Labelling the House

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Something I should have done a long time ago is to label everything in our flat in Chinese. Alicia was out quite a bit over the weekend and so I took the opportunity to run around the flat labelling everything in Chinese. She came back last night and just laughed: “You forgot 镜子 [jìngzi], mirror.”

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Archive Tweets plugin for WordPress

The design of the #MandarinMonday website is centred around having an archive of all tweets tagged with the hashtag #MandarinMonday. Rather than write a stand-alone script to search Twitter and archive these tweets, I decided to package it all up as a self contained WordPress plugin. I am now sharing this plugin (my first ever public plugin for WordPress) with anyone who wishes to use it.

The plugin has two functions:

  • it maintains an archive of all tweets which contain a configurable search term, and
  • it displays a list of these tweets on a page in the blog.

You can find more details and a download link in the full post. Continue reading

The future of #MandarinMonday

Over the last week I ran a poll over on TwtPoll asking what people thought I should do with the mandarinmonday.com domain. The poll closed yesterday and now that the results are in, it is time to get coding and see what I can make of #MandarinMonday.
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The Barrier of Free Flowing Conversation

#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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#MandarinMonday

This week saw the birth of #MandarinMonday on Twitter. There are no rules to #MandarinMonday as the idea behind it was to encourage people learning Chinese to use their Mandarin. Just turn up, tweet in Mandarin and use the #MandarinMonday hashtag.

The birth of #MandarinMonday

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