Today in China

A friend of mine asked me the interesting question: Do Chinese Provinces have specific flags?

Well, in a country as huge as China that only has one time zone instead of at least 4 or 5… You will not be that surprised to know that Chinese Provinces have no specific flags. So, what could we use to differentiate them?

A first approach to differentiate the different territories of China would be the Chinese Characters used to differentiate the License Plates.

Then, another approach, more colorful, would be to choose one local beer for each territory… For this, you may check the website Klausehm.de providing a huge list of Chinese Beers.

ChinoChano (Spanish language blog) already proposes the following Beer Flags:

Yanjing Beer, the symbol for Beijing, would be even better than the olympic logo.

For northern Heilongjiang province, a fresh and “Hapi” Harbin Beer.

Tsingtao Beer could be Shandong emblem.

Dali Beer is perfect for Yunnan, backpackers mecca.

West Lake Beer suits for Zhejiang.

Even Tibet could have the “Lhasa Beer” for a flag.

Are Quizlets the next evolution of Flashcards? On Quizlet.com you may start to learn vocabularies in a wide range of different languages; amongst them: Chinese.

While the Quizlets provided for for Chinese are still very limited, you might want to take a look and maybe help the community by providing vocabulary lists from your own Chinese lessons.

Here is the mission statement of Andrew Sutherland, the guy behind Quizlet.com:

My mission for Quizlet is to make learning vocabulary not a chore. I know a lot of teachers assign vocabulary to students, but few students actually “absorb” words into their vocabularies after they take their test. Which kind of defeats the purpose, right? So Quizlet is my response - it aims to make learning fun, thus make learning effective. At the very least, it can help students do better on quizzes and tests even if they don’t fully “absorb” their words.

And here is the explanation about how it works:

1. You enter a vocabulary list of any words or data you want. (ex. SAT words, history dates, French-Spanish translations, etc.)
2. Quizlet gives you a specialized learning mode, flashcards, randomly-generated tests, and collaboration tools for classmates to help you study those words.
3. You ace your test.

Couldn’t be easier!

I know it’s a little bit early bu after celebrating 2007, we will soon have to celebrate the Chinese New Year! If you want to impress your Chinese colleagues, I recommend using the following Pigs in your emails!

If you need some information about simpler Asian Emoticons, please check my previous post on Asian Smileys!

Thanks Zhao Na for sending this to me!

Happy New Year of the Pig! 猪年快乐！

The Olympic Games Pictograms are the basic graphical representation of the Olympic sports: athletics, rowing, badminton, baseball, basketball, boxing, canoe / kayak flatwater, canoe / kayak slalom, cycling, equestrian, fencing, football, artistic gymnastics, rhythmic gymnastics, trampoline, weightlifting, handball, hockey, judo, wrestling, swimming, synchronized swimming, diving, water polo, modern pentathlon, softball, taekwondo, tennis, table tennis, shooting, archery, triathlon, sailing, volleyball and beach volleyball.

They will be used for the directional instruction system, advertising and communications, landscape and environmental arrangement, TV broadcasting and souvenir designs. They are thus one of the most important marketing tools of the Olympic Games.

The search for good looking pictograms started in March 2005 when the BOCOG (The Beijing Organizing Comittee of the Olympic Games) invited four professional design institutes and organizations to compete for the design of the pictograms. The design based on “seal characters” by China Central Academy of Fine Arts and that on “string” by Academy of Arts and Design, Tsinghua University were then shortlisted and the two institute worked together on a common design. The final design has been sent to the 28 International Sports Federations (IFs) for approval, and all of the IFs had endorsed the Pictograms by April 2006. And last June, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) granted the set of the Pictograms.

Source
Beijing Olympic Games Official Website

Continue to read more if you want to have more details and learn some Olympic Games related Chinese Mandarin!

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CCTV1 is urgently looking for two foreigners for the months of July and August.

• One handsome guy ( do I qualify? )over 20 years-old, from North America or Europe, speaking Chinese.
• One pretty girl ( ermmmm… this time I definitely do not match the requirements… ) over 20 years-old, from North America or Europe, speaking Chinese.

The expected salary is 7000+ RMB per month, 20 days of work a month. It seems to me like a good and funny opportunity to practice your Chinese and earn some extra money!

