Tag: Language

  • Language skills lacking in the U.S. foreign service?

    Josh Rogin at Foreign Policy reports that government auditors found language skills among foreign service officers to be far more rare than they would hope. On China, he quotes from the unreleased Government Accountability Office report: In China, officials told us that the officers in China with insufficient language skills get only half the story…

  • Free Chinese Dictionary for iPhone in the Creative Commons

    Today a colleague showed me that what I had hoped for has come true: There is a full-featured, free, Creative Commons licensed dictionary, and there is a good iPhone application to use with it. The dictionary is CC-CEDICT, and the iPhone app DianHua. So far (for the last couple of hours) it’s served me well.…

  • 'Conquer English to Make China Stronger!'

    Ampontan points out that the media’s love for Li Yang’s instructional rallies and methods, called Crazy English, recently included a New Yorker article by Evan Osnos. I’m pretty happy with myself because with my Mandarin tutor today I finished a textbook. But our meetings at a Beijing cafe are nothing like Crazy English. One by…