Prince Roy makes a suggestion on a good Chinese-English Dictionary. He describes it very well here. This volume is very useful to the student of Chinese because it is a complete verbatim translation of Xinhua’s 1992 edition of the dictionary, including all appendices. Not only do you learn the meaning of a word, but you […]
Check it out Thanks Dan Wei!
Been sifting through some more Asian blogs again. How come I can’t find anyone blogging their experiences learning Vietnamese? I guess I’ll start sooner or later to blog those experiences. Anyways, I present to you the concept known as the The Asian Glance-Over. I never really thought about this but I realize I do it […]
As a native speaker of English it’s hard to have an impression on the sound of English. It’s so natural to my ears that I just consider it normal, unlike let’s say…. swahili. I would definitely be able to characterize swahili’s sounds as a foreigner. So what do other people say about English? Some people […]
Seems a well-respected hacker (at least in my book) by the name of Peter Deutsch is going to create an interpreter for Python. (Seems to mainly target Visual Works as the backend). If you don’t know how Peter Deutsch, oh.. he had some hand in building this. The fact he’s jumped into the fray for […]
Freedom to Tinker has a post on Online Principles. While it is interesting to see people throw up proposals for what people should do. I’m skeptical. However, there was an excellent comment from Hal regarding the online world. I am quoting it below since it is so good it can stand on its own. I […]
The phrase, “Odd numbers are prime” is quite amusing if we look at it from a viewpoint of polysemy. The following link shows some other ways to look at it from a linguist standpoint. A Linguist’s look at odds are prime
LA Weekly has a great article on IMDB and the story of how it got started. IMDB is a subsidiary of the empire known as Amazon.com but is allowed to run independently. One would like to think that IMDB sprang from nowhere however it took 5 years before they started going commercial. That’s 5 years […]
Language Log talks about the usage of ask as a noun. I didn’t realize that ask could be used as a noun myself. It feels weird to hear it but supposedly Kerry used it in a speech during a campaign in Missouri. Here’s the excerpt: I’m asking you to trust our nation, our history, the […]
After being in Japan for close to a year now. I haven’t stopped my movie watching habits although the choice of movies is a bit different. There are some days I wish I could get the latest movies back in the U.S. but that is what patience is for. One thing I have found rather […]
Continuing along with my linguistic geekery (which will probably not get me very far if I don’t concentrate on getting a decent foundation down). I present to you the… The Hmong Language FAQ Many thanks to David Mortensen for putting up such a FAQ for everyone on the Internet to browse at their own leisure.
On Japanese TV there are a few foreign faces that show up quite often. From what I’ve seen they are pretty much fluent in Japanese (ah a great goal to move towards). One such personality an American by the name of Patrick Harlan. It seems he was raised in Colorado and went to the Harvard […]
Salon has an article on children interpreters. Seems this phenomenon is a very tricky thing to handle properly. An interpreter holds quite a bit of responsibility in relaying information between two parties. A child, while loyal to their family, is still a child. At least that is what the Salon author thinks. So depending on […]
Saw this on Live Journal. Our family is from San Diego, so we’re all familiar with the correct Spanish pronunciation, especially when reading a menu. We were eating at a Mexican restaurant when my 12-year-old son proudly sounded out all the listings on the children’s menu, stumbling over just one. “Mom, what’s hey-yo?” Click here […]
I’m always curious about the Asian-american experience (being one myself). I stumbled across two different websites of Vietnamese-Americans that have viewed a different websites of Vietnamese-Americans that have put their experiences on the web. I found both interesting to read. It’s also great that the web has become an excellent source of information for finding […]