Confused LaoWai
I’m a keen Chinese learner and this blog showcases my trials and tribulations in trying to come to grips with this awesome language.
Site Owner: Confused Laowai
Most Recent Posts from Confused LaoWai
Mandarin Madness Review – A Chinese Vocabulary Learning App
The Chinese language learning technology space in my opinion is still under utilized. There are so much more avenues to explore in terms of aiding informal and formal learners of Chinese. There has been quite a lot of advances recently with excellent products (3000Hanzi and ChineseLevel) as well as great tools (HanziJS and Leiden Weibo Corpus) among others in the web space. The mobile space is very much an exploratory scene at the moment. There [...]Posted on 16 May 2012 | 8:18 pm
BreakFAST! – An entertaining Taiwanese shortcom
Herman (from ChineseLevel) linked this on his Facebook a week or so ago. BreakFAST! It’s a short sitcom style comedy (hence the name shortcom) surrounding the lives of people in Taiwan. It’s short, funny, entertaining and has a nice upbeat atmosphere to it. Also it makes me hungry every time I watch an episode. There are currently 4 episodes online. I quite like the second episode. Check out the Shakespeare soliloquy in Chinese and the fail [...]Posted on 15 May 2012 | 9:10 am
A visit from Beijing JiaoTong University and how 姜 trolled me
Last week, a few professors from Beijing JiaoTong University visited the lab I’m doing research at. I was nervous the whole week as I knew I’d have to talk in Chinese to them. I hardly get speaking practice in South Africa, which I know is my worst ability in Chinese at the moment! I looked up a lot technical terms yesterday, which I didn’t even end up using when I talked. Yes, I’m nervous like [...]Posted on 6 May 2012 | 3:40 pm
Introducing Leiden Weibo Corpus
My inner linguistic nerd is going crazy right now. This post released today from a member of Sinoglot, Daan, reveals that he has created a large Weibo corpus. For those not familiar with term, a corpus is a large body/collectinos of text, often used in linguistic research to study trends, frequency, discoure analysis and other interesting data. The LWC is an annotated linguistic 100-million word corpus containing 5.1 million messages from Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter-like [...]Posted on 26 April 2012 | 9:26 am
Giving ChinesePod the deserved listen
Some kinds of media just don’t gel with certain language learners. Back in 2010, when I was still studying Chinese in undergrad classes, I gave ChinesePod a try. It just wasn’t for me. It was slow, not interesting and I just didn’t learn anything. But it wasn’t ChinesePod’s fault, it was mine. I took a terrible approach. Here’s why. I wanted to listen to everything, from the start. Looking back now, what a dumbass mistake. [...]Posted on 25 April 2012 | 12:02 pm
