Classical Chinese and programming
I like writing about Classical Chinese, and I’m keen on formal languages too. So, every time I see the two concepts show up together, I know I have to write ...
Chinese
Some 1000-year-old doodles… and some thoughts on Classical Chinese teaching in the 21st century (Part 2)
In Part 1 of this post I wrote about an interesting Weibo hashtag I had seen, which was about some animal doodles on a 9th-century Chinese manuscript. Then I...
Some 1000-year-old doodles… and some thoughts on Classical Chinese teaching in the 21st century (Part 1)
Yesterday I saw a trending hashtag on Weibo (the Chinese Twitter): #一千年前小朋友写的字, which translates as “characters written by kids from 1000 years ago.” I click...
What did Chinese textbooks look like in the 19th century? (Part 6)
In Part 5 I finished reviewing the pronunciation and character parts of von der Gabelentz’s textbook. In this final part I’ll continue to review its syntax p...
What did Chinese textbooks look like in the 19th century? (Part 5)
In Part 4 I finished my review of Wade’s textbook and gave it the highest rating among all the 19th-century textbooks I’ve reviewed so far. In this part I’ll...
What did Chinese textbooks look like in the 19th century? (Part 4)
In Part 3 I finished reviewing Morrison’s textbook and also began reviewing Wade’s textbook. In this part I’ll continue to comment on the character and the s...
What did Chinese textbooks look like in the 19th century? (Part 3)
This is the third part of this long post. In this part I’ll present my remaining review for Morrison’s book and then turn to Wade’s seminal work.
What did Chinese textbooks look like in the 19th century? (Part 2)
In this part I continue to share my personal impressions of 19th-century Chinese language textbooks. I’ll finish off my review of Marshman’s book and then st...
What did Chinese textbooks look like in the 19th century? (Part 1)
Recently I was having this conversation with a (hyper)polyglot friend—who had already inspired a post on this blog by the way—where we exchanged ideas on var...
Carving civilization into stone…and the “Chinese Rosetta Stone” (Part 3)
In my previous post Carving civilization into stone…and the “Chinese Rosetta Stone” (Part 2) I introduced an inscribed stone tablet in Chinese history, calle...
Carving civilization into stone…and the “Chinese Rosetta Stone” (Part 2)
In my previous post Carving civilization into stone…and the “Chinese Rosetta Stone” (Part 1) I wrote about my recent discovery of a roadside stone carved wit...
Carving civilization into stone…and the “Chinese Rosetta Stone” (Part 1)
Civilizations in the universe come and go just like leaves on a tree grow and fall; neither ultimately leaves behind any trace. In Book III of the sci-fi nov...
“Can I copy your ppt to my mp3?” On letter words in contemporary Chinese (Part 2)
In my previous post I wrote about the letter word phenomenon prevalent in contemporary Chinese. I discussed their classification and semantics with some comm...
“Can I copy your ppt to my mp3?” On letter words in contemporary Chinese (Part 1)
The sentence in the title of this post may sound awkward to an English speaker’s ears—How can one copy a filename extension to another?—but it turns out to b...
Language in a Qing-Dynasty polyglot’s eyes: A review of GU Hongming’s “The Chinese language”
Lately I’ve been reading a book entitled The Spirit of the Chinese People (Chinese title: 春秋大義). It’s a collection of essays written by the famous Chinese sc...
“Country of visual language” and “ghost script”: Unusual stories about language in Chinese historical documents and folklore
Recently I randomly came across a passage about language in a historical Chinese document. It’s in a short essay written by the famous writer and poet SU Shi...