Hao Hao ReportThe best China news and blog posts

There have been a few posts about curse words in Chinese, but this is the first to my knowledge that actually has audio on how to say them - you don't get that on ChinesePod ;-)

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

A photo is said to make a thousand words. A thousand words with a photo makes the background. The suggestions of an Urghur woman in China's prosperous East Coast charging 10 kuai for something and being arrested for seeming to rip someone off.

The opening salvo in a debate over the romanization of road signs. A scrappy debate in the comments, too.

"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."

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.

Microsoft was already generating criticism last summer, not long after the launch of its portal, because MSN Spaces users frequently experienced restrictions when they used certain words prohibited by the government. Until the beginning of this year, Zhao -- also known by his blog pseudonym Michael Anti -- was able to skirt complete censorship by Microsoft. Zhao told AsiaMedia on July 19, 2005 that he was able to avoid online censorship by knowing and avoiding using sensitive words.

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.

I was with a couple of old China hands last night discussing acculturation assimilation and the movie Jackass.We all decided

Breathing had become harder as day turned to night. The chunks of brick and concrete that had buried him and his wife were pressing tighter by the hour, crushing them. Their bodies had gone numb.