"Study hard and make daily progress."

In addition to my graduate coursework, I’m taking intensive Mandarin classes. The classes are excellent, and there’s been a noticeable improvement in my Chinese.

My class focuses on spoken Chinese, so I’ve been working on my own learning characters. Learning characters is nasty and not always very much fun. It makes me miss the Korean language’s Hangeul alphabet, which is extremely easy to learn…a couple of hours of study allow you to sound out any Korean word you may see.

The Korean language uses quite a few English borrow words. When these borrow words are written in Hangeul, it is easy for the language learner to make an ass of himself with them. Just after learning to read Hangeul I saw the following sign for the Seoul revival of the American music 42nd Street:

브로드웨이 42nd Street

I stood on the street for several minutes, sounding it out:

“B..uh…luuh..oh…duh…uuuhh…wehhh…eeee. Buh-luhoh-duh-wehe. Buh-lohd-uh-way. Bloadway. Broadway. Goddamnit, Broadway.”

Several months ago I posted a video to YouTube of people throwing their seat cushions at a Changchun YaTai (长春亚泰) soccer match:

(No, that isn’t me shouting “Camera!”)

Someone left the comment

沙发，长春牛逼！！

which translated literally means

Sofa, Changchun [is] cow vagina!

牛逼 (niúbī, lit. cow vagina but used here as “awesome”) is a word much like chingón in Spanish…it’s not polite and is used to describe something as having traits that are really good or really bad.
沙发 (shāfā or “sofa”) is netspeak for the first person to reply to a post–like English speakers respond with “FIRST!”. Why? According to chinaSMACK’s cool glossary of slang,

the topic starter or original poster [is] the “owner of the house.” The first person entering the “house” and replying gets the “sofa.” So “sofa” means the first replier/reply.

Saying “SOFA!” in a thread is the same as an English speaker in a parking lot yelling “SHOTGUN!” to claim the front seat of the car–she was there first, so she gets the best seat.

Justin, the developer of Chinese Pera-Kun for Firefox, has released versions of the plug-in that work in Firefox 3. If you’re running the current beta of FF3, check it out.
There are also some new features in the pipeline for perakun that sound pretty cool.
Justin’s put up a donation button, so if you’ve found perakun helpful think about sending a few bucks his way to support independent (free) software!

The Guardian has a pretty cool interview with 102 year old(!) Zhou Youguang (周有光), the creator of Pinyin. The interview is short but worthwhile.