new bicycle inauguration tour

View Larger Map
A spontaneous ride: I left the shop and rode around until I saw the MRT Muzha line on it's elevated track which I followed southeastward until it vanished in a tunnel through a hill. I turned right and rode southwestward towards Xindian river. I accidentally crossed the river on a highway bridge. Fortunately there was a track for Scooters which I could use. The same bridge did not have a track for scooters in the other way, so I had to use the next bridge upstream. Back on the Taipei side, there was a ramp for bikes leading from the bridge down to the riverside path which I wanted to take in the first place. I followed the riverside path downstream (Google Maps got this wrong, they don't know about the ramp for bicycles). I went farther then I thought. When I went back north to Heping Road, I hadn't realised that I was already west of Roosevelt, so I first went westward, then realised my error and went back east on Heping to Roosevelt, where my new bicycle inauguration tour ended. Google Maps shows the distance as about 18 km. The riverside trail was really nice (just as riverside trails in big cities are!) and bikes can go really fast there, when no intersection stops them.

This is life as I love it!

I had brought my tools with me and did some post-buy tunings along the way. Some more tuning yet to be done. For a report about the bike itself, see my other blog.

the weather in Taipei

In short I could say "hot and humid even in winter". In the last couple of days the day time temperature was around 21°C, there were only one or two really sunny days in Taipei, since I came here, but also only one or two really rainy days. Most of the time it is just a grey sky and quite a bit of haze. I can understand why my friend likes (the central town of) Puli so much: the air is much clearer there and it is sunny much more often. It also was sunny on the two days on which I visited. So nice!
The coldest temperature here in Taipei was around 11°C during some of last week's nights. Since people here don't have a heating and poor isolation, this meant that the temperature in my room fell down to 15°C and I had to wear warm socks and a sweater at night in order to sleep.
On the other hands, when it gets sunny during the day, it can get so warm that I am at ease in shorts and T-Shirt outside! In every case, girls here seem to sense the weather before they leave their houses and don't miss a chance to wear the shortest of pants.
For the Chinese New Year (which means two weeks of school holidays for me starting tomorrow) a cold front has been predicted. Let's see how that goes!

more on tones -- a myth buster episode

I am learning Chinese for more than four years now. Yesterday at the lunch table, I talked to my classmates using simple words. I still remember when I learned the word for "I" on the very first day of speaking Chinese. And guess what!? I am stilling pronouncing it wrong! My class mate had to correct me, because my tone was wrong. It's wo3, not wo1 or wo2 or whatever. Same happened a day ago, when I asked a food vendor in the street whether he has anything sweet. It's tian2. Saying tian1 only yields a blank stare from the Chinese person.
Yesterday, a friend told me that the ability to hear tones might be related to musicality. People with some musical talent or practice seem to be much better at it. Being very bad at singing and the like, what could discourage me more? Also, in my first couple years of learning I did pay no (or not much) attention to tones and then when I started I had a bad understanding of tones. It's a bad start, but I am determined to make progress!

There are several ways to explain tones and I think that some are just counter-productive. In this post I want to explain which explanations I think are useful and which are bad. Before I start I should add, that some people can probably hear the different tones when (slowly) spoken to them and can reproduce them just by repeating what they heard. Those people do of course not need any explanation on how to do it! Except of course, they are asked on how to do it. I think that's exactly what happens when I ask a Chinese person about tones. They will most likely give a wrong explanation just because they themselves never needed one. They will just repeat what they have heard...

Now, first of all, the myths:

• The biggest myth in my opinion is that the ton accents of pinyin or zhuyin describe the tones. Because they don't! The accents are merely symbols for the tones (just like Chinese characters are symbols for words and parts of words). Although their shape somehow ressembles a change of pitch in the speakers voice, this information is in no way sufficient to properly reproduce the tones.
• Given this first problem, it is of course also counter-productive to try to explain tones by moving your hand up and down following the shape of the tone accents. Such a movement can be used as symbol to convey the information "this is supposed to be nth tone", but it does not explain how this tone is properly said, either.
• Myth: "The first tone is the standard tone, just said as if you were normally speaking." That's wrong and the truth is: "The first tone has a higher pitch than any other tone." The only true part about the first statement is that the first tone is the only one with a constant pitch. But it's a constantly higher pitch and that matters.
• Myth: "The second tone is just like as if you were asking a question." That's actually true: the raising tone is used in Western language to indicate a question. But this explanation falls short of explaining the difference between the Wester-language question-tone and the Chinese raising tone. The problem is that the question-tone applies to an entire ending of sentence, which can be one syllable or more, while the Chinese raising tone (like any other tone) only applies locally to one single syllable.
• Myth: "The third tone falls and then rises again." That's actually quite true, but it is not the most helpful explanation. More helpful is to say that the third tone is actually the one with the lowest pitch and when trying to say it, we can safely omit the falling part, start very slow and then raise the pitch. This way it is actually raising just like the second tone, but overall the pitch is lower. When the teacher in the beginner's course here in Taipei gave that explanation, it felt like a revelation to me. Finally I was able to understand why the tone sounded somewhat different from what I thought it would.
• Myth: "The fourth tone is pronounced as if you were very angry. And it's always very short and abrupt." Well, for the anger, the same caution applies as for the trick with thinking of the second tone as a question. Concerning the fact that people always pronounce the fourth tone short and abrupt I am still puzzled. They always do it, when they want to show me how fourth tone is pronounced, but in normal speech I can not find the same pattern. 

