As historians, we often engage in the liberal use of quotations to sanitize and quarantine distasteful terms or phrases that lend legitimacy to a category or a way of referring to an institution or other body. The use of these quotes, which I confess to frequently using, presumably robs such terms of their nomenclatural power [...]
In addition to my Muninn blog, I occasionally make contributions at the various Frog in a Well blogs, the East Asia Libraries and Archives wiki, some programming weblogs at Fool’s Workshop, and create various scripts and other creations. I have a Friendfeed profile but I don’t really like leaving this sort of thing to third [...]
The Problem: Let us say you have a list of Chinese words or single Chinese characters in a file. There are a lot of them. You want some easy and fast way of getting the pinyin and English definitions of that list of words or single characters and you want this in a format that [...]
Wenlin is the the best piece of software around for students of Chinese. Among other tools, it has a powerful and handy offline dictionary with very flexible and fast search options as well. I know many students of Chinese that use Wenlin to get their definitions and input vocabulary into flashcard software. Most recently I [...]
I’m a huge fan of Korean food and I will sorely miss it. I’m generally not as fond of the many oily and fried foods commonly found throughout China and Taiwan. I’m a big fan, however, of the many vegetarian buffets I have been to in Taipei. For the price of $2-4 you get a [...]
“Let Obama teach you charming English” Above is an advertisement at some kind of English academy near Chinese Culture University in Taipei. Somehow I don’t think this concept would have worked with our sitting president as a model.
I just remembered an anecdote I mentioned in a longer posting here at Muninn as I passed by one of the street side trash cans here in Taipei today where, even when it is far from full, one has to concentrate to get a coffee cup through its small hole. Re-blogging the memory in question [...]
My Fulbright in Korea has ended, as has a year of language study and dissertation research in Seoul. I moved to Taiwan on Monday and will be here in Taipei until the end of the summer. I’m quite fond of this island and look forward to shifting my research to Chinese language sources. I just [...]