When Skritter set out to find bloggers to help cover the Skritter Chinese iOS app release we were absolutely blown away by how much amazing content there is surrounding Chinese language-learning and culture. As a token of our graditude for the magnanimous support we wanted to do something more than just another blogger list. Rather, we invited bloggers to respond to these four simple questions, so that everyone can get to know them (and their blogs) a little bit better.
- In brief, tell us about the goals of your site.
- What’s the one character you could copy over and over again until the end of time?
- Traditional / Simplified or both?
- What is one post that everyone who visits your blog simply must read?
Sinosplice is my way of sharing what I’ve learned about China with the rest of the world. It started out with a lot of general cultural stuff, and has gradually gotten more specific over the years (particularly with regards to language learning), but I try not to keep the focus too tight because I’ll get bored myself! I think it’s better that the topics vary a bit and I lose some readers over it than to back myself into a corner topic-wise and just quit altogether. I’ve got to enjoy it too!
At one point I was also adding Chinese study material to my site, in the form of the Chinese Pronunciation Guide, Tone Pair Drills, Vocabulary Lists, etc., but now I’m doing stuff like that through my company, AllSet Learning, which is continually developing the Chinese Grammar Wiki, for example. I spend enough time on these resources for work that I don’t particular want to do the same thing in my free time for Sinosplice!
2. What’s the one character you could copy over and over again until the end of time?
I don’t have any strong preferences, but I guess I’d have to go with 心, simply because it’s such a simple character, but even after all these years, I feel I still can’t do it justice on paper. “Until the end of time” is probably just about the amount of practice I still need.
3. Traditional/ Simplified or both?
I’d say choose one, learn it pretty well, then eventually learn a bit of the other. I see no compelling reason to learn both from the start. (Personally, I started with Japanese kanji, then later studied traditional Chinese charcters for a semester, and then switched to simplified, which I’ve been using pretty exclusively ever since. I get enough exposure to traditional characters here in mainland China that I’ve never felt the need for focused study beyond that first semester I got, which couldn’t have covered that many characters anyway…)
4. What is one post that everyone who visits your blog simply must read?
Hmmm, it’s hard to make such a strong statement about my own blog. I guess in terms of what’s potentially useful for learners, I’d recommend “Language Power Struggles” for intermediate learners in a Chinese-speaking environment, and “X is the Unknown” for math-oriented beginners anywhere. I could go on and on with similarly qualified recommendations, but I think I’ll stop there. 🙂
My two sites, focus on two different areas of learning Chinese. Lingomi aims to help you improve your Chinese listening skills and tones. 3000 Hanzi is all about learning to read Chinese characters and has a Chinese Dictionary and a pretty sweet online Chinese Reader.
2. What’s the one character you could copy over and over again until the end of time?
I like 我. It’s balanced without being symmetrical. I also love writing it in cursive.
3. Traditional/ Simplified or both?
Living in China, I use simplified, but I can recognize traditional characters, too. I wish the simplification process could have preserved more information from traditional characters.
4. What is one post that everyone who visits your blog simply must read?
On Lingomi, my favorite is Practice these 20 Words for Awesome Tones. It’s a simple exercise that just works. On 3000 Hanzi, I have to recommend the free Chinese Dictionary: its features and content are pretty unique. Another favorite is my page about Chinese Measure words, which I have tried to make the most complete and approachable page on the subject.
Confused Laowai was a way to kickstart my own Chinese languagelearning. I was following quite a few blogs on Chinese language learning, but realized I really wanted to share my own adventures in learning Chinese. Not only to help myself keep track of what’s going on, but to help other learners as well.
2. What’s the one character you could copy over and over again until the end of time?
洋. This is one of the first characters I realized which had a perfectly transparent left-right semantic-phonetic compound structure. The water radical on the left, 氵, transparently implying the meaning of ocean and the phonetic radical 羊, exactly transferring the
pronunciation of the radical, yáng, to the character. Beautiful! Wish all Chinese characters were like this.
3. Traditional/ Simplified or both?
Both. Initially when I started studying Chinese, I thought simplified was the obvious choice, but now as I progress, especially doing research on Chinese orthography, it made me realize how much more rich traditional characters are.
4. What is one post that everyone who visits your blog simply must read?
5 Ways Chinese Radicals are sub-consciously trolling you. Chinese characters and radicals have a much deeper effect on how you process the script than you realize.
Hugh Grigg at East Asia Student
The goals of my site are pretty personal really. The vast majority of it is simply my class notes written up into Web post form. I realised in second year that there are probably quite a few people out there studying the same material, and it might be cool to share my work on it. The site also makes a nice way for me to keep track of what I’m learning and to get feedback on it from the community. And finally, it often pushes me to put a bit more effort into researching and writing up new topics, because I know there’ll be a few more people looking at it!
2. What’s the one character you could copy over and over again until the end of time?
My favourite character is 戀, but only in traditional form (I wrote a little bit more about that here).
3. Traditional/ Simplified or both?
Both. I did this from the first day of learning characters, and used Skritter from the first day as well. It does cause problems, mainly because there’s more potential to get characters muddled up,but in the end it’s really not that difficult to do. We have to read both sets in class anyway, so it’s good to be completely comfortable with both.
4. What is one post that everyone who visits your blog simply must read?
My most popular post is “10 popular misconceptions about Chinese“. That generated a lot of debate and arguments in the comments!
We hope you enjoy reading these blogs as much as we have. We got so much support from the community that we’ve broken the blogger round-up into (at least) two parts. Be sure to keep an eye out for part two next week!