Tag Archives: music

Mandarin Learner: Best of the Web for January 26th through February 7th

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My collection of Mandarin Chinese links for January 26th through February 7th:

  • QQ Music: A Sweet Music Streaming Service with a Touch of Piracy – For all your Chinese music needs, QQ Music seems to be a great way to stream Chinese (and non-Chinese) music on the web. It even has a reasonable mobile client.
  • ZhongwenMovies – ZhongwenMovies is an educational Chinese movie & language learning Web site. The videos shared are intended solely to help users learn Mandarin Chinese. We provide links to quality online programming, free study and cultural materials to advance your
    Chinese and just make Chinese learning fun.
  • 10 Chinese Dishes you should try (or at least know the name of) – Part 1 – Upon stepping into our first authentic Chinese eatery we were confronted by pages of unreadable characters (thank heavens for the gaudy photos!). Where were the roads lined with crispy spring rolls? How could we find the ultimate roast duck experience? Would we ever be able to make sense of the menus?
  • PeraPera Finally Released for Google Chrome – This is an absolute must-have Chinese Hack for browsing the Chinese web.
  • Pleco: Chinese Character Recognition App Finally Comes to Android [REVIEW] – The Android iteration of Pleco dictionary is now available in the Android Market. It comes with OCR abilities so that it can scan and ‘read’ Chinese characters using your smartphone’s camera, handwriting support, voice recognition, and numerous dictionary options.
Photo by Antonis Shen

The Sound of China

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Whilst in China I used Shazam to tag songs I heard in shops in both Beijing and Yangshuo. Unfortunately Shazam’s success rate was under 50%, but the songs it did manage to tag successfully are listed below with links to relevant videos on YouTube. I thought it could be an interesting little project: describe the places you visit by the music you hear. Who knows, this could be the start of a “guess the city by the playlist” game.

  • Don’t Let The Stars Get In Your Eyes by Perry Como (YouTube)
  • Пчелы 2 by Иван Купала (YouTube)
  • 有一种爱叫做放手 by 阿木 (YouTube)
  • 星期六约会 by 邝美云 (YouTube)
  • Danny Boy by Lisa Ono (YouTube)
  • Tu Es Foutu by In-Grid (YouTube)

I’m not sure what this particular playlist says about China but, if you have any thoughts, the comments are all yours.

Marlboro on NeochaEDGE

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I’ve recently discovered NeochaEDGE, a site which describes itself as “a daily-curated, bilingual website and discovery engine dedicated to showcasing leading-edge creative content and emerging youth culture in China.” I wouldn’t claim to be an avid follower of emerging youth culture, but I have discovered a couple of great music tracks on the site, the first of which is Marlboro. Many thanks to @ajschokora for highlighting both NeochaEDGE and Marboro.

Artist’s Profile: http://www.neocha.com/Marlboro

Music: Building a Collection

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This year, one of my New Year’s resolutions was to legalise my music collection. Since writing that post I haven’t given it much thought. Now, with only a couple of months left in 2009, I’ve given some serious thought to how I might go about achieving this. This renewed thought was, in part, prompted by the realisation that my music collection has remained largely unchanged since I left university. It is time to discover new things and time to legitimise the collection I do have.

The digital music industry has come a long way in the last couple of years and there are now several different legal options for obtaining music. The industry is still evolving, but there are two main approaches to downloading music; the subscription model, and the pay per track model. I decided that now was as good a time as any to take a look at some of the main options and decide how best to go about bringing my music collection into the world of legitimacy.

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Kenwood Picnic Concert

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20090815_174941_IMG_3357Yesterday evening Alicia and I went to a picnic concert at Kenwood House in London. We were treated to an excellent performance by Jools Holland and his Rhythm & Blues Orchestra.

The idea behind the concerts at Kenwood is that you turn up with a picnic and/or bottle of wine and sit by the lake and enjoy the performance.

As usually we bought way too much food, just the right amount of alcohol and even managed to find room for an extra flask of oolong tea.

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Monkey (猴): Journey to the West

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Photo by 水泳男Now showing at the O2 in London is Monkey (猴): Journey to the West, a show based on the 16th Century Chinese novel “Journey to the West” (西游记), by Wu Cheng’en (吴承恩). The show is directed by Chen Shi-Zheng (陈士铮), composed by Damon Albarn with visual design by Jamie Hewlett. Last Tuesday we went along to see the Show.

Alicia is no stranger to the story of Monkey as it is one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature but, for me, it was completely new. As a result we both had a different reaction to the show but surprisingly ended up giving it the same rating.

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