China!

August 19, 2008 9:48 PM

What are some good Chinese youth/pop culture blogs?

I'm looking for blogs about Chinese youth and/or pop culture...music, nightlife, art, etc. Preferably written by a native, in (Mandarin) Chinese, focusing on the cities of Beijing and Shanghai, though I'm still interested in seeing a foreigner's perspective on things.

Also, are there any good translation/learning sites where I can just copy and paste a phrase or character and get back the English meaning and pronunciation? My Chinese reading ability is pretty poor, so I'd need something to help me get through the blogs.

posted by god particle to society & culture (7 answers total)

Chinese is one of the languages supported by Babelfish, accessible through the Google translation page. I don't have any idea how good it is at it, however. (Based on how it handles Japanese pages, the answer is probably "not very".)
posted by Class Goat at 10:02 PM on August 19, 2008

As to translating individual characters, this site ought to work, but I can't make it handle the encoding my browser uses. Maybe there's a trick I haven't found.

Without the "UTF-8" box ticked, it seems you have to enter the unicode value in hex rather than the raw character. You can paste the character into this page and it'll give you the hex value. I know that's inconvenient, though; there's got to be a better way.
posted by Class Goat at 10:11 PM on August 19, 2008

Google Translate is probably the best free translation engine available on the web. I also supplement it with Adsotrans, Iciba and NCIKU.

My gut instinct is to say that there is no Chinese youth culture, they're all too busy studying for college entrance exams to get out and do anything. Obviously that's an exaggeration, but it's my impression for what it's worth.

The weblog of Chinese piano virtuoso Lang Lang:
http://user.qzone.qq.com/622008602

I'm having a hard time coming up with any. Most of the good stuff is on BBS/forums.

Shanghaining, SH hip-hop culture & nightlife:
http://www.shanghaining.com/forum/
(Only problem is the members use a lot of SH-nese dialect)

My age betrays me, I still can't think of many. I'll post back if I think of any more.
posted by msittig at 11:19 PM on August 19, 2008

"Youth" probably wasn't the best choice of word, the age range I'm thinking of is something like 18-25 or so.
posted by god particle at 11:48 PM on August 19, 2008

Worth exploring the links on Yan Jun's blogroll for a bit of artsiness and music, otherwise I'm in a similar boat to msittig.
posted by Abiezer at 12:06 AM on August 20, 2008

Alive Not Dead; Music/culture site geared at Chinese youth.
posted by applemeat at 8:25 AM on August 20, 2008

If you like Alive Not Dead, you might as well check out Neocha.
posted by msittig at 1:33 AM on August 23, 2008