howma news, thoughts, and fun stuff

So for those of you who didn’t know, we have been building a website called howma.com. We’re currently working on the new version of the website. As we have been building this next new version of the howma website often Daniel, Ed, and I have debated, argued, and fought (all friendly fighting of course) over what kind of content we should include on the website. What we discovered is that there are many different ways to categorize words and phrases–greetings, at the airport, shopping, traveling, etc…Rather than guess at what kind of phrases would interest people, we decided it would be best to pose the question to our potential users and readers of this blog.

So if you wanted to learn Chinese (or English), what kind of Chinese words and phrases would you like to learn? Help us out by filling out the survey below. Thanks for helping!

Click here to take our survey

I always feel like I’m behind on the popular internet videos floating out there. Luckily, there are a lot of people online who find this stuff before me. Our friends over at due-east posted this pretty popular video in a blog post about this woman singing on Bulgarian Idol (the show where everyday people audition to be famous singers in their own country).

When I first watched the video I cracked up. I didn’t realize she was attempting to sing in English at first. I really have to admire her confidence. It’s as if she didn’t even attempt to learn the correct words or pronunciation and instead tried learning the song completely by ear. Maybe some people can learn English this way, but I think for the rest of us it might help to study at least a little bit. I put together this video to highlight the differences between the original version of the Mariah Carey song vs. her version of it. I also added my own artistic twist to it

Ken Lee Remix Edition (with correct lyrics!) from Pan Pan on Vimeo.

I’ve always said that studying a language doesn’t guarantee you’ll be able to speak it. A lot of people Read the rest of this entry »

So in addition to helping people to learn Chinese the whole point of Howma is to help those who want to improve their English. So we here at Howma have been thinking of coming up with a short video show to help teach some phrases in English. However, we aren’t sure what kind of phrases people want to learn (or even if people want to learn phrases). We want to make a show that’s simple and fun that’s very different from many of the shows that are out there right now. We aren’t trying to replace teachers, we’re just trying to help out and keep learning interesting.

This show, while not bad, is what we DON’T want to make.

Instead we want something a little more fun…maybe something more like this…

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In the past year or two the number and quality of free video lessons on youtube has dramatically increased. I remember when I was looking for learning Chinese videos on youtube about 2 years ago how many of the videos that were on there were primarily student’s Chinese language projects, very simple/silly lessons, or stuff that wasn’t even Chinese (see the below youtube collage for examples).

However, times have changed and now when you search “learn Chinese” in youtube you actually can find a bunch of Chinese lessons that are not half bad. I chose 4 different video series to take a look at. How did I decide on these four? I just took the top 3 different search results in youtube for “learn Chinese” and then I threw in a random video lesson to mix it up (very scientific, eh?). What I did was rather than have you watch the entire lesson for each (some run a little long) I just took a minute snapshot of each and put them all together in one video. This way you can get an idea which one might be most suited for you.

Learn Chinese Video Shootout from Pan Pan on Vimeo.

If you want to view the whole show I’ve included them all here. Read the rest of this entry »

Depending on who is reading this post some of you may or may not know who “MC Hammer” is/was. Here’s the quick wikipedia bio:

MC Hammer (born Stanley Kirk Burrell on March 30, 1962) is an American MC who was popular during the late 1980s and early 1990s, known for his dramatic rise to and fall from fame and fortune and his trademark Hammer Pants

So he was a pretty famous “rapper” with some really catchy songs, having such hits as “Can’t Touch This”, “2 Legit 2 Quit!”, “Pick Up The Hammer” etc… Among his other notable qualities, besides his flashy “Hammer Pants” and funny song titles, was his trademark dancing. I remember at middle school dances (yes I was in middle school when Hammer was cool) all the kids would be putting on their best “Hammer” dance moves. Here’s Hammer putting on some of his flashy dance moves in his world famous “Can’t Touch This” music video.

I really thought that Hammer was more of an American thing, but imagine my surprise when I found a pretty popular video on youtube of a Chinese guy dancing to “Can’t Touch This” and copying a lot of MC Hammer’s original dance moves. Here he is (if anyone has any information about him please let me know):

He’s actually really good. Even funnier, though, if you watched the video is the fact that it looks like his grandma is in the video knitting while he is dancing like there’s no tomorrow. She never looks up. It’s like she’s used to all his dancing and doesn’t care much at all for it.

So I started thinking. How does his dancing compare to the original? It’s tough to evaluate Chinese MC Hammer’s dancing by watching the original Hammer dancing video and then his dancing video one right after the other. I figure the best way is to watch the two videos at the same time and see how accurate Chinese Hammer is to the original video. Here’s our side by side MC Hammer Showdown Challenge! I’ll let you guys be the judge.

Chinese MC Hammer Vs. Real MC Hammer from Pan Pan on Vimeo.