Welcome fellow language students! I created this website to record my experiences in learning Mandarin Chinese. My hope is that this information may be of use to other people, and that others might be able to share their learning experiences with me as well.
As you can probably tell from the dates on my posts, it's been a while since I updated this website. Over the late spring and summer, I have been busy planning and preparing for my wedding. My wife and I have now returned from our week and a half in Hawaii – returned to our regular life. That life must include a return to my studies.
My like or dislike of a place is rooted in two things: the physical beauty of that place and the food. For all it's visual faults (and here I'm thinking specifically of the horrible Verizon logo wrecking a perfectly good skyline) New York delivers on the dinner table like almost no other place in the world. I have to say almost; one step above is the island nation of Taiwan.
What are the most common Chinese characters? A Taiwanese linguistic researcher answers the question. Chih-Hao Tsai performed a study that assessed the frequency and stroke counts of Chinese characters that appeared in Usenet newsgroups during 1993 and 1994. The result is a collection of 4000 of the most frequenty used characters organized into sets of 200 by the "Learn Chinese Online" website.
For many simple searches for words, characters, and meanings, my Dian Hua dictionary is a perfect solution. However, there are times when the CE-DICT on which the app is based is not good enough. That's why I purchased the iCED Pro iPhone app which is based on the more complete (and more expensive) ABC dictionary.
When I visited Taiwan, one of the national holidays I learned about was 2-28 (February 28th). For people living in Taiwan, this date is could be compared to December 7th 1941 for Americans. It is certainly a day of infamy. For Taiwan, 2-28 has also been a day that, for some time, was unremembered. This day (and the reasons it was for a time forgotten) is the subject of the recent movie "Formosa Betrayed" from writer Will Tiao and director Adam Kane.