Although many notable stories have been in the news lately, I haven’t had time yet to comment on any of them. So for now I’d like to draw everyone’s attention to two recent posts elsewhere:
- Victor Mair, whose piece on the crisis/opportunity myth is one of the most popular readings on Pinyin Info, has a guest post at Language Log titled On Learning Mandarin in America. It’s full of good sense on the most effective way for foreigners to study Mandarin as a foreign language.
- And Languagehat has a wonderful discussion titled The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Balderdash. One representative line: “Chinese readers are not ‘gazing into both pictorial and conceptual space,’ they’re reading, just like anybody else.” Amen! Recommended reading in conjunction with this: Fenollosa, Pound and the Chinese Character, an essay from 1958 by George A. Kennedy.
Keywords » Characters said
[...] I was going to write a short piece linking to two great Chinese-character related blog posts, one by Victor Mair (guest posting on Language Log) and the other by LanguageHat, but Pinyin News beat me to it. So go read Mark’s intro instead (he includes some useful additional links), or just hop over to the original articles and enjoy. {Chinese, æ¼¢å—, 語言} [...]