Some Interesting Chinese Links

I know tons of people are interested in Mandarin Chinese these days. I've played around with it a little and found some links that might be useful:

http://www.chinese-lessons.com/mandarin/pinyin/south_f/ This site gives you sound files that tell you how to pronounce all the letters. Pretty useful. It is all free.

http://www.eon.com.hk/estroke/download.html This program looked pretty interesting. It shows you how to write and pronounce a whole variety of letters. You can download and demo and then buy it if you want.

I highly recommend Fundamentals of Chinese Characters by John Jing-hua Yin available at amazon.com. I'm working my way through it now. As a complete beginner I can tell you it is a really interesting approach. Instead of giving you a book full of complicated characters with tons of strokes to memorize it starts off with the simplest ones and works its way up. All the while it shows the history of each character's development so you can really see the transition from pictograph (a picture of what the image really meant essentially) to the modern day forms. I think it is a very effective and not so frustrating way to get your bearings when taking a look at Chinese for the first time.

Decoding the Written Word - Tibetan Series

OK for those of you following my podcast on iTunes "Decoding the Written Word" I've started my new series teaching you how to write in Tibetan so check it out! I'm also on www.podcastalley.com now so please vote for the show if you like it.

Sand Art

I ran across this yesterday and just though it was so cool. Ilana Yahav is an Israeli artist who makes videos that show her creating artwork using nothing but sand on a table lit from underneath. It's really amazing to see how you can create such beautiful images out of nothing but sand. Check out hte videos one has a song in Hebrew and another a song in Georgian. Truly unique I really enjoyed it.

http://www.sandfantasy.com/videoclips/videoclips.htm

Greek and Roman Texts

I decided to get adventurous and have started studying Latin and Ancient Greek. I found an unbelieveable website:

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cache/perscoll_Greco-Roman.html

Once you have some experience in either of these languages check it out. It has all the classic literature in the original languages as well as lots of helpful notes. It's incredible it literally has everything from Homer to Euripides to Julius Caesar.

Also lots of stuff in English if you don't read Ancient Greek or Latin too.