PandaPassport.com – China Blog

Some reflections on a Chinese language post from My Chinese Blog Experiment, called Top 10? on Baidu: ?????? You can also read about some of my other Chinese Language Posts here.

This post is actually a sort of a supplement to a post made by a friend of mine, Dan Johnson, on his great website, Chinese: Beyond the Textbook. Dan has probably implemented the pinyin hover tool as well as anyone I’ve seen. Or I should say, he takes useful chinese text or dialogues, and annotates it with pinyin in order to produce interesting texts for Chinese study. One of the problems that many foreigners face when studying Chinese – or at least, it’s a problem I faced – is that the dialogues and sample texts that you study are really goddamned boring.

I mean, every text seems to have a Mary (Mali) and a John (Yuehan), and there’s probably an Ali somewhere in there also. And most likely the craziest situation those three are likely to have is Mary running a fever, and the boys bringing her to the campus clinic for some Chinese over-the-counter goodness. Maybe if Mary put out more, it’d make for better dialogues… ?????

Anyway, to combat this kind of mind-numbing fuckery, Dan has posted tons of somewhat more unconventional texts, one of which was from the movie Gimme Kudos/???????. This is the wittiest thing I’ve ever seen in my short time flirting with the Chinese language:

???????? – What is happiness?
?????? – Happiness?
????????? – Mmm, in your opinion.
????……???……??? – Happiness . . . is . . . if I’m hungry . . .
?????????? – and I see someone holding a meat bun . . .
???????? – then he is happier than me.
??? – I’m cold . . .
?????????? – and I see someone wearing a thick coat . . .
?????? - he’s happier than me.
????? - I need the toilet . . .
???? – but there’s only one . . .
???? – and you’re squatting there . . .
?????? – then you’re happier than me.

(some girls behind him snigger)

?????? – what’s so funny?
?????? – you’ve never been to the toilet?

Watch Video or Listen to mp3

So why write about “What is Happiness?” on my Chinese Blog?

Well, 2 reasons really. The first being, this Chinese blog is, as I’ve stated an experiment. I’m interested in learning about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in China. I’ve targeted one of the most common searches on Baidu, and I’m gonna see if it results in some traffic. I’m not gonna lie to you. I’m relatively new to making websites, and I’m experimenting to see what works. I’ve put all the keywords in the title, I’ve put the keywords in heading and meta tags as well. I’m curious to see if any hits come back, based on search engine results alone. I’m also experimenting with having Chinese characters in the url. And that’s something that may or may not work in my favor. It remains to be seen.

The second reason I wrote this post, is essentially the whole reason why I keep a Chinese Blog to begin – and that’s simply to try to improve my Chinese. And what better way to do so that to choose a topic that I like, and one that can be of some value to readers as well — that being, the eternal search for happiness.

Does the Search for Happiness End at Baidu?

With any luck the search for happiness on baidu will bring a few Chinese people to my post. Now what was my answer to “What is happiness?” Well, while I absolutely love this little speech from gimme kudos, I think it does shed some light on one inherent characteristic of Chinese culture. And that’s the all-too-common instinct to compare yourself with others. Chinese people are often very concerned with rankings. Number 1 in population, number 3 is geographical size, third country on the moon, blah blah blah… David Letterman would have a field day if he brought the top ten list over the wall.

What’s My suggestion for attaining happiness?

Stop comparing yourself to others. Because no matter how much you have, there’s always gonna be someone else with more.

And that goes for everyone. Not just China.

China Business

Chinafrauds.com
“China Frauds – a community for businesses to list and look for resolution to frauds, scams and just plain mistakes made while doing business in China. China Frauds is a clearinghouse for stories and remedies for problems doing business in China.”
Oh, and there’s a blog too.

China Solved Blog
“ChinaSolved is an online resource for international managers in China. Ex pats, returned Chinese, overseas Chinese, local Mainlanders, and all other types of manager are operating in a market that offers unprecedented opportunities for success — and and endless array of challenges and pitfalls that have often resulted in failure, frustrationa and waste.” One neato article is entitled 10 Commandments for Westerners in China.

China on Seeking Alpha
An assortment of China Business news. Internet, business, economics, and all that jazz…

Stolen Intellectual Property on the Chinese Internet

While youtube is getting all kinda of grief about copyright issues, Chinese video sites are posting TV shows and movies like there’s no tomorrow. Are all the big networks doing anything to bring legal action to these Chinese companies as well? Who knows… Here’s are a few of the shows that I found:
Lost season1 season 2 part of season 3, Futurama, The Apprentice, Hustle, Ghost Whisperer, Prison Break 1st season 2nd season, Joey, and The Unit. Courtesy of the good people at tudou.com.
I’ll continue to report shows that I find on the Chinese net, for anyone who’s interested. I’m curious to see how long the Chinese net-immunity lasts.

