Sinosplice » language

I found this fun shirt on Taobao: I love characterplay but I found this shirt, while clever, a little whiny. So I checked the seller for other designs like this, but this was basically the only o...

https://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2024/04/08/zheeeeeen-leeeeei

My original hometown may be Tampa, Florida, but my family relocated from there to Atlanta, Georgia in 2020. So this past July, I was finally able to take my whole China-based family to visit this...

https://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2023/08/17/chinese-like-graffiti-in-atlanta

I think rate of speech is one of those things that gets some attention at certain points in one’s studies (especially the beginning), but easily gets forgotten under mountains of vocabulary, ts...

https://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2023/04/05/rate-of-speech-affects-learning

I got back from a family trip to Lijiang (Yunnan) last week. It was quite interesting being there again when my first and only trip to Lijiang happened a full 20 years ago! (Yeah, yeah… I’m o...

https://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2023/02/03/using-chatgpt-to-learn-chinese

I am amused at the bold use of the name “Wooo-Laaa-Laaa” at this restaurant in a Shanghai mall: The Chinese name is 吴辣辣 (Wú Là Là), and while 吴 may be the surname of the owner (or ...

https://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2022/08/18/wooo-laaa-laaa

Last week I made my very first (and very overdue) trip to Sanya (三亚). Sanya is a city on the south side of the southernmost island off of mainland China. It’s basically the farthest south y...

https://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2022/08/04/a-repurposed-chinese-character-in-sanya

I’ve been seeing this app icon in ads around Shanghai recently: Can you read it? Specifically, I want to focus on the character on the left. Whether you can read it is all about how you parse t...

https://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2022/07/21/does-this-font-make-the-character-unreadable

Two little personal stories about creativity, adaptation, and prejudice. Eason When I first heard this English name I didn’t like it much, and just chalked it up to “Chinese creativity” wit...

https://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2022/07/13/eason-and-lason

After writing that blog post about the crazy Chinese character “biang“ a while back, I had to share this tweet by Alexander Zapryagaev @JPRidgeway about biang: You think you saw biang? Get re...

https://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2022/06/29/bianging-around-with-biang

I was at Shanghai’s Global Harbor mall the other day (it’s open, but there’s hardly any business, and eat-in dining is still prohibited at restaurants), and I saw this text on the window: A...

https://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2022/06/24/bad-translation-puzzle-divided