You may call them directly if you are interested or have any questions: (63992259 or 13381205789)

Do you want to learn Chinese while reading one of the most famous book on Earth? Chinese-Bible.com provide the Bible in English, French, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional and Pinyin. You may decide which of these languages you want to display and they appear at the same time on the screen. Here is an example:

Ainsi, il y eut un soir, et il y eut un matin: ce fut le premier jour.
And the evening and the morning were the first day.
有晚上，有早晨，这是头一日。
You3/4 wan3shang , you3/4 zao3chen , zhe4 shi4 tou2 yi1 ri4.

Source
Chinese-Bible.com

Here is a Chinese Palindrom (回字对, hui zi dui) a Colleague shared with me this morning…

上海自来水来自海上

Pretty isn’t it? It means that the running water in Shanghai comes from the see.

上海 (Shanghai) 自来水 (running water) 来自 (coming from) 海 (the sea) 上

And here is another one from the Poet Li Yu.

Li Yu ( 李禺 )
回 文 詩

枯 眼 望 遙 山 隔 水 ，
往 來 曾 見 幾 心 知 。
壺 空 怕 酌 一 杯 酒 ，
筆 下 難 成 和 韻 詩 。
迷 路 阻 人 離 別 久 ，
訊 音 無 雁 寄 回 遲 。
孤 燈 夜 守 長 寥 寂 ，
夫 憶 妻 兮 父 憶 兒 。

水 隔 山 遙 望 眼 枯 ，
知 心 幾 見 曾 來 往 。
酒 杯 一 酌 怕 空 壺 ，
诗 韵 和 成 难 下 筆 。
久 别 離 人 阻 路 迷 ，
遲 回 寄 雁 無 音 訊 。
寂 寥 長 守 夜 燈 孤 ，
兒 憶 父 兮 妻 憶 夫 。

And ermmmm… no! I will not give you an automatic translation of the poem from Google Language Tools…

Hahaha! Anyway, I tried and in fact it looks nice!

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Well, in fact… the guys from ChinesePod made this video in Shanghai but it also apply to the cabs in Beijing. This is a nice introduction to useful sentences when you’re in a taxi. Zou guai! You guai!!! Kuai dian ba!

And this is the 4th one, I missed the first 3 episodes. Check the links to get them!
Enjoy!

Links
Blog entry on ChinesePod
The PDF with the vocabulary and characters used in this video
Episode 3: Revenge of the Reservation
Episode 2: The Restaurant
Episode 1: Inaugural video

Today, I would like to share with you a nice website about Hanyu Pinyin (????, Hànyǔ Pīnyīn). As you probably know, Pinyin is the official romanization of the Chinese Characters in Mainland China. Pin means spell(ing) and Yin means the sound. It quite appropriately describes the romanization as spelling the sounds or writing in phonetic symbols.
Pinyin.info provides a lot of resources about this romanization: the rules, some readings, useful tools for your website, etc. It also introduces some other systems (both romanization and non romanization such as the BoPoMoFo used essentially in Taiwan)

I really liked the following tools:
- The Tone Converter. If you want to add “Han4yu3 Pin1yin1” on your website, it will convert it for you as “Hànyǔ Pīnyīn” and provide you some CSS to display it nicely with Unicode Font.
- The Chinese to Unicode Converter. If you want to add “汉语拼音” on your website, it will convert it for you as “汉语拼音“.

And, if the Pinyin is not displayed correctly on you website, refer to their explanation on How to put Pinyin with tone marks on Web pages.

Wikitravel is… a wiki about travel tips.
Wikitravel covers most of the countries. However, for this short review, I will concentrate on China. Following the usual wiki concept, Wikitravel will improve in content and in quality as the community grows. So far, they already provide some information about major cities, transports, currency, language, etc. They explain how and where to eat, drink, buy things, sleep. They even explain to you how to get a language teacher’s position in China!

For those who are planning a trip to China and who don’t speak Chinese, they might be interested in Wikitravel’s Chinese PhraseBook, covering topics as diverse as basics, problems, numbers, time, colors, transportation, lodging, money, eating, bars, shopping, driving, etc. For example, you’ll know how to say: ???????!

Links
Wikitravel
Wikitravel - China page