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The Dao De Jing is a writing that can be interpreted in many ways and each time you read it you may find that you see it in a different way. It’s an interesting concept to think that as soon as we assign a word to represent something, it already distorts true essence of that…
I built a new … Thai language learning app … mainly for myself, but I thought I would share it with the rest of the world. There are two main parts, studying letters and studying words. They’re all inside the same menu, but if you choose to study things like consonants and pronouns, the app…
Well, the Chinese New Year just past, and it is now the year of the snake according to the Chinese Lunar Calendar. And this is a time when Chinese people exchange greetings and well wishes for the new year. Here are some common greetings that you might find useful to share with your Chinese friends:…
One improvement that I haven’t seen mentioned by many is the improvements ChatGPT is making on a wider and wider array of languages in terms of spoken language. Just a month ago, I tested it on Thai and Cantonese languages, and it’s spoken language was terrible. But now it is sounding pretty good. It’s really…
So for a long time, I was taking lessons on Italki. During Covid I took a Chinese lesson every day and I remember at that time I was paying around six dollars or seven dollars per hour so it was very affordable every day. But recently, I have found the prices on Italki to be…
This was one of the slides at an event I attended last night. Everyone spoke Chinese, and the speaker gave a lecture for more than an hour about motivating yourself, and then he went on to talk about making money selling Life Insurance which I was not interested in, but great speaker! Here is the…
It’s been about 3 years since I became the organizer of the Irvine Chinese and English Meetup group. Not only do we have a Meetup.com group with about 1400 members but we also have a WeChat group with 250 members. You can see our picture from this week. It looks like we had about 22…
Mostly I write here simply to document my progress in Chinese. With each book I read, I look up fewer and fewer characters, but it still requires a lot of concentration. 骆驼祥子 (LouTuoXiangZi) is about a rickshaw puller in Beijing back in the 40s when the Japanese had invaded, and life was really hard. He…
Well the name doesn’t translate very well (Amazon books uses this translation as well), but I just finished reading this book. It the second full length novel I have read in Chinese. The Chinese name is 忧确杂货店, and actually it was written by Keigo Higashino, a Japanese mystery writer, and then it was translated into…
So with that exciting homepage where I told you I speak Chinese, you probably were curious to hear me speak Chinese, or else you wouldn’t have clicked the link and arrived here, right? 🙂 You are the curious sort! Ok, let me see what I can do…