Here is an image from "Reading and Writing Chinese" which I think explains the tones better than fore-mentioned myths. Since it is a book about reading and writing this does not promise too much, but I find it's a good start.

As for me, I now need much more practice...

I hope I just bought a bike...

... because I left NT$1000 as an advance and all I got is a receipt which I cannot read.

But the good news is: I ordered a bike plus extra parts and even haggled a bit on the price. If my Chinese does not again fool me then I will get a brand new Dahon Eco 3 with extra fenders and rack tomorrow. The Eco 3 is the cheapest Dahon model and not even sold in Western countries. It is more expensive than bikes from other brands, but looks like true Dahon quality. Especially the folding mechanism seems to be much better than the cheap competitors.

Brand new bikes sell for quite cheap in Taiwan (all made in China, I suppose), but Dahon's prices seem to be just like in the West. Gotta pay for quality, I suppose.

Buying the bike was a really interesting experience. The shop clerk even called his boss on the phone who tried to speak English to me, but in Chinese we seemed to have better communication. But of course, I have to wait until tomorrow to see how well we really understood each other.

stay tuned!

plan of attack

Classes at my school make slow progress, because they are designed so that students learn to write almost every word which they learn to speak and understand. The major exception are class room expressions which students have to learn very early in order to understand the teacher. Those are not (all) taught in writing.

Indeed, learning of Chinese characters is impossible unless the characters are repeated and reinforced very often. In class this happens mostly through reading from the book where previous characters are reused. I am pretty sure that students forget all the words which are not repeated often and I think those are quite a few words, since not every word can be used in every lesson. Since the characters are so complex, forgetting ones that you don't use very often is unavoidable. Since I do not have time to learn Chinese, I am convinced that I should only spend this valuable to learn characters which are of personal use to me, so I have a good chance of remembering them later. Anything else is just a waste of time (and of much time!), since it bears no long-term result.

As a consequence of this, I will have to expand my spoken vocabulary much faster than the written one, otherwise I will just not learn enough words for even the most basic conversations. That's why bopomofo and pinyin are so important to me.

For the written part, I have to find out for myself which characters are worth learning. I will probably have to skip many characters we do in school, simply because there's no chance of using them often enough later, and therefore no chance of ever remembering them. I am trying to come up with a list of characters worth learning:

1. Those on street-signs (traffic signs, as well as shop-signs).
2. Those on menus in restaurants and especially in garage kitchens since the latter have a very short menu written in big letters (on a poster, usually) and I go there often.
3. Some basic characters talking about "when and where do we meet?" which I can use in text messages on the cell phone or computer.

In order to have some success, I have to keep the list short and only learn the most important characters in each category.

Concluding remark: I would much prefer if the school's classes were separate for conversation and writing, so that student's vocabulary and pronunciation would progress faster and effort on reading/writing concentrates on characters that are really read and written often. This would be good for many people, but unfortunately not so for the school's main clientèle: Asian people who come to Taiwan to study at a university. Those youngsters do indeed need to spend all the time, make the big effort to learn to read as well as possible. Poor dudes, they'll need many years!
(As a contrast/comparison: Asian or other students who came to Western countries only need one (yes, one!) or two years of language learning to be able to successfully attend university. As another comparison, some children in any country but China can already read simple and medium texts before they go to school. Chinese kids, however, need for years of education to reach the same level of literacy!)

bopomofo inside-out

As a phonetic representation, bopomofo really sucks; even the most obviously similar sounds, don't have similar symbols. Actually, it does not just suck, but given that it was invented 470 years _after_ the Korean Hangul, it is a real shame for the Chinese civilisation.

