The first few Net Effects videos are starting to trickle into the Net Effects group on Flickr: Translated from the Romanian, "The internet allows me to stay in touch with my friends from 10 years ago, to realize that we are the same losers and that I still love them just as much." UX profe...

Strangest thing. China Daily, Shanghai Daily and Xinhua (to name the first ones I’ve checked) seem to have minimized mention of the Mandarin Oriental’s destruction. Go to their home pages now and see. China Daily only has a reference to the story on its list of recent articles if you loo...

Chinese New Year just a week away from now.  Most chinese families are now busy cleaning and decorating the house.  Some moms are busy baking delicious cookies.  Well, do try to involve our children in doing all these activities so that they are exposed to the tradision and culture. Let make an e...

How do you get a foothold when trying to learn a non indo-european language? I've been listening to French and Spanish language learning podcasts off and on and I've kind of gradually been learning enough to pick up the gist of conversations or to read articles in Spanish and French (my real goal in...

One of my goals for this year is to learn spoken Mandarin Chinese. Given that I live and work in China it only makes sense that I learn the language which will ultimately help improve both hopefully. Also given that Mandarin is one of the harder languages to learn (hard as in virtually impossible if...

Filed under: Airlines, Galley Gossip Dear Heather, I know this is really random and weird, but I'm a Jr in high school and we were given an assignment to write a research paper over a job that we would like to do once we graduate and I have become very interested in becoming a flight attendant. Anyw...

My wife and I recently spent a weekend in Penghu, a beautiful, stark archipelago between the main island of Taiwan and China. Since Penghu is under KMT rule, I expected to find street signs in Magong, the capital, in some old system (e.g., MPS2 or perhaps bastardized Wade-Giles) or perhaps even Hany...

The New York Public Library’s Digital Gallery offers a glimpse inside a book published in the 1770s: The Chinese traveller. Containing a geographical, commercial, and political history of China.. The book provides a chart of 325 syllables identified as being “A LIST of all the WORDS that...

The Ministry of Education’s National Languages Committee on Wednesday issued very general guidelines for how Taiwan will go about implementing Hanyu Pinyin. Unfortunately, they’re not very clear. But long years of experience have taught me that the most pessimistic interpretation (from t...

The news on Taiwan’s romanization situation has been coming in fast over the past few days. Unfortunately I’ve been too busy to report much on this. But rest assured that I am trying to get some things done behind the scenes … for all the good that will do given Taiwan’s piss...