Stig in Shanghai created a nifty Chinese character game for learning some of those hard-to-remember characters.

It's levelled so you start out easy and build up after a while. It even supports some cell phones, so you can kill time as you travel in train or bus.

In Chinese, there are several words meaning river, such as Jiang, He, Xi, Shui, Chuan. This one give you some idea of how to distinguish them.

According to The Economist, Chinese may be a fad for misguided fools. The tonal intricacies and delicate inflections of the Tang tongue are too much for those more accustomed to the Romance languages.

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 ;-)

A little insight into the rather topical and useful Chinese slang term: chaozuo, or fried work. As the article states, 'chao' is used in a number of common slang terms, but chaozuo in particular has an ever-increasing meaning in how it relates to Chinese media.

"Chao is now often combined with zuo (work). So chaozuo (fry work), or cooking or creating a buzz is now being practised by some who are becoming experts in the field.

They do whatever it takes to ensure that chaozuo can be applied extensively.