Hangeul and Hanzi

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 […]

Fun with Chinese slang

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 (niúbÄ«, lit. cow vagina but used here as “awesome”) is a word […]

Chinese Pera-Kun for Firefox 3

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 […]