The Lingual Bee is an interesting blog from a Chinese guy who has lived in the states and has mastered the English language. Here he describes how idiomatic English can be rather tricky. Many of his amusing insights apply to the Mandarin learner, but in reverse. Here’s a classic, Karl Marx, me, and learning English. […]

From the increasingly indispensable Micropersuasion, two interesting posts today. The first one concerns Apple’s agressive move to own the word ‘podcast’. They’re issuing cease and desist letters to companies who use ‘pod’ in the product names. This seems very uncharacteristic of the cool image that they work so hard to portray. If they don’t handle […]

Howard French pens an insightsful article in the New York Times, Children of Rich Learn Class, Minus the Struggle. Link to story.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post exaggerates slightly when it claims that Across Latin America, Mandarin Is in the Air.
Ken Carroll

Video just gets bigger and bigger these days. Searchvideo is a new video search engine that gleans videos from all over the place, including Youtube, Google Video, etc. It was developed by AOL and it appears to work really well.
I searched for ‘learn Chinese’ on Searchvideo and was pleasantly surprised to see our CNN […]

Here’s an article in the Guardian that has the unmistakable whiff of the dinosaur about it. ‘Will podcasting finally kill the lecture?‘ was written by a Dr David Hearnshaw, who teaches at the University of Westminister. The article is entirely free of insight or information, but it shows the kind of denial Hank mentioned earlier […]