia, the man who murdered six policemen and wounded three others and a security guard on July 1 this year.”
- Scientific and academic fraud in China. One popular post printed a letter from a Yale professor teaching at Beijing University upset about plagiarism among his Chinese students: “When plagiarism is detected in America, it can end the career of the person doing it,” he writes. Such as Harvard professors Laurence Tribe, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Charles Ogletree, and Alan Dershowitz?
Happy Thanksgiving! A Chinese friend texted me this. I replied I was surprised she was aware of it. “The majority of Chinese know this day,” she replied, “and say thanks to their friends and families.”
A couple of years ago, I had business that brought me to Shanghai a few times. I don’t like cities at all, and I don’t like breathing air that I can actually see, but I fell in love with the place. Well, maybe not the place itself, but being there. Unlike Phoenix, in Shanghai, and in China in general, there is so much there, there. In Shanghai, you could feel the energy of Asia being sucked there as if Shanghai was the center of a giant cultural and economic whirlpool. There is nothing like it in the United States. It makes even NYC seem like an interesting, but rather slow-moving and self-involved little town.
I’m not saying I’d move there, but there is nothing like China on the planet now other than China, if there ever was. If you have not been there and experienced it, you cannot know what the world is really like, because China is more of the world than you can imagine if you haven’t been there.
Those are all good websites that you mentioned and I’d like to mention two others. The food review website dianping.com is a marvelous resource, although it’s only in Chinese. But it does list the highest rated restaurants and their most popular dishes, so you really only need a little chinese or machine translation to get alot out of it. Also, alljapaneseallthetime.com is a great site with a different theory of language learning especially for east asian languages.
I’ve heard of some of those sites. I personally use https://www.nciku.com because you can start your own account and build vocabulary lists, look up words by drawing them on a character recognition tool and they use more than one source for translating words from english to chinese and chinese to english to make the meaning and usage of chinese words a lot clearer than just looking up a definition in a standard dictionary.