China Web Bits

Flickr China Photo Pool
With about 1500 members, this Flickr group is focused on photographing all things China. If you’re in China, and you have a camera, you might want to consider joining in on the action.

Chinamemes.com
A digg-like site for China-specific tech/internet news. Design could use some work, but overall, a good source of information for China internet nerds.

IsaacMao.com
One of the leading Chinese bloggers out there. Writing in both Chinese and English, he’s got a lot to say about the internet in China, and abroad. His recent Open Letter to Google made a bit of noise in the blogosphere.

Chinese Language

Pinyin News – A Guide to the Writing of Chinese in Romanization
An interesting blog which appears to be about nothing but pinyin and the Chinese Language. They have a list of tools on their page which looks useful.

Some reflections on a Chinese language post from My Chinese Blog Experiment, called ????????????????? You can also read about some of my other Chinese Language Posts here.

This was one of my first efforts at writing a Chinese post on this blog. It’s great practice for my Chinese, and I have to say I enjoyed it a lot. I chose money management as a topic, because I definitely see a lot of the new upper-middle class spending money in ways that just don’t make no sense…

I don’t mean to focus on money, but it’s tricky to avoid this topic if you’re a Canadian/American in China. When I meet someone on the street, and I tell them I’m Canadian, the most common reply is “Canada, eh? Canada’s really rich, right?”

Now, being from Canada’s poorest province, Newfoundland, I often feel the need to explain that not everywhere in Canada is rich. But instead I usually just play a game I like to call “Count the Audi’s.” Despite the fact that China is still a country in development, man oh man, does it ever have a shit-load of luxury cars! In my province, I might see a couple of Audi’s in a week. Here’s I can hit the same total in about ten seconds.

Now is it necessary to own such a car? Or is it that having such a car projects the image that you want to show others in society?

Compensating for anything?

I guess it happens everywhere in the world, but I think when you get a strata of society new to money, as some in China are, you’re likely to find this phenomenon.

Another point I raised in this post was the fact that second-hand clothing doesn’t really seem to be popular here in China. At least not that I can see — with the possible exception of army surplus stores. By the way, check out Chinese Rock Star, He Yong (left), not being afraid to buy a second-hand Navy shirt. Good for you, buddy!

Most other countries have tiny stores where you can go and get old retro, dirty cheap clothes, for about the same price as regular clothes in China. There’s a scary thought hey? If Chinese textiles can be made for so cheap, maybe the second hand stuff is priced so low it’s not worth selling…

More likely it’s the fact that Chinese people in general are more concerned about the possible image they might portray by wearing someone else’s used clothes? Maybe the knock off Ralph Lauren with the leather man-purse is a better option?

Anyway the underlying truth of the matter, in my opinion, is that appearing to have money in China seems to be almost as good as being rich for real.

What I’ve tried to say in my Chinese post – and I tried to do it in a relatively sensitive way without being negative – was that it doesn’t matter what impression you project for others to see. Expensive cars, clothes, cell phones — they’re just a mask.

The opinion others have of you means nothing in the end. The most important thing is the opinion you have of yourself.

If you’re into wordpress, check out Wordpress Tips and Tricks for more wordpressy goodness like this post.

A few of my friends have asked me how I do the Chinese Character pinyin annotation on my Dalian Information Guide Website. For those of you who don’t know, the tool is used to display the phoenetic pronunciation (i.e. pinyin) when you hold the mouse over a Chinese Character. It also displays a neato HELP question mark, as well as a dotted line underneath the text to tell the readers that there’s a little something else waiting for them.

For example: ??????

Isn’t that cool? I was first made aware of this tool through my friend Dan’s site Chinese: Beyond the Textbook. This is a great site for anyone interested in learning Chinese, and it makes use of this pinyin tool extensively, in order to annotate a wide variety or Chinese language text.

From Dan’s site, I managed to trace this tool back to John Pasden’s Sinosplice.com, one of the oldest and best expat blogs running in China. John outlines here, how to use a little CSS code to display the help question mark and dotted lines under your Chinese characters. All you need to do is assign a class to the particular piece of Chinese text that you’d like annotated.

