So I've been ordering waimai way too much recently because my kitchen has been out of order.  One thing I notice is that pretty much every place has some version of 小炒肉 or 农村小炒肉 on the menu.  This is some kind of meat with (bell and chili) peppers and onions, drenched in oil.  What's the idea behind the dish and why is it on every menu?     It's nearer to the American Chinese food idea of "mix a bunch of unrelated ingredients up and stir fry them" instead of the "use one kind of food and make it good" idea that I love so much about real Chinese cooking.  

I'm translating a novel. The story takes place in Southern China, around 1920, although I suspect that's not actually important for my question. Two bandits show up: 一个背着长枪，一个挎着短枪. My question: what does 挎 mean here? How is the man actually holding the gun? Does he hold it in his hand, is it in a shoulder holster?   Many thanks for anyone who knows! I think the answer must be simple, except I don't know it.

My post on Reddit got a number of people interested so I though I’d share again here.   I find Pleco to be the best companion tool for learning Chinese. However, I don’t really like how Pleco has a separated tab for individual characters in a word. So, I created a user dictionary for Pleco that does exactly that so you can view the definitions for each character right on the main page. Even more so, CD-Dict is now updated with radicals, stroke counts, HSK levels, General Standard#, and frequency ranks for 9,933 characters right in one place.   For download links you can visit this Github page where I’ll be updating new versions of existing dictionaries and adding new ones as well: https://github.com/meap158/Pleco-Collection Aside from CD-Dict above, there’s another dictionary on there called ML-Dict which is a Multilingual Dictionary. Basically, I took the same set of data with 238,925 headwords and used Google Translate to translate them all into multiple languages: English, Japanese, Vietnamese, French, Russian, Spanish, and Korean. So while you’re learning Chinese, you can reinforce and perhaps learn some words in these other languages as well. It’s a great way to learn multiple languages at once!   Since they share the same headwords, I recommend using both of these dictionaries at the same time. This way, you will always have them together when searching for words without one showing up and the other not.   Anyhow, as a longtime lurker and first-time poster, I wish you all happy learning!   Credits: Data are sourced from HanziDB, OVDP, Unihan, and Google Translate.

It's been a pain in the ass these last three years.  No going home, no Christmas surrounded by the people you love back home, no more loading the suitcase up with your culture's special foods (ouch).  Dealing with a lot of extra bullshit, like finding a testing center near you that's open, keeping your jiankangma up to date, getting denied entry into shopping centers because you had something come up and forgot to get tested.  Or, what hurt me the most, your relatives not able to make an annual visit and hang out.     Remember the early days?  When foreigners were straight up freaking out?  The general feeling was "I've got to get out of here! I'm going to die in China!"  LOL.  Anyone remember Flora, that lady in Wuhan?  Classic.  Remember when the US State Department sent a plane to evacuate its consular staff from Wuhan, and then was going to fly back half empty?  And after an outcry, they reluctantly agreed to allow US citizens to board...at $2,000 a seat?  Good times, good times.  While countries like Russia and the Philippines sent planes for their people at no charge.  You know, because they think they should care for their own citizens, unlike the US State Department which thinks we're all (non-Amcham that is) either criminals on the run from the law or tax evaders.     But I'll not lie, it was kind of nice having China all to ourselves for a while.  Nobody came in.  There was a trickle, but a 28 day hotel stay at your own expense was a significant barrier to entry.     I've been told that China has lost a lot of long-term foreigners and I should be upset about that.  I don't quite understand.  Why?  My attitude has always been: you don't like it, get the heck out.  For some reason this is really bad and people react very poorly to it.  We recently had a long-termer (14 years) leave.  There was some foofaraw with his school, and instead of looking for another job he just decided to exit.  This was fine by me!  He was the biggest complainer ever.  Every time I met him, he wanted to pull me aside and explain how something had happened, that the Chinese were so stupid, and how he missed the good old days when he used to live in Taiwan.  After a while I just couldn't listen to it any more and told him off to his face, just don't give me that negative crap any more!  It brings me down, which I'm pretty sure was the intention.  I have a great time in China, how dare I enjoy it while he hates it!  Well, when it was time for him to go he was all broken up about it.  I didn't get it, I thought you despise China and despise worse Chinese people?  He didn't speak Mandarin, of course. How can you be sad about leaving a country and people that you detest, and your favorite topic of conversation is this fact?   I saw this pattern repeated over and over online. It might be phrased as, "I'm leaving and you should be very dismayed and try to stop me - but I won't be stopped, you can't un-break a vase, and this is a really bad move on your part which will turn out badly for you."   With our reduced numbers, I'm glad that the issue of foreigners can go on the back burner for a while.  We were really attracting attention from the government, and now we're a lot fewer.  Hopefully it will take a long time for our numbers to return to what they were, if they ever do.  I was expecting a new crop of foreigners when the restrictions were relaxed in January and I haven't noticed a single one.  The tourist visas will open in a few days and that will be the real test.  Well, if those were planning on moving back to China and living full-time, they've got a big surprise coming.  All the training centers are closed and that was a major source of work for them.  Now, it's only public schools and they are regularly inspected for illegals.     I hope we can go back to the good old days, when foreigners were rare and unusual.  I don't say this because I have the "I'm the only laowai in China" disease, but because the foreign trash is all gone. It's also nice having a bit of leverage.  Now, either they pay up or lose out.  Nice to see the shoe is on the other foot for once. I've said this before in a Wechat group and got quite a number of upset responses. Evidently a lot of people like the foreign trash? Someone else put this way, "The way I understood it meant he that the inconvenience of the last three years got rid of all the people that come to China to fuck around because it’s easy to get some training centre job which requires minimum effort other than being a foreigner & spend all of their time getting drunk, sleeping around and giving china a bad impression of foreigners."  Amen to that.

