Kicking off with an episode of the Hexi Corridor

 Our pet goldfish Shaoqi just passed away, sadly. Thank you for the one year you spent with us Shaoqi. Named after the brave leader of the China Liu Shaoqi, he was an active member of our household.
I`m kicking off this blog with a post here on Sunday night. Waiting for the Hexi corridor episode to begin. I find the producton quality questionable, but it illustrates some key parts of Chinese history that took place in this strategic area of the Chinese mainland.

This episode was about Buddhist statues and grottos in the Hexi coridor. The episode began by focusing on a monk named Kumarajiva who travelled from the West and got stuck in the Hexi corridor for about 17 years as he was under suspicion by the government of the time. Eventually he was taken to Changan by a more likeminded emperor and set to work translating all the Buddhist scriptures into Chinese. After that, the episode focussed on the development of Buddhist grottoes along the corridor. One interesting piece of information I learnt was that up until the invasion of the East by Alexander the Great, there were no human likeness sculptures of Shakyamuni, the Buddha. It was only the bringing of Greek statues to Gandahar- present day Kashmir - that people began sculpting likenesses of the Buddha because they found the Greek sculptures brought by Alexander and his men so beautiful.

I hope I get the chance to visit some of the grottes when I visit the Hexi corridor this year.

 

p.s. (I've now created my own blog for the upcoming trip this post refers to; I will be cross posting there and here and linking to the home-made blog here: https://easterngrean.github.io/silk_road_blog/posts/130425.html

Yuck.. news... where have my blogs gone?

 Yuck..

 It's so annoying to read the news every day. Tired of seeing the same guy banging on and making the world a worse place.

I realised how much I have missed since stopping reading blogs. It was the end of the RSS feed that started that. Without that organised stream of new content I wasn't able to connect.

So I am revisiting this blog, MY blog!, where my reading lists were collated and shared for others. Interesting to see so many of them still going, after what has been more than 10 years since I was a regular vistitor here.

I am still language learning. I have lost a lot of that early motivation, but I still perservere. My career, and its attendant dissappointments, have also got in the way. I am still involved in language learning in my work, which should keep me motivated. But the politics and BS that needs to be dealt with in a large organisation is something that has taken the fun out of it for me.

I have also taken on something of a tangent in learning how to code. Or at least improving my tech literacy. I have a couple of certificates now and am trying to complete the Harvard CS50 introduction to computer science. My overall goal is still to develop a good language learning tool. To make use of this revolution to help myself and others with language learning.

 I will endevour to post more regularly. Additionally, I have set up my own blog to write about a trip I will take later this year, back to China. My wife is Chinese and we will visit the Hexi corridor, part of the old silk road. I would like to connect that blog and this in order to write and post more. I will link to it here once up and running.

Reading a book in Japanese

Despite my last post about how difficult it is to get to a level where you can read a book in Japanese, I've been going for it lately. I've been reading a book written by a Japanese lady who went to China to teach Japanese for a year. It is an account of her time there. This book is good for me because the subject matter is both familiar and interesting to me: I have travelled abroad to teach, and I'm interested in China and have visited on a few occasions.

I'm finding that I'm able to understand around 90% of the book most of the time. The odd word or two I don't understand, but from context it's often quite easy to imagine what it could be. On occasions there are passages which are more difficult, and my understanding becomes a bit more clouded, but I find it's best just to plough through these sections and wait for the clouds to clear, rather than diving to the dictionary every time, which can be distracting and frustrating.

Anyway, hopefully the more I read, the easier and less cloudy it will become.

Another quick update

Another quick update after my last post where I mentioned that I was concentrating on the grammar exericises on the Oxford site. Well, I've just finished those this week—it took me about 3 months altogether. It helps to get into a rhythm with these things, I found my rhythm was broken by trips away and stuff, which probably doubled the time it took.

Well, "still going" I guess is the message. Progress has not been earth shattering by any means, but I did take a trip to Beijing earlier this month where I found I was at least able to communicate basic things with Chinese people, and didn't have too much trouble with having my pronunciation understood, which was good.

Going to keep up with the grammar style exercises, this time probably with the Conversational 301 text book I have for the time being.

What I'm reading at the moment

Just added an image I've been playing around with to the Qing Dynasty page on this blog (see right-hand column).

Recently started reading China's Last Empire: The Great Qing, by William Rowe. It's a good read, and covers a really interesting period of Chinese history. As the title of the book suggests it was a great dynasty—probably in the top five, if not the top three as far as reputations of Chinese dynasties go—but, because of the fact that it was the last imperial dynasty, and it took China through the turbulent years of modernisation that were taking place around the world at that time, it is also a very historically important dynasty.

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about it all is though, that the dynasty was not actually formed of ethnic Han, or "Chinese" people—the Manchus really didn't exist as an important factor in Chinese history right up until they took over the whole empire! The book goes so far as to suggest that their race and culture was almost an invention of political convenience to give legitimacy to the band of warriors who had taken over the empire.

Anyway, I think I might be getting out of my depth here talking about all this, so I'll stop before I say something wrong and suggest you read the book if you're interested in Chinese history like me.

Journal writing deleted on italki

I wrote a journal entry on italki about the audio recording site Rhino Spike.

Admittedly, although I claimed to be sharing the benefits of the site with italki users, my reasons for writing it were self-serving.

I uploaded a load of Chinese Mandarin sentences on Rhino Spike that I wanted recording to put with my Anki flash cards, to help with my mandarin pronunciation.

These haven't been recorded yet, so I figured I'd try and get a few more Mandarin speakers using the site by writing a little piece about it in Mandarin and posting it on italki.

Anyway, I just received a message from another user telling me that she just saw my entry moments before it was deleted (by the administrators we presume).

Why would they do this?

They don't want competition from other language sites?

These two sites are hardly in direct competition. And I'd have thought if italki really wanted to help their users, they'd at least encourage this sort of information sharing.

Seems like overkill on their part to me. They see another website being talked about and they immedietely delete the entry?

Is this what the internet is about?

Or is Rhino Spike a blacklisted site in mainland China?

I can't really see why.

Anyway, here's my entry for those poor souls at italki!

一个实用的网站

我觉得这个网的概念非常好。

大家知道这个网站马？

http://rhinospike.com

你的想听的外语文章能录被讲母语的人录下来。

我想录的上载句子很多。

你有空就看看一下这个网站

Exciting new blog

I have a new blog!

And no messing around this time. This one's going straight to the heart of the Japanese nation. A Japanese blog, in Japanese.

Check it out:

http://blogs.yahoo.co.jp/easterngrean

My initial idea is to try and translate Japanese news articles into English. I'm gonna try and select ones that have links to China, and hopefully, as my Chinese improves, I'll be able to translate them into Chinese too. Actually, I mean, from Chinese, into English. Vice versa will probably have to wait a bit longer.

Anyway, hope it's interesting.

Feedback/comments welcome!