Jacob Rhoden

安全帽

2012-03-14T01:59:10+0000

    我在台灣常常看到機車
    常常機車上有孩子
    常常父母戴安全帽，孩子沒戴安全帽
    這件事讓我很著急。
    我要知道為甚麼。。。
    有時候人沒有錢？
    有時候人懶惰？
    有時候人不覺得孩子的生命重要？
    或是你想這個外國人的思想很奇怪？

For a long time I have noticed and been concerned about the fact many parents in Taiwan take their children on scooters without a helmet. Often the parents wear a helmet, but the child does not. Given that I see so many scooter accidents in taiwan, it has perplexed me why parents would not want their children to wear helmets. Is it because the parents are poor, because they are lazy, or they don’t value their children’s life?

The above chinese is mostly my own. Below is a second more natural chinese version created with some useful feedback from a friend.

    我在台灣常常見到機車
    常常機車上有小孩
    常常父母戴安全帽，但小孩沒戴
    這件事讓我很著急。
    我要知道為甚麼。。。
    有時候沒錢？
    有時候懶惰？
    有時候不覺得孩子的生命重要？
    或是你想這個外國人的想法很奇怪？

Recognising Chinese character components

2012-03-14T03:46:07+0000

Today I wan’t you to consider if you are placing an appropriate value on being able to name components of chinese characters. It is likely that when you first started learning, you were taught your first few characters by learning their parts first. Is this method still part of your learning?

你好

Most chinese learners will of course have learn’t that good (好) is really just woman (女) with (子), from this point forward, whenever come across a new character which contains 女 you will find it easy to learn because your brain sees it as woman + something else. This ability to identify and remember characters by their component is natural with simple characters, ie after you learn sound (音) and heart (心), learning to write and recognise 意 is easier than if you had not first learnt the component. However it seems this skill of learning characters by their component does not get carried over when learning difficult characters.

蘋果 (Apple)

The word for apple (蘋果) starts with a 19 stroke character. The relative complexity can disable our ability naturally to see it as three simple components, especially if you have not first learnt the characters for page 頁 and 步. If you had previously learnt them, then Apple becomes trivial to learn, it is just 艹 with 頁 and 步. So the take home message is clear, if you are finding a character hard to remember, it might only be hard because you don’t know the components.

If you are in the situation where you have not already learn’t 頁 and 步, how are you able to discover which parts are true components, ie is 步 a component. or is 止? In these cases, a little trial and error is going to be required. I usually just hit the dictionary on my iPhone and try writing various parts.

Just do it

Enough talk, go right now and find some characters you have having trouble remembering, and break it down into the components. Practice doing this so it becomes a habit.

You may also be interested in subscribing to the Learn Chinese Weekly blog which frequently contains interesting information about usage patterns of radicals.

Pinyin vs Zhuyin (Bopomofo)

2012-03-18T07:49:17+0000

Many people love a debate over the benefits of using either pinyin or zhuyin. Many people are 100% convicted they know better than you which method is better. Usually expounding the benefits of pinyin, while at the same time having little to no real world practical experience using both systems. I am not interested in arguing with people for one writing system over another, however I would like to share some experience on the matter.

Practicality of zhuyin when living in Taiwan

People grow up in Taiwan being taught and using zhuyin as part of learning chinese. When you need to discuss or clarify with a Taiwanese person the correct pronunciation, zhuyin is the only reliable way to do this. Despite official government proclamations from time to time, there is no set method of using roman characters to write chinese in Taiwan. In northern Taiwan, many signs use pinyin, however in most of Taiwan, the romanisation on sign’s is best described as random collection of roman characters. Without going into detail, the official government signs along the street I live on demonstrate at least three different spellings of the name of our street.

Practicality zhuyin when teaching children

My son is learning both English and Chinese. Trying to teach a child of a young age both an English and a Chinese pronunciation for roman characters is non-sensical. Roman numerals have one set of pronunciations, and zhuyin has a different set of pronunciations.

Pronunciation benefits.

I used and was comfortable with pinyin for quite a few years. Having now made the effort to learn zhuyin, and become proficient in using both systems, an un-intended side effect has become apparent. Because in zhuyin each “letter” corresponds to an exact sound, it becomes clearer what the correct pronunciation of a word is. For example:

There are two different sounds in chinese approximated by a u and ü. However in official pinyin, the ü sometimes written as a u. Knowing the difference requires memorization, and after many years I still sometimes forget. This may be clearer by considering the following example:
- nu = ㄋㄨ
- cu = ㄘㄨ
- lu = ㄌㄨ
- nü = ㄋㄩ
- lü ＝ㄌㄩ
- ju = ㄐㄩ
Sometimes the pronunciation changes depending on the initial roman character, this means more memorization of correct pronunciation for different “words”. For example, there are two words that are simply pronounced u and ü, however in pinyin they are prepended with a silent w and y to become wu and yu. Beginners usually incorrectly pronounce the sound of w and y, and find it a difficult habit to break.