If you have Chinese text needing annotating, you can do that like this:

??

and then make sure you got the proper CSS code in your style sheet:

span.info { border-bottom:1px dotted #00AAFF; cursor: help; }

Now you can copy and paste this code for every bit of text you’d like to annotate, but John has another blog entry explaining how you can assign that class with the click of a button — if you are a wordpress user. I use this plugin on my Dalian Guide, but I don’t use it on this blog though. It doesn’t allow for you to keep your WYSIWYG editor, and for this blog, I kinda like using that.

While my Dalian City Guide is just a hobby, I sincerely hope that anyone who seriously takes on the task of creating a proper Dalian Information website properly utilizes this tools, or at least something similar.

Anyway, enough about that. Lets move on…

How to Generate Pinyin Tone Markers from Chinese Characters

If you know Chinese well, and you’re not marking a huge amount of text, this might be useful to you, for your reference:

1st tone markers: ? ? ? ? ?
2nd tone markers: á é í ó ú
3rd tone markers: ? ? ? ? ?
4th tone markers: à è ì ò ù

But in general, if you’re marking a lot of text, copying and pasting those marked characters, or typing special symbols is gonna be a pain in the ass. There are numerous sites out there that can convert characters to pinyin, but I have yet to find one that generates really good useable marked pinyin from Chinese Character input.

One of the best sites is Adsotrans, but I find that sometimes there’s a problem with the display of the third tone pinyin. It often will display as a small square, i.e. it’s not recognized. I love the site, and I use it often. But for some reason, I’ve experience these little squares sometimes. Bummer… If anyone has any idea about why this is, I’d love to hear it.

I find that in order to avoid this problem, I can change the adsotrans output to NUMERIC PINYIN, (example: wo3 chang2chang2 chi1 xi1gua1), and then dart on over to Toshuo.com, and punch it into to their pinyin tool. For now, that seems to work well for me.

I hope that you take the time to visit some of the websites I’ve listed above, as they’re all doing good work in helping facilitate Chinese study on the internet. Especially John’s!

I’d be curious to know if anyone has applied this tool to other asian languages, such as Japanese or Korean. Anyone know of any examples?

I want to talk about Firefox’s language add-ons and extensions, but first a word about Firefox in general. You may have noticed the links on my site stating that I recommend Firefox. I thought that I should at least provide some information as to why I recommend it, before my readers go and download it.

Why do I like it? Well, I’ve checked out numerous browser reviews, none of which explicitly state that Firefox is the fastest web browser.

So why do people say Firefox is so fast? Well, it’s because it seems fast. Firefox loads the top part of a webpage faster, and for this reason, it seems faster to the end user. And unless you read webpages from the bottom up, then that means that Firefox is the best choice of browsers for you.

Kinda reminds you of Hamlet doesn’t it?

Gertrude: Why seems it so particular with thee?

Hamlet: Seems, madam! nay it is; I know not ’seems.’

Similarly, Firefox cares jack-sheeat about “seems,” because in this case seems = is.

Who gives a damn if the bottom of the page hasn’t loaded yet?
You’re reading the top of the page, right?

And if you find that Firefox is still not fast enough for ya, here’s a Firefox speed tweak!

Firefox Extensions and Add-ons: Chinese Translating Software

Another reason I like Firefox, is because there is a cool add-odd you can install, called Fox Lingo. I sometimes use it when trying to get the gist of a difficult Chinese article. It doesn’t produce excellent English text, like most translating software, but it’s not bad.

Here’s a screen shot of FoxLingo in action:

For your reference, it supports 45 languages, but I just use it for Chinese, and occasionally Japanese. With neato little add-ons and tweaks, I definitely think Firefox suits my needs. Especially with the language software.

Depending on your specific needs, your choice of browsers might differ. But for anyone who needs language software, Firefox with Foxlingo may be a good choice.

Firefox with Rikaichan add-on, Japanese Character Annotation

Given the current available options for Chinese Character annotation, I was very impressed with this Firefox add-on for Japanese Character annotation. I do plan to study Japanese soon, and this seems like it will be a very useful tool.

Here’s a screenshot of the tool at work on the Japanese engadget site. You just hover your mouse over the characters, and voila!

I wonder if this can be done with Chinese? The closest I’ve seen thusfar is newsinchinese.com. I highly recommend that site as well.

In anycase, there are more than enough reasons to give Firefox a go. Especially if you have any interest in Asian Language study. So if you’re sold on Firefox, please feel free to give it a try.

Having good content on your website these days is just not enough. Making sure your readers come back again for more is key.

And while content is the best way to achieve that, there are a few other little tips and tricks that you can implement to encourage them to return a second time.

