work, life & chinese

Recently I’ve been practising writing Chinese characters. This was always something I planned to leave until after I was able to speak Chinese reasonably well but, on my recent trip to China, I realised just how important it is to learn the characters. I have an appalling memory and so the only way to learn the characters is to practise writing them, a process that I’m finding increasingly insightful. There is so much more to 汉字 than just playing a game of spot the difference.

Now, on to the reason for this post. I scoured the web for a good quality template grid that I could print out in order to practice writing. There are a number of grids available, but none were quite right. All had some form of branding across them (for some reason this bugs me). So, I made my own. Feel free to download and use as appropriate. If it isn’t quite right or you would like an alternative format, let me know in the comments.

Chinese Writing Practice Grid: Download PDF

A relatively small collection of Mandarin-related links this week, but a good one nonetheless.

As usual, if you’ve come across something you think should feature in this weekly list, get in touch and I’ll include it in next weeks updated.

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Sorry folks, but the Best of the Web is a day late this week, for no other reason than I’ve been swamped with other non-Chinese related things. That said, here is this weeks collection of articles that may be of interest to those of us studying Mandarin.

As usual, if you’ve come across something you think should feature in this weekly list, get in touch and I’ll include it in next weeks updated.

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Yesterday I decided to upgrade our Mac Mini to OSX 10.5.7. As far as I was aware there wasn’t anything controversial about the upgrade and it was required as part of a general update to iPhoto. The upgrade went smoothly until after a second reboot of the system, the display resolution was all wrong and text was unreadable.

I am not the only one who has suffered this problem, and despite the fact that there is a work around, the best advice I can offer, is that if you use a TV as your main display then save yourself a lot of trouble and hold off on the update.
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#MandarinMonday was/is a nice idea and I hope it doesn’t die completely. Over on Tea Break, @1980_ examines why the concept has fizzled out in recent weeks. One particular point that I can associate with, and not just in relation to #MandarinMonday, is the difficulty of free conversation for those studying a second language.
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