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helpful Chinese language learning tips and resources

New Year in Haerbin-Ice and Snow Festival

Posted on | January 26, 2011 | Comments Off

New Years in Haerbin

-This is a guest post written by Joel and his wife Chris who are currently studying Chinese in Beijing at 1on1 Mandarin. In this post, they shared their experience and some pictures from Ice and Snow Festival in Haerbin.

To celebrate New Years in China, that is Jan. 1st New Years, my wife and I decided to go to Haerbin and see the famous Ice Festival. Truth be known, it was early December when suddenly one evening while on-line she told me what it cost to stay there at a hotel she found in her whole-hearted effort to get both of us out of Beijing for New Years.

She succeeded.

So we took the fast train to Haerbin and while waiting in the train station, this young Thai couple approached us and speaking fair English, they told us they were on vacation and didn’t speak any Chinese. Our encounter with them is a story in itself as I served as there translator to help deal with a group of young men who were staying together in several sleeper units and who had strategically placed there 88 year old grandfather in the Tai couple’s cabin.

Let’s just say it worked out.

We arrived to the expected freezing weather and a light snow, checked into our hotel by 8:30AM and went out exploring for breakfast. After breakfast and a long nap, we went to the famous Zhong Yang Da Jie, shopping street. It was beautiful for the ice sculptures and Russian architecture. It was a fun relaxing afternoon with two stops for coffee and hot chocolate, and the discovery that all Russian stores in Haerbin basically sell the same six things. When you’ve seen one…

We found our hotel staff really helpful. The first morning we asked about how to get to the Bing Deng (ice festival) by bus. They explained well and after a great Russian dinner at the shopping street we found our way to the bus stop, boarded and were on our way.

The Bing Deng (Ice-Lantern show) was expensive but worth the 300RMB admission. The horse carriages inside however, are not worth the 100RMB for the approximate 10 minutes it takes for them to circle around. The ticket seller explained the driver only gets paid by the customers, so every time you stop and get off, these guys beg for money, when you pick up another one to travel a little further you face another driver begging for a tip. O well.

Afterward, we, along with about 20 other Chinese tourists, discovered that the return bus that was suppose to run until late was already finished at 7:30. We all walked together for about 1km to the main bus stop. We had no clue what bus to take back, so I asked the driver where it would drop us. A wonderful Chinese woman and her daughter told us to get on the bus, so we did, and in the end, they had the bus stop at their apartment, hailed a taxi, took us back to our hotel, and then for a walk to St. Sophia’s Church and then back to our room where we exchanged personal info.

Obviously, this was totally unexpected.

This turned out to be a great new relationship. The next day we met the daughter, a wonderful seventeen-year old aspiring nurse with a loving and gracious spirit. We spent the day together at the Haerbin aquarium and met her Mom again for a classic dongbei meal with tons of meat and potatoes. The next day, our last, we spent shopping, visiting the cathedral, buying traditional dongbei snacks to take back to our friends in Beijing, and enjoying the crisp cold air of Haerbin. We met our new friends at the hotel and they took us out to dinner at the exact same restaurant.

Then sadly we had to part and make ready to catch the train back.

It was truly a special experience. Neither one of us would trade it.

My dear wife was right in her ambitions. I love her for that.

Here are some pictures taken from Ice and Snow Festival.

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Category: Culture
Tags: festivals > haerbin > holidays > ice festival

Chinese character etymology-History of every character

Posted on | January 18, 2011 | Comments Off

I came across this site and was quite impressed by what he did. Richard Sears made Chinese Character etymology available online after years of effort. Through his site, you can see history of any Chinese character.  You can see how each character written in different ancient Chinese character styles: simplified Chinese character (most common used), traditional Chinese character, Seal Character (篆体字-zhuàn tǐ zì), Bronze Characters（金文-jīn wén) which used Zhou Dynasty and Oracle Characters (甲骨文-jiǎ ɡǔ wén), it may not make sense to you, but it’s very interesting to see how characters change through Chinese history.

Richard found it was very helpful to learn Chinese characters by getting a step by step evolution of the character from its original form and understand the meaning of the character.  If you are interested in learning Chinese character and knowing more than what textbook offers. It’s really something you want to check out. some characters you can see: 马 (horse), 鱼 (fish), 羊 (sheep), 家 (family), 人 (person), 男 (male), 女 (female) and much more……

Lastly, if you are like Richard and very interested in learning Chinese characters, Skritter is one of great tools for Chinese character writing practice, I heard very positive feedbacks about this tool, you may want to try it out if you are serious about learn Chinese characters.

Chinese character etymology:  http://www.chineseetymology.org .

Learn Chinese Characters

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Category: Language
Tags: Chinese character > language learning

a great Chinese video player

Posted on | January 6, 2011 | Comments Off

As I mentioned in previous post,  today I’d like to share more about the Chinese video player-Splayer, it’s neat, safe and really high performance.  It has many great features, however, the one feature I like most is that it automatically match and download subtitles from shooter.cn, so you don’t need to find the subtitle yourself.  If it sounds like something you may like it, please check it out.

here is the video player site in English: http://splayer.org/index.en.html

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Category: Resources
Tags: tools > video

Where to download Chinese subtitles for movies

Posted on | December 28, 2010 | 2 Comments

Recently, when I was surfing around on some Chinese learning websites, I noticed that some people were looking for a place where they can download  Chinese subtitles for movies. And Since watching movies is one of great ways to learn Chinese,  I’d like to share some resources today, hope it would be something helpful for those who want to learn Chinese by watching movies or for those just want it for entertainment.

The website I’d like to introduce is called 射手网-shooter.cn, it’s personal-owned website and has tons of subtitles from way back, probably any movie you can think of. You can download Chinese subtitles for Chinese or English movies, or English subtitles for Chinese or English movies.  How can you make it work to show up the subtitles then?

Here are the steps:

1. type in the name of the movie in search bar and search;

2. then download the subtitles to your computer;

3. to change the file name of subtitles and make sure all the subtitles in different language have the same file name with the movie file name; (please make sure you don’t change the file format)

4. lastly, if your video player recognize  the subtitle file, you should be able to have subtitle showed up and also you can switch between different subtitle languages as well.

One more tip: when you search for subtitles, mostly like there would be many versions available from different subtitle producers, but the only important thing you need to know is what languages available in each version of subtitle? There is a language section of each subtitle description, so you can find out what languages  are available, the most common languages available are simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese and English. here are two examples:

subtitle languages: English, traditional Chinese, Dutch and French.

Subtitle languages: English, simplified and traditional Chinese.

Hope this post would be helpful to you and let me know in comment if you run into any problem.

In next post, I will share more about the video player developed by shooter.cn called Splayer.

Comments: 2 Comments
Category: Chinese Movies
Tags: movies > subtitles > tools > video

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