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.