But then there's the social side of it. Imagine if the only language people around you would speak was C++ or some other horrible, archaic idiom. Wouldn't you still love it! And that's what happened to me: since bopomofo is like an alphabet with about 36 letters, I was able to learn it within a week. And now I am pseudo-literate. I still can't read any signs or menus or anything else, but at least, when I write down a word (i.e. its pronunciation) I can ask people whether I got it right, and I can also ask them to write the pronunciation for me, so I can distinguish all the sounds that I cannot hear. In this sense, bopomofo has been a total success!

some rants

Chinese characters come in various levels of complexity. Simple ones like 人 or 中, medium ones like 安 or 慢, and really complex ones like 邊 or 機. The complex ones contain a lot of strokes, are hard to read and even harder to write, but they are still pronounced as one single syllable and since there are not many pronunciations available, there are lots of other characters which sound the same. The information value of the character is thus the same. Only very few characters (for words such as "I", "pig", "meat" and grammatical particles) are used by themselves. Most Chinese words consist of several characters (the great majority actually of two) and the characters themselves only have a use inside all of the words (or idioms, if you prefer that) in which they occur.
Now the big stupid trouble is that even the very complex characters almost always need some other characters around them when properly used. All that work to write a complex character and then it does not have extra value. That's why I am strongly in favour of the simplified characters. They carry the same meaning, transfer the same information with much less effort. People in Taiwan say that the complex (or traditional, or "real") characters are more beautiful. But to me embellishment is not beauty. In this case, Antoine de St. Exupéry's observation fully applies: Perfection is not when there is nothing to add, but when there is nothing to remove. ("La perfection n'est pas lorsqu'il n'y a plus rien à ajouter, mais lorsque qu'il n'y a plus rien à enlever.")

Actually, I think that it would be best for the Chinese to not use the characters at all for daily writing (like business, shopping lists, text chat, newspapers) and instead switch to a sound-based writing system like the Koreans did when they gave up Chinese characters and like the Vietnamese did, too. But well, I not here to change to world, but to learn those characters. And there I go...

so here....

In the last four days, I took part in a class of a different level on each day. So I had different class mates on each day! At least, I know a lot of people now!
The simple fact that I already know quite a bit of spoken Chinese, vocabulary and grammar, but almost no writing at all, throw the system out of its rails. Apparently, all classes at the school teach reading and writing together with the spoken language, which means that progress for the vocabulary and grammar is initially very slow. I would suppose that all language schools in Taiwan do the same.
I think the class which I took today is the one in which I will stay. They are still working with the first level book, but are already half through. I think that I know all the oral material in the book (although I have already forgotten much, since I last learned it). So I won't really learn so much new things, but it gives me a fair chance to learn writing, to practice more fluent speaking and listening and to try to actually remember all the words that I already learned. This first-and-a-half level class is my two hour class. All students of this class take the one-hour-class together with another bunch of students who are in a more advanced two-hour-class. This also offers room to catch some more advanced words and expressions.
Overall, I am happy with this outcome. However, I have also noticed that school does not seem to be the place where I can learn many of the words which I want to learn to get around in Taiwan. But I think overall the environment is excellent to permit me learning those words by myself.
Now, it's time to stop blogging and catch up with writing Chinese!

注音符号 -- 注音不好!

Bopomofo or Zhuyin Fuhao: A notation system for the pronunciation of Chinese which uses symbols similar to Chinese characters. This would have been an opportunity to create an alphabet whose letters actually reflect the sounds that they represent. Similar sounds could get similar symbols to speed up learning and make differences of similar sounds more clear.
Some people say that zhuyin actually reflects the shape of the mouth when pronouncing certain sounds. But in my opinion the opportunity to create something really well-designed was largely missed! This is very sad.
In order to learn zhuyin myself I made the following translation chart to pinyin in which similar letters are grouped together. You can see that there is only very little similarity between similar sounding phones, but there are a lot of false friends.

If you like archaic notations and false friends, then bopomofo is for you!

PS: Also being proud of the post title which is my first Chinese word play, although I don't know if Chinese ppl would consider it one.

is it because I am German?

It is totally obvious to me to pronounce and to hear the difference of aspirated vs. non-aspirated plosives: p-b, t-d, k-g. However for the affricates I can not hear the difference between aspirated and non-aspirated ones: [in Pinyin notation] c-z, ch-zh, q-j. Admittedly, it is even hard for me to tell the difference between the alveolar affricates c-z and the alveolar-palates ones: q-j. However, those are quite important in Chinese and I would really like pronounce and distinguish them well. Admittedly, q-j can be told from c-z by context, but the distinction between q and j and between c and z is quite important.
Hello my linguist friends, who wants to enlighten me?

