Site for Chinese book reviews: aNobii

The most popular site for buying books in Taiwan is books.com.tw. That's the number one search result if you search for "books" in Chinese. So, I imagined that, like amazon.com, the site would be a good place to look for book reviews. It's not.

There is a great place for reading Chinese book reviews: anobii.com. It is a social site for readers, like librarything.com. Although the site originated in Hong Kong and is available in 14 languages, it appears that Taiwanese users make up the vast majority. For example, there are on the order of 300 users with the book Perfume in English, and around 3000 users with the book in Chinese. There are 197 comments in Chinese, 163 of which come from Taiwanese users. (Perfume is more popular with Taiwanese readers than American readers, so don't read too much into the single data point.)

You can filter the comments and users that are displayed by language and region. You can import booklists, create wishlists, join groups, etc. For more on features, see the Wikipedia page.

While librarything.com hasn't been able to recognize any of the foreign language books I've read, anobii.com didn't seem to have any problems pulling up the info for the Chinese language books I checked. Anobii supports importing and exporting book lists, so if you really like librarything or another site like that, you could use anobii to enter in your Chinese books and then export them.

The name comes from a type of bookworm, Anobium punctatum. They explain this on their blog, but they don't explain why they had to make the name look ridiculous by changing the capitalization to aNobii.

Eastern-Style Western Food

An article in the New York Times from a couple of weeks ago describes Japanese-style Western food in Japan, called yoshoku. The article is relevant to Taiwan because much of Taiwan's idea of Western food comes via Japan. Not all yoshoku dishes are common in Taiwan, but the dish that is arguably Taiwan's most popular "western" food, jukao (焗烤) is probably a Japanese import. (Jukao is rice or noodle casserole with cheese on top.)

Link:
Spaghetti Stir-Fry and Hambagoo: Japan Looks West

Pronunciation Web Site

I came across the web site forvo.com on Lifehacker today. This is the kind of the site that make you think, "Why didn't I think of that? I did think of that, didn't I? I must have." It's a multi-lingual pronunciation site. You can search for recordings of words in different languages or you can request that other users record their pronunciation of a word.

Cartoon Lyrics

I read this post today where the lyrics from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon, which have been translated into Chinese, are then translated back into English. I thought it was funny, so I should steal the idea and translate some other cartoon lyrics into English. I looked at a Taiwanese web site that has the lyrics for about forty cartoons in Chinese, mostly from twenty or more years ago. Most of the cartoons shown in Taiwan were Japanese cartoons that were not shown in America.

Other then Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a few of the overlapping cartoons shown in both Taiwan and America are He-Man, She-Ra, Popeye, The Smurfs, Thundercats, Voltron, Transformers, and Dennis the Menace. But I don't think any of these cartoons have the same theme song in English and Chinese, at least not lyrically. So the backwards translations would have to be based on fan translations from English. Well, there's always rap lyrics to back-translate into English. Quick, translate "then I put the mack down" into Chinese and then back into English...