Thanks to Sina Weibo, China’s most popular blog network, I stumbled across this neat art blog, which I recommend taking a stab at if you like art, as you’ll learn a bunch of useful simplified Chiense artist vocabulary. This post discusses the fable-like origins of Ukiyo-e, a traditional style of Japanese art. The Chinese for “Ukiyo-e” is 浮世绘, or “Floating world paintings”.

I’ve been idly looking at moving to a new apartment lately (looks like I won’t be moving after all – a good thing, too, because I like my current place), and I typically use the Chinese property search sites instead of the foreign ones. The prices are about 4 times as high on the English sites made for foreigners, and the properties they offer there are often aimed at high-rolling executives. It helps quite a bit to be able to browse the Chinese listings, so I’m doing a few here. This is solidly advanced stuff. Local place names abound, so you have to be able to at least guess when something is or isn’t a proper noun, and because we’re working with real estate classifieds, a few words are shortened to save space or the formal version is used to sound professional.