The two official languages of multicultural Malaysia are Malay and English, but many other languages are spoken, including several Chinese and Indian dialects.

A Malaysian TV show called Mr. Siao's Mandarin Class provides a glimpse into Malaysian society and an idea of how these various cultures interact. The setting is a Mandarin language class, and the dialogue is a mixture of Chinese (Mandarin, Hokkien, Cantonese, Hakka), English and Malay.

Mr. Siao's Mandarin Class is entertaining and educational, even if you don't understand all the dialog. You can see it on YouTube.

I have a confession to make: I don't have a cell phone. So I don't know much about them besides texting and games. And up until today, I had just a vague idea that you can use a cell phone to browse the Internet.

So I was surprised to see that Google has a new cell phone app that allows you to search the Internet using voice input. Wow! This stuff is more advanced than I ever dreamed.

I don't consider myself a technophobe, being quite computer literate, but cell phones don't interest me at all. But I know that they are considered essential in some corners, so it's my duty to inform Mandarin students about the latest gadgets that can be used to learn the language.

This Google app recognizes English (in various accents) or Mandarin Chinese. According to the Google Research blog, "Mandarin Voice Search (is) a part of Google Mobile App for Nokia s60 phones. Google Mobile App places a Google search widget on your Nokia phone's home screen, allowing you to quickly search by voice or by typing."

Google plans to extend this technology to allow searches "in any language."

The BBC reports that we may soon be seeing Chinese characters in the address bars of our favorite web browsers.

Web addresses - anything beginning with http:// - are currently restricted to Latin characters. Considering that more than 50% of Internet users speak languages that use non-Latin characters, this domination of Latin based domain names is long due for a change.

There are lots of technical challenges to this proposal, but if all goes well, we should soon be able to use Chinese characters (as well as other scripts) for web addresses.

Just as there are many ways to say "can" in Mandarin, there are also many ways to say "to be".

The Mandarin 是 shì is an "equivalence verb" used when the subject equals the predicate: 我是美國人 / 我是美国人 / wǒ shì měiguorén (I am an American).

When it comes to adjectives, though, watch out. Many Mandarin adjectives are "stative verbs", which are used to describe a relatively static quality, such as "He is tall". Stative verbs already have "to be" embedded in them, so the correct translation of "He is tall" is 他很高 / tā hěn gāo (He very tall).

And yet a third way to say "to be" is with the verb 在 zài. This is a locative verb which also has "to be" embedded in it, so to say "He is in Beijing" we say 他在北京 / tā zài běijīng.