So, that's written Chinese sorted out, then

A Californian lady's very own phonetic Chinese script (a modification of Pitman shorthand) from the late 19th century.  Well, it was a nice try, and her heart was in the right place.

The unreasonable difficulty of Chinese characters

An old Language Log post here about how difficult even native speakers of Chinese find it to write characters correctly.  Is the writing of Chinese by hand so intolerably difficult (and unnecessary, now, given that Pinyin input is so easy) that the writing of characters will inevitably die out?  There's a lot of cultural capital invested in the writing system, but that doesn't necessarily settle the matter—Turkey switched from Arabic to Roman script pretty quickly, after all.  Vietnamese is now romanized, albeit with some alarming diacritics.  I'd be sorry if the characters disappeared as it's one of the things that first got me interested in Chinese and Japanese... but ultimately it's up to the native speakers.

Benny on the train

here as he travels through China.  Entertaining and well-made video.  Impressive given that he's only been learning Chinese for a few months.