Theresa's book

You are also advised, when first learning a character, to be conscious of all the radicals that appear within it. Say aloud the radicals while writing a new character. For example, say "knight-eye-cowrie" while writing 賣 "sell", or "grass-mouth-mouth-dove-yawn" while writing 歡 "to be pleased". Such incantations may be of considerable help in recalling characters to memory three of four days afer first encountering them.

Quoted from "Reading and Writing Chinese" by William McNaughton and Li Ying.
Thank you Theresa!

language learning -- the first impression

The school has two teachers for each class, one teaches two hours a day, that's the main class, and the other teaches one more hour per day, that's the practice class where the focus is on exercises and talking. Teachers seem to be very free in how they want to teach, they can use pinyin or bopomofo or both. They also have different books for both of the classes although the book for the one-hour class is not obligatory. One thing that's really good is that the teachers work a lot with dialogue, objects (or pictures of objects) and some role-playing, there is not much English spoken and this seems to be very effective. Much better to associate Chinese words with the things they denote than with words in another language (which for most students is only a foreign language, too!).

Learning the language is really easier, when it interfaces with real life. Once I have eaten, tang2 mien4 I know the difference to gan4 mien4. And also, the word for hot/spicy is very important so I can verify that I can actually eat the food which I buy. It seems that I have to do the discovery of Taiwanese menus and the related vocabulary on my own. First, ask the food sellers what they have, then go home and learn the characters for those words, and then go back and read the menu. Why can I not just translate the menu with a dictionary? Well, because I don't yet have the magic ability to find a Chinese character in the dictionary!

I wonder how long it will take to learn the characters for all the Chinese words which I can already correctly say and understand...

what now?

As I was talking to the student office today, it turned out that no second level class started this month. I was invited to listen in to the third level class, which I did for two hours today, interleaved with two hours of my first level class. The third level class was really interesting, students seemed to be really fluent in Mandarin when it came to discussions and the vocabulary introduced in the class seemed really advanced to me: the first lesson was about describing faces from the teeth, via lips, nose, eyes, ears and hair with several special attributes introduced for each part of the face. Overall, mostly words which you wouldn't use in your daily life (except if faces were your business).
The atmosphere in the class was really great: students seemed to know each other (probably from taking earlier levels together, although some students just joined the class at this level) and were having much fun together. And those people from all the different parts of the world were mostly talking Mandarin among each other. That's really cool! Although I could not easily keep up with this advanced class it was fun and just from hearing those people and taking part in discussions (which are much slowed down when I speak), I learn a lot.
In the other third level class which I took the teacher was using zhuyin (bopomofo), which I thus saw used for the first time. I already understand a little bit of it and think I could learn it quickly by myself when I need it. However, the larger part of this class consisted in reading example texts and dialogue for some new vocabulary, and this text was entirely written in characters and to my big surprise (if I remember correctly) all the students in the class could read this text and knew all the characters! At this point of the class, I was totally knocked out. I already knew some of the characters, but reading an entire text is still beyond my abilities. (My surprise how well those students could read comes from how little attention the first level teachers seem to pay to the writing of characters.)
Now, after taking both first level and third level classes today, I am pretty sure to belong into the second level. But what should I do now? Take the first level class? Take the third level class? Negotiate a special solution? I know one other person from my class who might be ready for a second level class... probably that's not enough to start such a class, but maybe we could get at least one hour of second level each day and take the other two hours with the first level people. Anyway, when we are bored in the first level class, we spend the time writing characters and one of the teachers will at least write characters on the board, so we can copy them (given some basic knowledge about stroke order which we can acquire ourselves).
So, I'm in for another early-morning meeting with Ms. Li. Once again, let's see how things go.

start from zero

As I wrote last week, instead of a level assesment test, the teacher just asked me whether I can write and on hearing my "no" sent me to the beginner's class. So, today I was expecting to get a brush-up on pronunciation and the pinyin/zhuyin notations. I think I could really need some perfection of my pronunciation, focusing on some of the similar-sounding sounds (like q, j, ch, zh, z, c) and the tones.
However, unfortunately and surprisingly, our first class today started with a very short introduction for tones (which I admit was useful, because the teacher explained the third tone different from how I know it and I think that helped me), but the she went on teaching us some words with special attention to the tone, but with no attention to the sound. In fact, she was using only Pinyin and assuming that we all know it. Also, I hoped to see some writing, but there was none at all.
So I was a little disappointed and I am questioning what value there is in a mostly oral course when I explicitly stated that I want to learn to write. I also just had a look at my school book and saw that it mostly contains things which I have already learned two or three times over.
So I went to the school's office after lunch and they told me to speak to Ms. Li tomorrow Morning about how to proceed.
I think that learning to write is mostly done at home by yourself and I already started learning the week I arrived here. I just hope that I can attend a class which also talks about writing each character as it is introduced. I have seen that done in other places and I think it doesn't take too much class time away if the teacher just shows the character, talks about it's radical and components and gives a chart of the stroke order.
So much for now, let's see how things go.

