Jean-Francois' posterous - Filed under 'Chinese'

Free Chinese lessons at ChineseTeachers.com

By browsing the different teachers available on Chineseteachers.com I found out that one their teacher (named "Annie") is giving away free one to one chinese lesson for the whole month of november. For that You only need $1 in your account to have lessons with her, and of course that $1 will not be deducted! She is the only teacher with the special promotion 'S' red icon .

As you remember, I've already written a long post about Chineseteacher.com, I mentioned that even thought the service is really great (one to one Chinese lesson anywhere in the world at any hour of the day...or the night) it's still can be quite intimidating to have a lesson with someone we don't really know, that's psychological and we cannot do much things about this (at least for now, that's mainly why Loic Le Meur switched its product, Seesmic, from video conversation to a tool that would instead aggregate content from other social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook).

If you are not totally sure about the fact that a one to one lesson through internet is an easy thing for you, you should try this offer and see.

Note : This is not a sponsored post (but they are indeed friends of mine :) )

The 幹簡體字 Button

I think it's Albert Einstein who said: "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction" (basically Make everything as simple as possible). I'm still surprise that I've been fooled because usually I'm a very "straight to the point" and "less is more" guy.

You all know the hatred I can have for the simplified form of Chinese characters (I'm sorry, but the aforementioned quote doesn't apply here...or maybe yes, you can see what is the result of simplification performed by some people who were, obviously, very far to be geniuses) and even though I can recognize them without much problem (if you learn traditional set first, the simplified one can be guessed quite easily, you just need to see it once) it always slowed me and gives me a headache (yes I'm also very stubborn and not diplomatic at all).

The thing is that according to the CNNIC last report (2009/3/23), no less than 96% of websites in the Mainland are filled with simplified characters (note all the work that remains to be done to reverse this trend; also note that officials websites are proposed in traditional as well) and whether we like it or not, we cannot escape this insanity, can't we?

Hu! You have a short memory, I told you I'm stubborn!

A few month ago I decided to code (I don't know how to write a single line, but to learn new thing never scared me) a Safari/Firefox plu-gin that would allow me to instantaneously and invisibly convert any simplified Chinese page into a traditional one with the help of Google Trans lation (We're talking here about a "conversion", not a "translation" thus the result is almost perfect). So I passed days and nights to read books, tutorials, testing some easy then more complicated code until (few weeks of labor later...) a friend of mine mentioned to me that that kind of thing already existed...made by Google 凸(-_-; )

The system is simple, when you are on a web page in simplified, you just need to click on the "幹簡體字" button and the whole page (it's not perfect, things in flash will remain in simplified but important are converted). One example with a random 天涯 Forum page :

Before:

After:

To do that it's very simple, you simply drag and drop the "Chinese (Traditional)" link, that you will find in that webpage, onto your Bookmarks Bar. Note that this little trick can also works with other language.

Loading mentions Retweet

Filed under // China Chinese Firefox Mainland plugin Safari Simplified Traditional

Comments (0)

Jean-Francois’ posterous

Jean-Francois’ posterous

Chinese

Free Chinese lessons at ChineseTeachers.com

The 幹簡體字 Button

My Other Sites

Tags

Get Updates