About ChineseBug
If you've been bitten by the Chinese bug, you've come to the right place. ChineseBug wasn't built by professors of linguistics or companies looking to shrinkwrap a product for maximized profitability. ChineseBug was built by a beginning Mandarin student who discovered that learning Chinese is hard - but that it could be easier with the right tools. Our primary focus is in helping you memorize Chinese words - and keep them memorized - but it is our goal to find and incorporate as many learning tools especially suited for the Chinese language as possible.
If we don't have it, we'll tell you who does. (See our Directory of Links)
ChineseBug keeps track of everything you know (and don't know), offering the largest assembly of tools to help you memorize your vocabulary and Chinese characters.
About the Name
1. [a noun] A person who has a great enthusiasm, a craze or an obsession for Chinese.
2. [a verb] To bother, annoy or pester. Our service will BUG you to stick with your Chinese language studies.
3. Spiderline® is the name of our parent company... and how appropriate to place a bug in our web!
About the Organization
ChineseBug was designed and developed by Ben Benson, an Internet architect who moved to Beijing in July of 2008. His wife Lily is a Mandarin language school teacher and provides the oversight that only a native speaker can. Ben's father is also a linguistic expert in many languages.
Spiderline LLC is the legal entity behind ChineseBug and is owned by Ben.
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Ben Benson is an architect of large-scale high availability Internet products. He moved to Beijing after marrying Lily Gao in 2008, and began developing ChineseBug to aid in his own Chinese studies. |
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Lily Gao Benson taught Mandarin to public school students in the United States before returning to her hometown Beijing in 2008 to complete her Masters degree in Chinese literature. Lily provides general oversight to the ChineseBug system and ensures that we're in line with what academic instructors would like to see. |
Our Advisors
To make ChineseBug the best memorization tool possible, we've hand-picked people from many different perspectives on learning Mandarin and asked them to help us guide the product. A big thank you goes out to the following individuals.
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John Bauer is John is a student of Chinese and a developer of learning techniques and learning effectiveness and efficiency measurements. John studied Chinese at the Hengshu language school in Beijing, and studies at home with his Chinese wife Ping and bilingual daughter Jeni. |
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Michael Isvy is a software designer based in France. For work and (p)leasure, he happened to spend some time in China. That was a useful experience that taught him how to cycle on ice (easy as long as you go straight), blow-up fireworks on Chinese new year (easy). Also, Michael happens to be married to a lovely Chinese woman and has two half-Chinese daughters. |
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Peter Ritchie is an Australian chemical plant manager working in Shenyang on a 2 year expat assignment for a Chinese state owned enterprise.
He started to learn Chinese in 2008 and has struggled ever since.
"I have decided that waiting till I was over 50 to start was probably not the best strategy but have so far proved too obstinate to call it quits. I enjoy learning but wish I was progressing faster. I used to cheat and think I had pretty much learnt a word if I got the pinyin right, but hey the tones didn't really matter that much. Having discovered this was the road to failure, I decided I needed some discipline in my study to improve my recall of Hanzi and the associated tones. A friend said she was using ChineseBug and I gave it a try. I am now happy with my improvement in this aspect of Chinese learning but there is still a long way to go. My long term goal is to be able to read 80% of the content in basic management reports and newspapers without a dictionary." |
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Kendra Schaefer is an American web designer and content copywriter with 6 years of living-in-a-freezing-Mao-era-apartment-dear-god-why-did-they-turn-the-heat-off-its-only-February experience. After a long stint at Beijing Language and Culture University, and a longer stint in China's expat workforce, she's come to appreciate the value of portable ovens, shoes that fit, and cheap cheddar cheese. |
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Tad Turpen is currently an undergraduate senior at the University of San Diego majoring in computer science and economics. He specializes in computational linguistics and has research experience in the fields of named entity recognition and machine learning. He has taken two years of Mandarin and studied economics and mandarin at Peking University for a semester. He hopes to apply his computational linguistics expertise to his passion for Chinese language and culture. He enjoys snowboarding, reading and philosophy. |
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Albert Wolfe is an American English teacher at Guangdong Peizheng College in Guangzhou, China.
He started teaching himself Chinese when he went to China in 2005. He is the author of the popular language-learning
blog LaowaiChinese.net and the book
Chinese 24/7: Everyday Strategies for Speaking and Understanding Mandarin.
He has served as a translator in several capacities, a consultant for various other language-learning websites
and resources, and has even written a few Chinese pop songs of his own.
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Contact Us
Have a question? An idea for a new feature? Or maybe you'd just like to give us a pat on the back (we appreciate that too!). We'd love to hear from you - send us an email to the address below:
Official ChineseBug Logo
When you need the official ChineseBug logo for a web site, button, or publication, please use one of the following. We also provide a high-resolution version in Adobe Photoshop format if you need to make transparency changes.