I’m implementing all these tools on this blog, and on my Chinese Blog as well. So for each tool, I’ll quickly outline how to do it in not only English, but in Chinese as well:

Javascript Add to Favorites or Bookmark tool

While most people are well aware of how to add a site to their favorites using their browser, it doesn’t hurt to remind them to add your site anyway. You can do so almost anywhere on your page using the following bits of code:

Put this code right before the closing /head tag,

Be sure to replace the url for my site with that of your own. haha…

And then you can place this piece of code in your page, which serves as the text link your readers can use to activate the BOOKMARK javascript:

Bookmark

For Chinese webpages use:

?????

Send to a friend using Microsoft Outlook Express

Everyone has at least one or two friends who forward them jokes or chain letters via email. Despite all the news aggregators, social bookmarking, and all that web 2.0 jazz, it’s good to remember that simple emails have the potential to spread like wildfire if the content is worth spreading. So here’s a piece of code that you can add to your site, so that people can conveniently send your website address to others with the click of a button:


Send to a Friend

Of course, again replace my site’s details with those of your site. And if you wish to use this function on a Chinese language page, replace “Send to a Friend” with “????”.

Note that I’ve combined both of the tools above, in combo with the COMMENT button, to create the following triple-threat link option at the bottom of my posts.

Cool, wha?

Social Bookmarking

Many of you are familiar with Digg.com and Delicious. If your article gets submitted to one of these sites, it could be a wicked jump in traffic for your site. It’s a good way for starter blogs to kickstart their hit count, and of course it’s no different in on the chinese internet. On this blog I’m currently using Thomas Mcmahon’s Social Bookmark Creator Wordpress Plugin which is a really cool way to allows my readers to submit my articles to some famous sites, which instantly provides me with more exposure. It includes all the sites you need like Digg, Delicious, and Reddit – and even a Japanese social bookmark site if you wished to add it.

Now the one thing it doesn’t have – and this is a must have for any China-related blog – is a button to Ryan’s Haohao Report. The Haohao Report is a sort of China-focused Digg site, and if your blog is about China, I encourage you to add Ryan’s kickass little buttons.

Again, I’ve combined these two social bookmarking tool, so that the Haohao Report button is added on to the end of my articles along with the other social bookmarking sites:

As for Chinese social bookmarks, that was a bit trickier. I had no idea how to start looking for cutting edge Chinese web 2.0 sites out there. But I did find a neat site called coolcode.cn, which has a good wordpress plugin that allows for your articles to be submitted to some major Chinese Social bookmark sites. The tool is called Blog It, and I highly recommend it for any Chinese language wordpress blogs.

To be honest, I wasn’t aware that wordpress was being developed very much in China, since most of the blogs here seem to be made from free hosting services like Sina.com or Soho.com. But it’s good to see that there are developers here making new and interesting progress in the world of wordpress. This is something I want to focus on in the future on this site, and I’ll definitely try to spotlight guys like Andot and Xenium who do good work like this.

RSS feeds

Having people subscribe to your website is a kick-ass way to make sure they find their way back. I use Bloglines to read all my favorite sites, and it keep me from wasting time since I only read those sites which have updated content.

Now for this site, I have my feed set up using feedburner, which allows for RSS subscription, and just recently has also rolled out an email service. You can see both on the top of my sidebar.

Now you could use feedburner for a chinese blog, but I’ve opted to go local on my chinese blog. I’ve chosen feedsky, which seems every bit as neato as feedburner. I definitely recommend it.

Share your site’s Blidget

Ok. I know what your sayin’… What the be-jeesis is a blidget? Well, apparently it means blog widget, and it’s a little something that widgetbox.com is producing. You can see my Chinese Blog’s Blidget on the left.

I have to say, this is a really cool idea. I mean, people can always link to your site, but this allows people to put a big-ass widget/blidget thing in their sidebar. This widget is connected to a site’s RSS feed, and it contains all the latest post, which are automatically updated as a list on the widget.

The thing that I like about this (and why I’m listing it) is that it can be use on Myspace blogs. So you have the potential to reach a whole new audience, given the popularity of the whole Myspace network. Never used it myself, but hey… It sounds like it’s catching on with the young kids.

If you have a myspace blog, and you’d like to try it out, feel free to try it.

To summarize

Anyway, that’s my quick overview of a few blog tools that I’m using. If I add any more, I will add update this article as I go along. So be sure to save it to your favorites!

Hey hey,

I’m in the middle of making a slight re-design.

If you’ve come for Dalian City Informaton, no worries, just follow the link to my Dalian Guide page. It’s all still there.

Same goes for the Dalian Forum.

In the meantime, if you’re looking for some China-related reading, why not drop over to the Lost Laowai Blog. I write some stuff there every now and then, along with 4 or 5 other guys.