Talking Tea: Learning Tea With Babelcarp
Mar 8, 2017
We’re calling this episode “learning tea” because
learning about tea can be like learning a language – like learning
English, or French, or Chinese, or any other language. There’s a
vocabulary to tea, and the world of tea is so vast, with so many
words, facts and concepts to learn and keep track of, that it’s
easy to get overwhelmed. Compounding this in the English-speaking
world is the fact that tea terms are often actually in
another language – most commonly Chinese or Japanese. So what’s a
tea drinker to do?
To look at one solution to this problem in the world of
Chinese tea, today we chat with Lew Perin, the creator of a free
website app called Babelcarp. Lew calls Babelcarp a Chinese tea
lexicon, but it’s much, much more than a dictionary. We chat with
Lew about his background in tea, what Babelcarp is and how it
works, and how its structure and system of links and
cross-references make Babelcarp a virtual encyclopedia of Chinese
tea. As an example, we type a sample tea phrase into Babelcarp
and look at the answers and cross-links Babelcarp provides. We also
chat with Lew about the Babelcarp add-on in the Pleco Chinese
dictionary app and how it can be useful in purchasing tea
online.
You can find the Babelcarp web app at babelcarp.org. Lew
Perin’s Twitter feed is @babelcarp.
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episodes, visit our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/talkingtea.
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Talking Tea is produced and hosted by Ken Cohen.
You can follow Ken on Twitter @Kensvoiceken.
This podcast features music from “Japanese Flowers”
(https://soundcloud.com/mpgiii/japanese-flowers) by mpgiiiBEATS
(https://soundcloud.com/mpgiii) available under a Creative Commons
Attribution 3.0 Unported license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). Adapted from
original.
