Because my China page at Caltech is down at the moment, I'll post this here: on the laptop here at home I found a PDF of an article by UMich ALC professor David Moser titled "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard" that would be amusing even to readers who aren't students of the Chinese language. I Googled to figure out where I downloaded it from, and this lead to the site pinyin.info, which is still under construction but has made available a number of texts about Chinese, and East Asian languages in general. Oh, and here is the Moser piece, "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard." (and I see that this article was mentioned in an old Brainysmurf thread)