Chinese program is expanding

I woke up to an e-mail this morning from the head of our Chinese department explaining how the Chinese program will be changing next year. I think our Chinese-language faculty have really begun to feel the strain of the ever increasing number of students enrolling in Chinese.
They’re creating two tracks from first to fourth-year Chinese: [...]

Improvements to iMandarinPod

After my initial review of iMandarinPod (podcasts intended to help intermediate speakers of Chinese practice their Mandarin), the makers left a comment asking me to send them some suggestions about improving their podcasts. I told them I’d like their lessons to cover more serious topics, or, at least, topics pertinent to life in China (they [...]

Eavesdropping

I have a confession to make: I’m a chronic Chinese language eavesdropper. If I happen to be eating alone in a dining hall for whatever reason, I often pick up a newspaper and hunt around for a group of Chinese students (usually graduate students) speaking Chinese. I sit next to them, but instead of engaging [...]

Speaking Chinese in Houston and on campus

Both my brother and I speak Chinese. Whenever one of us tells people that, especially people of the baby-boomer generation, they always say something like, “I bet you boys carry on secret conversations right in front of your parents!”
We always laugh awkwardly, and mumble some sort of reply. The fact is, we rarely have anything [...]

Getting your children to study Chinese

The ‘Pursuits’ section of today’s Wall Street Journal has an article titled “Just One word: 塑料. (That’s Chinese for ‘Plastics’)” Remember the Graduate?
Today’s China-oriented CEOs are encouraging their children to take Chinese so that they may “get an edge in the global economy increasingly dominated by China.”
The article is painful in the sense that these [...]

Princeton in Beijing

My brother and I are headed to Princeton in Bejing this summer at Beijing Normal Univeristy (my second time) . While chatting with the coordinator and some former PIBers today, I found out that the waiting list for PIB is over 150 students. That’s really ridiculous, and just shows how popular Chinese is becoming. PIB [...]

Notecards and memorizing characters

For me, remembering new characters is the hardest part about learning Chinese. When I’m learning hundreds of characters a month, but only using a fraction of them to write essays, I tend to forget nearly all of the most obscure ones.
How often am I going to use the characters for “stock market price index” or [...]

iMandarinPod—my new favorite free way to study Chinese

I became interested in podcasts out of China after watching Danwei TV’s interview with Antiwave. There’s a lot of interesting podcasts out there, but even more worthless ones, so it’s difficult to find the diamonds in the rough. Luckily, I managed to stumble across some great Chinese language podcasts from iMandarinPod.com.
The podcasts, uploaded by [...]