From the Times of London, today:
Heroes do grow old. Age withers them. Our age cannot identify with the broadsword of Henry V or that sore broad Boadicea. So the Chinese authorities are giving their communist hero a facelift. Lei Feng is the model of the Chinese people’s revolution. He was the orphan son of poor […]
Archive for March, 2006
Mandarin’s Influence Expands
Published by March 17th, 2006 in About the Chinese language. 0 Commentsvia the Shanghai Daily
THE worldwide dominance of English is being challenged by Chinese, Spanish and Arabic, a British linguist told Shanghai audience.
David Graddol, a British applied linguist and a renowned writer on global English issues, made his comments earlier this week as he discussed his new self-published book “English Next” at a lecture for English […]
A lexical focus concerns words, and word combinations (or chunks), rather than grammar. Let’s go a little deeper into this and look at two characteristics of ‘chunking’ (in the form of phrases, collocations, etc). After that I want to say something about grammar.
- Most of the expressions we use on a daily basis […]
There’s something big coming over the next few days. It’s a trial run of a major new initiative at CPod. Can’t tell you right now what it is, but it will be a new and interesting learning tool.
Stay tuned.
Beginning in the 1980s, computer-based studies (mainly of English) began to provide us with powerful insights into the workings of our language. Linguists fed millions of English documents into software programs to scan them and see what they might yield about their patterns of behavior. These studies were known as ‘corpora’ studies. From […]
In order to reduce the lag time in approving comments, we are experimenting with a new “captcha” spam prevention system. When commenting in the ChinesePod weblog, you will now be asked to enter a numerical code hidden in a graphic. Using this system will allow your comments to be immediately added to the […]
Beijing Radio interview
Published by March 14th, 2006 in About ChinesePod and ChinesePod Media Coverage. 5 CommentsI’ll be interviewed on Beijing Radio this morning - local time 9:20. They want to talk about podcasting and about ChinesePod. You can listen to the streaming audio here: http://www.bjradio.com.cn/media_player/waiyu_player.htm
Ken
Today we were glad to receive an honored guest. Professor Rick Harbaugh of the U Indiana, at Bloomington, came to visit the ChinesePod factory on Huang Pi Road. Professior Harbaugh may not be well known to you, but his work could be: he is the man behind the zhongwen.com website.
For years, Zhongwen.com […]
大跌眼镜(da4die1yan3jing1)
glasses dropper
This Chinese term vividly describes a situation where you’re so stunned by something that the glasses fall from the bridge of your nose. Of course, your glasses-dropping could also be caused by the fact that your idea or prediction about something is proved to be wrong as wrong could ever be.
放鸽子(fang4ge1zi)
stand up, no-show
This Chinese […]
Here’s an interesting article from Newsweek. It talks about new translation machines that apparently seek to make instant translations of any language available without the need for human intervention. I have some fairly strong views on why such a machine is by definition very limited in what it could do, but for now I’ll reserve […]
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