Contents tagged with Chinese

  • Skritter: Day #913

    15 July 2014

    That's more than two years of which I spent on average 16.03 minutes a day practicing Chinese, with 1629 characters and 2369 words under my belt; so that puts me roughly around Level 5 in HSK terms. According to the HSK, Level 5 is: Designed for learners who can read Chinese newspapers and magazines, watch Chinese films and are capable of writing and delivering a lengthy speech in … more

  • Natalie Imbruglia - Torn (Chinese cover)

    18 February 2013

    Next in the series of Chinese to English and English to Chinese covers, the one-hit wonder of the 90s (One Direction doesn't factor into this song's progeny). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AH5F55BxV0w more

  • Adorable Chinese Etymology - Teeth (齒)

    4 October 2012

    I'm nearing the 1000 character mark on Skritter (maybe I'll hit it before the end of the month? Progress is slow but steady), and here's one that like 龜 has a pretty direct relationship to its pictorial past - 齒. Essentially, it's a mouth with teeth - simple as that! I've just come back from Kaoshiung where I partook in the age old tradition of roadside barbecue in celebration of the Mid-Autumn / … more

  • Here's Two Adorable Chinese Words

    17 August 2012

    Over dinner, my aunt taught me two words which I thought had particularly accurate radical compositions: The word for 'heating up' / 'burn/scald/hot' is: 湯 (tang2, soup) + 火 (huo3, fire) = 燙 (tang4) The word for 'blind / unseeing' is 亡 (wang2, die/perished) + 目 (mu4, eye) = 盲 (mang2) Excellent, excellent! more

  • Skritter: Day 86

    16 April 2012

    At at average of only 6 minutes study per day, in 86 days I've gone from 0 to 500 Chinese words learnt! Super exciting and still can't wait for the iOS app. I thought I was a big hotshot and tried to read from a tv magazine though, and that was maybe 20% successful - I guess it's still a long road to go! [508 words learned | Retention - 94.2%] more

  • Skritter: Day 72

    1 April 2012

    Slow going - I'm looking forward to hitting the 500 word mark! But the more I learn, the more I can guess, really. The word for throat is pretty cute. 喉嚨 In Chinese, if you remember, radicals have two main functions in words, pronounciation or meaning. A rule of thumb (though by no means a fast rule) is that the mouth radical on the left of any word denotes onomatopoeia, or phonetic sounds - … more

  • Skritter: Day 60

    17 March 2012

    Okay, so this isn't really related to Skritter, per se. But this is apparently the most complex character still in contemporary usage to write. And it's for a type of noodle - go figure. [418 words learned | Retention - 92.6%] more

  • Skritter: Day 41

    24 February 2012

    The word for late/slow is awesome: 遲, which is 辶 (walk) + 犀 (rhinocerous), which is then in turn 尸 (Corpse) + 氺 (Water) + 牛 (cow). Does it make any sense? Only a little. Is it hilariously awesome? Yes. [319 characters | 136 words] more

  • Excel 2010 and Unicode CSV files

    15 February 2012

    As part of Wuxie, I'm creating (or rather, compiling from the internet) a number of different resources to include in the application to populate the word database. So I have a whole bunch of nice .xls spreadsheets with all the characters and information in UTF-8; but someone, for some reason, decided that any time you save a spreadsheet to a .csv, it would force the encoding back to ANSI and you' … more

  • Wuxie: Sneak Preview

    10 February 2012

    Working on my next Windows Phone 7 app - here's the very first screenshot! This time round I'm trying a few new things - I did a design document (instead of making up all my classes and pages on the fly, I've actually got a plan, which is handy), and I'm using NotifyPropertyWeaver - which is awesome! Yes - I know the word card above is totally wrong - it's just dummy data for layout purposes, … more

  • Skritter: Day #22

    4 February 2012

    Until very recently (thanks to the very, very large distraction and happy disruption to my life in the form of Final Fantasy XIII-2), I've been Skrittering daily. I'm kind of over super complicated words, for now - while they're initially hard to remember, they eventually become pretty memorable once broken down to the radicals. My new pet confusion is words that are written the same but have two … more

  • Skritter: Day #7

    22 January 2012

    According to Skritter, studying for an average of 33 minutes a day, I've learnt how to write 131 characters so far, with a retention rate of 89.2% - already, I've noticed I can read much, much more of all my Taiwan friends + relatives' Facebook posts. The hardest word I've learnt so far is doctor - (醫 / yi). It's awesome! more

  • Skritter: Day #2

    14 January 2012

    Alright, so I've been using this awesome online app to kickstart my Chinese study - I can speak and converse, but am essentially illiterate; so I figured I should probably at least try to fix this! Thought for the day is that 在 and 再 are too close. Much too close. If you want to check out Skritter, and you know you do because it's amazing, you can check out the demo on their site, and if you … more

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