Many of you have heard about Linese.com, a website created by the Chinese to help foreigners understand Chinese culture and learn Chinese. One of the best features of the site is its extensive collection of CCTV videos, all available for download (MP3, MP4, and WMV formats). The main archive of video material is divided into […]
Archive for the 'Language' Category
Happy Chinese Video
Published by November 24th, 2006 in Pedagogy, Learning Chinese and Language. 43 CommentsDaniel Tammet is a young Englishman who was born with congenital childhood epilepsy. This disease threatened his life as a child, but left him with some staggering intellectual abilities, a syndrome known as autistic savant. Amongst other talents he is a polyglot (9 languages, plus 3 he created himself) who […]
This blog is one year old this week. I looked back at what we were talking about at that time. Here is one of the earliest posts - About communiction. It concerns Steven Pinker (amongst others). Funny that, one year later - to the day - we’re back to Pinker’s ideas.
And guess who answered […]
How many languages do you speak?
Published by October 7th, 2006 in Learning Chinese and Language. 76 CommentsWe touched on the question of different languages this week. I’d be interested to know more about your attitudes/experience in this regard. Is a ChinesePod learner more likely to have studied other languages in the past? If so, did you achieve any degree of fluency (written or spoken) in previous efforts?
A certain number of […]
The Lingual Bee is an interesting blog from a Chinese guy who has lived in the states and has mastered the English language. Here he describes how idiomatic English can be rather tricky. Many of his amusing insights apply to the Mandarin learner, but in reverse. Here’s a classic, Karl Marx, me, and learning English. […]
Via Language Log, a New Yorker cartoon with a linguistic twist:
The magazine asked people to come up with a good caption. The winner: “The hours here are obscene”.
Ken Carroll
“I crave comprehensible input, lexis, and a top down, cognitive approach.”
The chap in the picture is doing very well at learning human languages, and trashing one of Noam Chomsky’s most cherished theories while he’s at it. Oh, and did you know that dogs don’t just smell a bowl of soup - “Dogs have the ability […]
Talking to Oneself Productively
Published by May 24th, 2006 in Uncategorized, Learning Chinese and Language. 17 CommentsAs an English teacher in Hangzhou, China, one of the questions Chinese college students most often asked me was, “how can I improve my spoken English?” As a member of the ChinesePod team and student of applied linguistics, learners frequently ask me, “how can I improve my spoken Chinese?” Unfortunately, the are no easy answers […]
If you are interested in linguistics (or even if you’re not) here is a fascinating article from the Spiegel. It concerns the language and culture of the Pirahã , a South American tribe. The language has to be one of the strangest on the planet:
The language is incredibly spare. The Pirahã use only three pronouns. […]
The first “Word on the Street” podcast
Published by April 6th, 2006 in About ChinesePod, Language, News and Word on the Street. 12 CommentsChinesePod is happy to announce the release of our first “Word on the Street” podcast. The WOS podcast was published today in the ChinesePod RSS feed along with our daily lesson. Word on the Street is a regular column in City Weekend Magazine - “Beijing and Shanghai’s essential English guide to today’s China”. As […]
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