The current Israeli prime minister – Benjamin Netayahu – spoke at the last Israeli Business Convention and elaborated the importance of introducing Chinese studies to the Israeli education system. I’ve known about this for quite a while, but I finally got around to listen to his speech.     Here’s the video of Benjamin Netanyahu [...]

3 years after I wrote about the first signs of the Israeli Chinese studies trend and there are signs that the trend is still going strong (see “The Chinese Language Studies Trend in Israel” and “Channel 2 story : Israelis studying Chinese” for more info). Every once in a while, Israeli news channels rediscover this [...]

My one month intense summer Chinese course ended this last Friday and it feels sad.  In the one month that we’ve been studying Chinese together, I feel we’ve become really good friends. 5 hours of intense practice and lunch out together everyday, with some nights going to KTV, movie, dinners – will do that to you, I guess.  [...]

Forgive me father, for I have sinned. It has been over one semester since I last touched Chinese and over a year since I last had a decent Chinese class (no, Chinese classes in Israel don’t count). Honest to god, I can hardly manage anything in Chinese. I know that I know things, I can [...]

Google’s China presence is growing with new China services for their local Guge coming out often. Google China (GuGe) has just released Google Pinyin, a Chinese IME to simplify typing in Pinyin to output Chinese characters. I think anybody using the default Windows Chinese IME has felt it’s a very frustrating tool, and most of my Chinese/Taiwanese [...]

I haven’t seen any announcements or mentions of this in either Chinese-related or IT-related blogs, but it seems that Google Translate is finally BETA testing Traditional Chinese, which is used in Taiwan, HK and some other Chinese communities outside China. Although Altavista’s Babelfish has been providing this service for a while now, it always felt [...]

Avia’s classes got me interested in a whole new approach for studying Chinese – reading Chinese BBS jokes. Avia was kind enough to send me some, and I also started looking around myself. Since my level of Chinese is still not very good, I stick to the really simple ones, but even those I find to [...]

Leaving London and having a few moments to spare at the Heathrow Airport to get rid of my remaining pounds, I entered the book shop and looked for something interesting to read. After consulting with the young lady about a good China related read she referred me to the then recently published "Mao – The [...]