howma news, thoughts, and fun stuff

Once again a lot of time has passed by since I last wrote here, but I wanted to assure everyone exciting things are in the works. We’ve been fixing a lot of the bugs on the site and improving the overall Howma experience. Thank you to everyone who has been giving us feedback and being patient with us as we fix the problems users have been having. You guys are truly awesome. Anyway, stay tuned for some exciting things in the next few months.

In the meantime I wanted to share some interesting ideas for learning/studying Chinese…

A good and fun way to learn Chinese I’ve found is studying pop culture materials. This includes comics, movies, TV shows, cartoons, etc…What’s cool about it, on top of hearing Chinese, is seeing the differences in culture. A good example of this is looking at how bras are advertised in the United States versus Taiwan.

Here is a typical American bra commercial, courtesy of Victoria’s Secret:

Notice how the ad focuses on the “sexiness” of the models as well as the edginess of the Victoria’s Secret bra. Having one of their bras makes you hip and cool.

Contrast this with this Taiwanese bra commercial I found:

So what’s going on? First off here’s one simple Chinese vocabulary that I can teach, bra in Mandarin is “胸罩” (xiong1 zhao4). Literally translated this means “breast cover” or “chest cover” which is a pretty good description of what a bra is. If you listen closely to the commercial you can here them say it a few times. Anyway, here’s what’s happening in the commercial. I’ll break down what I understand:

man: 不好意思 (bu4 hao3 yi4 si5) (excuse me, I am sorry)
woman: 不會，很舒服 (bu4 hui4, hen3) (no, it actually feels very nice (comfortable))

Then there’s a bunch of stuff about the bra, how it has nice lace, and all the other stuff that’s supposed to appeal to bra purchasers. Some of it I understand some I don’t. I just find the dialog more interesting. Continuing on, after the woman bumps into the man…

woman: 不好意思 (bu4 hao3 yi4 si5) (excuse me, I am sorry)
man: 沒有關係，我也覺得很舒服 (mei2 you3 guan1 xi4, wo3 ye3 jue2 de5 hen3 shu1 fu5) (there’s no problem, I think it also feels really good)

I still find it amusing how the same topic, bras, can be sold in two different ways. I just can’t imagine the Chinese commercial being advertised that way here in the United States. A lot of people might consider the commercial sexual harassment. I think the add is pretty funny, cute even, whereas the Victoria’s Secret version is much sexier (and less creative) and just a bunch of eye candy.

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 »