Here are some readings in Hanyu Pinyin:

• Dàshuǐ Guòhòu (”After the Flood”), by Zhāng Lìqīng. The story recalls a girlhood friend in China, not long after the end of the Second World War. This is also available in a version with an English translation given in parallel.
• Hànzì Bù Tèbié Biǎoyì, an essay, also by Zhang Liqing. (PDF — from Sino-Platonic Papers)
• Hūndì Dūndì (”Humpty Dumpty”), by Lewis Carroll, translated into Mandarin by Y.R. Chao and presented in Gwoyeu Romatzyh, Hanyu Pinyin, and English.
• Lā Tuǐ, by Táo Dàzú (Christopher L. Potter), a shaggy dog story
• Gùxiāng (故乡), a short story by Lǔ Xùn

Some song lyrics

• Wǔ Bǎi and China Blue
  • Làngrén qínggē
  • Nuówēi de sēnlín
  • Qiānguà
  • Láibují
• Jay Chou
  • Guāniú
• Faye Wong
  • Bù liú
  • Tiānkōng
  • Zhèngtuō
• Cuī Jiàn
  • Huāfáng gūniang
• And one song whose name and performer I can’t remember

I should probably figure out a way to incorporate this into the recommended readings section. One of the problems with this site is that it has grown much, much larger than I ever expected, which has resulted in some pages not fitting well within the structure I initially established for Pinyin Info. Over the years various additional readings have been added to the site, a few of which are even in Hanyu Pinyin. But since Pinyin Info’s recommended readings section is set up for books rather than essays, songs, etc., this will involve a rethinking of that page.

I very much hope people can help expand the list by providing links to readings elsewhere in Pinyin. But before listing something in the comments, please make sure it is in real Hanyu Pinyin (e.g., with word parsing instead of bro ken syl la bles, with tone marks instead of tone numbers, and with proper capitalization and punctuation). Alas, most texts that are supposedly in Pinyin do not follow those rules.

Just last December there was an interesting milestone on the web. For the first time, we found that Unicode was the most frequent encoding found on web pages, overtaking both ASCII and Western European encodings—and by coincidence, within 10 days of one another. What’s more impressive than simply overtaking them is the speed with which this happened.

Here’s Google’s graph:

I wish Big5, the encoding most used for Web pages in traditional Chinese characters, had been included in the graph. And I suspect that it’s only within the past ten years — perhaps even within the timeframe of the graph — that more Web pages have been encoded in GB (used for so-called simplified Chinese characters) than Big5. (GB is shown on the graph in green.)

Of course, many (most?) Web pages don’t declare any character encoding. This is especially bad when they contain characters beyond the bounds of ASCII, since those characters will often end up rendered as garbage on systems different than that of the creator of the Web page.

So … should I have a post focusing on Unicode without again berating the Unicode Consortium for its continuing unscientific, egregious, and unforgivable use of ideographic? I don’t think so.

source: Moving to Unicode 5.1, Official Google Blog, May 5, 2008

Li Yang Crazy English (as it is properly known, after Li Yang, the company’s founder, chief spokesman, and head cheerleader) uses untraditional and emphatic but not always proven methods, including shouting and vowel-associated gesticulations, to help students overcome their fear of using English and remember the sounds of their vocabulary words.

Chinese nationalism is also a big part of its approach.

From the article:

A long red-carpeted catwalk sliced through the center of the crowd. After a series of preppy warmup teachers, firecrackers rent the air and Li bounded onstage. He carried a cordless microphone, and paced back and forth on the catwalk, shoulder height to the seated crowd staring up at him.

“One-sixth of the world’s population speaks Chinese. Why are we studying English?” he asked. He turned and gestured to a row of foreign teachers seated behind him and said, “Because we pity them for not being able to speak Chinese!” The crowd roared.

Li professes little love for the West. His populist image benefits from the fact that he didn’t learn his skills as a rich student overseas; this makes him a more plausible model for ordinary citizens. In his writings and his speeches, Li often invokes the West as a cautionary tale of a superpower gone awry. “America, England, Japan—they don’t want China to be big and powerful!” a passage on the Crazy English home page declares. “What they want most is for China’s youth to have long hair, wear bizarre clothes, drink soda, listen to Western music, have no fighting spirit, love pleasure and comfort! The more China’s youth degenerates, the happier they are!” Recently, he used a language lesson on his blog to describe American eating habits and highlighted a new vocabulary term: “morbid obesity.”

Li’s real power, though, derives from a genuinely inspiring axiom, one that he embodies: the gap between the English-speaking world and the non-English-speaking world is so profound that any act of hard work or sacrifice is worth the effort. He pleads with students “to love losing face.” In a video for middle- and high-school students, he said, “You have to make a lot of mistakes. You have to be laughed at by a lot of people. But that doesn’t matter, because your future is totally different from other people’s futures.”

Very soon Sino-Platonic Papers will be issuing a long, critical study of Crazy English. Look for the announcement of that here in Pinyin News.

further reading:

• “Crazy English” and Chinese nationalism, Pinyin News, July 2, 2005
• Learning English, Losing Face, and Taking Over: The Method (or Madness) of Li Yang and His Crazy English, by Amber Woodward, Sino-Platonic Papers no. 170, February 2006 (No, this isn’t the SPP study I refer to above. A new one by the same author will appear soon.)