Hao Hao ReportThe best China news and blog posts

In my opinion, writing Chinese words with the Latin character set and neglecting tone marks is the equivalent of writing English words with dots in place of the vowels. Yes, it’s possible to guess the missing information from context, but it’s not a very complete writing system.

During my first month in Fuqing, a Chinese colleague had given me a handwriting textbook written for Chinese kindergartners, and a grid-lined notepad, specifically designed for writing characters. At the time, I was diligent in my Chinese studies, but had decided to focus my studying around pinyin (Chinese Romanization) rather than learning to write the characters.

This tool converts pinyin and tone numbers into pinyin with tone marks above the correct vowels. It's fully written in Javascript, so it's very fast and doesn't require page loads.

A fantastic article about Hu Jie, a Chinese documentary filmmaker, and his quest to bring to light the story of Lin Zhao - a defiant woman who was arrested and eventually executed during Mao's Anti-Rightest Campaign of the late 50s, and who used her own blood to continue writing her critical analysis of the times from prison. In Hu's own words - the story shows how far China has come.

There are a few basic considerations online marketers must take into consideration when writing for international readers.

Tired of Internet censorship? Is your site being blocked for having "sensitive" words? Then Censortive is for you. Use this plugin to replace those pesky words with their graphic equivalent, making them invisible to censorship robots.

The link in this post goes to the main plugin page, but you can read more about it at my blog.

In the interests of not drawing too much fire from the GFoC, I'll just say - go watch this video about mountains and why not to walk in lines near them.

Sorry it's not in English, but I think the actions speak louder than words.

Ryan announces a group writing project over at Lost Laowai, aimed at the Chinese Blogosphere. The topic?

If I knew then what I knew now.

What do you know now that you wish you knew before you arrived in China? Write a post, and contribute to what will likely be a great guide for Laowai-to-be coming to China.

The movie introduced several Chinese words to the world, such as Oogway, Shifu, Wushi Finger, etc. Check to see the original meanings in Chinese.