Learning my way around the online community

[Bob161]

Hello all

I've been lurking around this site for a few months now and I really enjoy this forum. The members here all seem very generous with their time and advice.

I personally and just beginning to learn Chinese. I have taken the time to read over the posts regarding learning materials available online and off, and found it very helpful.

I was just wondering which, if any, blogs about China the members here find entertaining and informative. I'm particularly interested in Chinese politics (mostly regarding their foreign relations), Chinese military, and modern exportable culture (music, movies, TV shows etc.). I've tried googling these subjects, but I'm simply too inexperienced to separate the tripe from the quality work.

Do any of you frequent other Chinese forums? I've looked around at a few, but none of them seem as well maintained as this one. I'm mostly just trying to expand my knowledge base and opportunities for interaction as quickly as possible.

Thanks

[Daan]

I frequently read Danwei, Sinoglot (and its subject-specific blogs), Chinesisch-Blog, Sinosplice, Pinyin News, and 井底之蛙. There's bound to be more interesting blogs out there, so I'm looking forward to reading what everyone else follows.

[Bob161]

I stumbled upon this one this evening. It says it's a blog..but has many different posters. It seems pretty good.

http://www.lostlaowai.com/blog

[chrix]

I particularly like to read journalists' blogs, though recently a lot of them have closed down (like the one at Time Magazine, or McClatchy). So here are those still left in my feed reader:

Wall Street Journal

Le Monde (Even if you don't read French, it's mostly pictures, so it's still worth it)

Also there's the China Section of Weird Asia News

And a blog about US foreign policy towards China

Two blogs specific to Taiwan:

http://taipeh.wordpress.com/ (occasionally writes in English)

This is good for language studies:

English translations of KMT-leaning newspapers (including the Chinese original)

As far as language-related blogs go, Daan has mentioned most of the blogs I'm following (and also mine ), here's some more:

Shanghai Daily's buzzword blog

Hanzi Smatter

And anything Victor Mair writes on languagelog

[wushijiao]

I'm particularly interested in Chinese politics (mostly regarding their foreign relations), Chinese military, and modern exportable culture (music, movies, TV shows etc.).

Besides Danwei, and some of the other sites previously mentioned, here are some that I generally visit on a regular basis:

Asia Times

EastSouthWestNorth

China Brief

China Law Blog

Sinological Violoncellist

China Smack

I can't really say I really use any other forums, or read the comments sections of many other websites very much. It seems to me that many sites just degenerate into yelling matches or become self-righteous nationalistic battlegrounds. That gets old really quickly.

(Of course, It should go without saying that one should try to learn Chinese to enable oneself to get a wide variety of Chinese perspectives, without an English-language filter/interpreter, regardless of however skilled that person/website may be).

[Don_Horhe]

For more academic reading, you can check out Sino-Platonic Papers, a series edited by the aforementioned Victor Mair

[jbradfor]

James Fallows over at The Atlantic has a (near) daily blog. While it's not only about China, many of them are, due in large part as he lived for two years in Shanghai as a correspondent. [And, IMHO, most of his non-China postings are pretty interesting as well.]

[chrix]

Just came across this Mandarin pronunciation blog: http://pinyinpractice.com/wangzhi/

As far as other forums go, there are some forums in other languages, such as German and French. There's a forum dedicated to Chinese history.

There are expat forums, like www.forumosa.com for expats in Taiwan, and I'm sure there are some expat-geared forums for expats in Beijing and Shanghai too.