:: taken at a middle school in Chuzhou, a small town in Anhui province. The first photo below is the wall that surrounds the school’s running track; 人人都说普通话 means “everyone speaks Mandarin.” The second photo is of two classroom doors. The door on the right reads 请说普通话 with pinyin (QING SHUO PUTONGHUA) for standard pronunciation, meaning “please speak Mandarin.” The door on the left reads 请写规范, meaning “please write standard (Chinese) characters.” The third and forth pictures are just close ups of the second.

I am glad to see educators in lower-tier Chinese cities at least making an effort to push Mandarin. I’ve spend some time at middle and high schools in Shanghai where Mandarin still seems to only be an occasional thing. Sigh.  // AjS

:: I received an email today from Woody Fu (a producer at MTV | iggy) introducing me to a couple segments he recently did with a gentleman named Christoph Niemann. I found them to be quite interesting.

Christoph is an illustrator / designer who created a children’s book called The Pet Dragon. The book also functions (unintentionally) as a 101 to learning Chinese language through its fun anthropomorphization of the a characters.

In the first video below, Christoph discusses the trials of making the book (he’s German, and English is his 2nd language – he has zero formal Chinese education).

In the second video, Woody tries stumping Christoph with increasingly difficult Chinese characters to make images out of.  // AjS

:: from this TechCrunch post it appears Stanford’s “iPhone application programming class” (CS 193P) has released a free Chinese language learning / dictionary application called “Qing Wen” (as in “请问”). Qing Wen is described by developer / student Karan Misra as “an extremely focused and streamlined Chinese-English and English-Chinese dictionary designed with the Chinese reader in mind. Lookup is meant to be fast and easy. There is just one search field which accepts anything you throw at it – Chinese characters, Pinyin, and English – and figures out the most relevant results. Since Qingwen is meant for students of Chinese, you can also easily add words to word lists for future reference and discover relationship between characters by seeing which other words they occur in and which other characters have similar sounds. Qingwen uses a modified version of CC-CEDICT as its dictionary.” Click here (direct iTunes link) to download the application from the Apple App Store.  // AjS