The future of Pinyin and Zhuyin

I am no advocate of eliminating chinese characters, however when it comes to teaching chinese characters, Pinyin is both convenient, and accessible to foreign learners, and a good argument can be made that it is quite helpful for beginners. If you live in Taiwan, it would be well worth your time to consider learning both systems. It takes a lot less time to learn Zhuyin than you would think, and in the process of learning it I believe you will likely start to pick up on some pronunciation issues your western brain has picked up from reading pinyin.

If I had my time over again, I think I would still want to have learnt to use, and to be proficient in pinyin, however I wish I had learnt zhuyin much sooner. I believe the exercise of learning and cross referencing both “alphabets” is beneficial for checking your pronunciation.

Chinese classes at Taiwan Universities

2012-03-08T05:32:24+0000

After some experience of studying Chinese at a Taiwanese university, I wanted to summarize some thoughts about the pros and con’s of the experience.

Study priorities

Many universities use a textbook, which at a full time study load, covers one chapter per week. The lessons give even focus on speaking, listening, reading, writing and grammar. Using the most common text book, the number of words you will learn per week approximately twenty words. It is clear to the teachers that it is difficult for students to participate in even basic conversation with such a limited vocabulary. This forces the teacher to supplement with extra materials that are not standardized and not integrated into the book. Given that students are not tested on the extra material, it is difficult to focus on learning both the material from the textbook, and the extra materials. I found that I had to spend many hours of studying grammar rules which limited my ability to learn new words.

As you can imagine, if a student is only being tested on twenty words per week, over the course of a semester, each student is going to be expected to have learnt approximately two hundred and forty words. Hence after six months you are going to be expected to know about 500 words, plus a whole lot of complex grammar rules.

A student who knows only 500 words is only going to be able to participate in the most rudimentary of conversations. It is unclear to me why students do not question why their progress appears to be so slow.

Too much grammar too quickly

To get good grades you will need to put equal amounts of study time into speaking, listening, reading, writing, and grammar. I found this to be too restrictive and unhelpful for someone living in Taiwan. As soon as I quit university, put learning grammar on hold, and focused on learning as many words as I can, I discovered I am increasingly more and more able to have conversations with people. If I was still studying at university there is no way I would be at the point right now where I can have conversations about my every day life with whom ever will listen to me.

My next project is to start reading native reading material, with the goal to start having some fun reading real chinese and to help sort out my grammar. I will let you know how that goes in a few months time.

Taiwan and the EPA

2012-02-07T03:20:33+0000

For several months, we would wake up to a stinky noxious smell in the middle of the night. Outside our window would appear to be dense smog. The attitude of in-laws and of our neighbours, seemed to be one of not caring. One neighbour suggested that one or more companies in the nearby "Science park" are probably acting illegally, our neighbours revealed their solution is to ensure their windows are kept closed at night.

We were becoming quite concerned, especially for the health of our young baby, when this same smelling smog appeared late on a Sunday afternoon for two weekends in a row. This triggered my wife into composing a letter to Taiwan’s equivalent of the EPA. We were skeptical this would achieve anything, so imagine our surprise, they responded almost immediately saying they would investigate the matter. Approximately one week later they informed us that their tests (conducted during a week day when the pollution doesn’t occur) could not find any problems. They informed us that if the problem occurs again, we should contact them.

Our conclusion out of all this was that talking to the EPA was a complete pointless waste of time. However it has been a few months from when we made the initial report, and as far as we can tell, the noxious cloud has not returned. I do not know if this is pure co-incidence or if there are back channels between the EPA and the local manufacturing businesses, but either way, reporting things to the EPA would seems to have solved the problem for now.

CC-CEDICT and role of dictionaries

2012-02-07T03:25:06+0000

I have had both positive and negative interactions with the editors of CC-CEDICT lately, I wanted to share some of them with the aim to gather some feedback.

Proper nouns

The dictionary seems keen to include some proper nouns, but not other proper nouns. I understand that in the real world, real paper dictionaries do not attempt to collect a list of every proper noun in the language, however I wonder if a more pragmatic approach would be more useful for learners of Chinese?

Prescribing rather than describing usage.

Recently I came across a word that seems to be commonly used in the phrase “char grilled” which for example, would describe “char grilled chicken”. When I submitted this particular word usage to cc-cedict, the update was rejected with a comment that implied “Taiwanese people need to learn to use their language properly”

Editor: yes, I have a better way. It’s to reject the change. And when you meet 碳燒烤, tell them it’s written 炭燒烤, because 碳 is a character that has been invented specially to designate the chemical element C. Original submission

http://cc-cedict.org/editor/editor.php?log_id=40006&return=ListChanges&handler=ViewLogEntry

Sample sentences

One of the first things I have to do after looking up a new word, is to go and find some sample sentences to both help me learn how to use the word correctly, and help the word stick in my memory. I can’t be the only person that is doing this. I suggest that cc-cedict could become an even more invaluable resource if words could be added to the dictionary along with their example usages. A word already has to be checked for its correct usages, so why not retain the example sentences as part of the dictionary compilation process?