Hello everyone,   I am a master's student who will be graduating in July. Recently, I applied for a Ph.D. Scholarship Program that is scheduled to begin in September. However, I am facing a problem regarding obtaining my master's degree certificate. To be eligible for the scholarship program, I need to submit my master's degree certificate in August. But I haven't passed the HSK 3 exam yet, which is required to obtain the certificate. My question is, can I still get my master's degree certificate without passing the HSK 3 exam so that I can complete it during my Ph.D. program? I would really appreciate any insights or suggestions regarding this matter. Thank you in advance for your help.

I've recently been discussing "important" topics on China vs West views of the world, in my woefully inadequate spoken Chinese with my teacher on Italky.  Just made me realize how little I know, and how hard is to reconcile what we read in the media about China, what we choose to believe, and what the Chinese think.    I found this article on the topic to be interesting and in my opinion fairly neutral (would be curious to hear people's opinions about it): https://hbr.org/2021/05/what-the-west-gets-wrong-about-china   Can anyone suggest good articles or literature on this broad subject? Which are the conversation that you have with Chinese people that you find most interesting, and which most frustrating? How does that affect your love of Chinese culture and your motivation to study the language?

This is my first time posting a topic right here in this forum, but I need your help from everyone.   I'm very confused about these kind of dating, and I want to know if I can trust. Some months Ive been in touch with one female member of this website, but, how could I know she is using me as entertainment? there is a genuine feeling and intention after months of talking, it looks like something is happening with her. How can I know chinese women are interested in men from America? for example

Hi, I know that not everyone are willing to explain everything outright  in this regard but consider that your responses may be useful as same as normal users.  I wonder these exactly: I may either consider to attend MSc courses or HSK preparation (Chinese Language Programs) The first one will require around two years to remain there and the second one approximately 1 years. And I ask whether this would be possible. Otherwise will they directly disqualify me as soon as I show my physical examination form?     Thanks.

Hello! I have here a vintage watercolor painting and I want to find out the aritsts name. I am not 100%sure, if its chinese. Maybe someone can read it or have an idea. Black writing and red seal. Thank you once more for your help!   https://www.kunstefan.de/vorschau/cat1.jpg  

Hello everyone! lazybug.ai A while back I posted about a browser plugin I was working on. Interest was a bit lukewarm, I think partly because it wasn't very accessible or easy to get started with. But I kept going and changed direction a bit as I felt it can be a very helpful tool in the end. I've changed the name and the project focus to a web app for watching content instead of an extension (which comes a bit later), since I think it's more convenient to use. More importantly perhaps, it's 100% free and open source (contributions welcome!). To summarize shortly what Lazybug is: Curates good Chinese TV/Movies and vlogger content, mainly on Youtube but later other sites as well (with a browser extension) Web app that runs as much as possible in your browser. All your data is stored locally, but can optionally be synced to the cloud. You can download all your data in JSON format. Smart subtitles philosophy: hide words you know, try to understand with as little help as you can, but it's still flexible enough to use in your preferred way Export words to Anki/Pleco ML workflow for extracting hard-subs, i.e. hanzi captions ingrained in the video. This expands the available content considerably. You can also use this to extract subtitles for yourself, there are instructions in the readme, but the process is still a bit rough around the edges (reach out for questions) lazybug.ai