my classmates in the beginner's course (入門華語)

I've been told that most Chinese language students in Taiwan are Asians. In our class, however, it's fifty-fifty: four Westerners and four Asians. It's an interesting mix of people:

• two Vietnamese girls who just finished High School and want to study in Taiwan later.
• two men from Thailand: one of them disappeared during the first break and the other one is a monk.
• an American girl who also wants to go to College in Taiwan, she did a little Chinese in college in the US and also taught herself writing characters from books.
• a French woman who wants to work in Taiwan, so she can live with her Taiwanese boyfriend.
• a photographer from Turkey who wants to work in Taiwan.
• and a German grad student from Canada who wants to learn Chinese so he can order food in restaurants and write Chinese text messages to his Chinese friends.

Remarkably, the French girl really looked French on first sight (I guessed before she told me). Also remarkably, the American girl uses a lot of Asian body language, which I thought she has learned from watching Mangas, but she also had a Korean boyfriend before and she worked in a Korean company in the US. She seems to be the one most interested in the Chinese language itself and I instantly liked that. She already taught me how to write her name: 李亮瑩.

funny first dialogue with my Vietnamese classmates

They are two girls and four boys. The boys will study at another university, but were with the girls today, because their classes didn't yet start.
We didn't introduce each other, because we couldn't understand our names anyway (or know what word is a name and what word isn't). But generally it was very interesting because we carried out almost all our conversation in Chinese. It's good to talk to other students of the language, because they speak simply and slowly and are patient with me.
So one of them asked: "How old are you?"
"28" I said.
- "Oh, really, all of us are also that age."
- "hm."
- "Oh wait, did you say 28 or 18?"
- "I am 28."
- "Oh."
And they he said that they are all 18 years old. Wouldn't have been able to guess, since 28 year old Vietnamese people would probably not look much older than 18 anyway.
Later they asked me if I was married. Other culture, other focus...

Why I love Taipei

A non-exhaustive list...

• the subway has beautiful trains and gorgeous stations: big, clean, well-lit and lots of lines of sight. Can't get lost there. Can't feel sad there.
• the city has lots of huge, wide avenues with plenty of space for traffic to flow, for scooters to park and for people to walk. Think of Toronto's University Avenue. In Taipei all major streets are like this. In comparison Toronto's main streets (be it King, Queen, or Yonge) do look like small-town streets. (It seems that the layout of those streets was mainly done during the fifty years of Japanese rule 1895 to 1945.)
  
• spreading from the major roads are medium streets (sized like most streets in Toronto) and from the medium streets spread lots of lanes and alleyways, which are really, really small (sometimes not even space for one car), but which are very, very lively: here's usually where the good food is cooked and sold, shops extend into the street and leave little space for people which is all taken up by those stopping by. This is the natural / organic version of a shopping mall and it's much better. (Yes, I am a fan of natural things!)
• Many of the big and medium streets have building build over the side walk, which thereby becomes roofed over. I think this is an excellent way of building a city: the street becomes wider, yet buildings are close together, and of course pedestrians are shielded from the rain. It's amazing that this works in so many streets, although the individual buildings are all different in architecture. Gaps between the buildings are often roofed over by very simple means which look very ad-hoc, but do their job. It's like a lot of diversity which agrees in the point that's most important: keep people's heads dry.
• the food, oh yes, the food would deserve a couple blog posts of its own. I only want to highlight one thing: the food places which I like most are very small, independently run, often found together in a food alley, or scattered through town. They are very small (maybe just a stand in the street), all the food as fresh made; the venues are very simple, much below western standards, for example, customers sit on little stools in the street, but the quality of the food is so much better: fresh ingredients, freshly cooked, with a large variety of herbs and spices. Just the kind of food that I could eat all week, no need to cook at home or go to a fancy restaurant. Key to this scheme is first that all food places are very small and offer only a bunch of related dishes --that's why they can make it all fresh on the spot and still be cheap-- and second that many of those small shops are found together in one street, which gives hungry people a huge choice of different things to eat.

Maybe I'll add more things later...

我是老外，请说慢点。

When I am going out, mainly for buying food, I am in a conflict: I want people to speak Chinese to me (not English), but my Chinese is not really good enough to speak normally with people. And I really don't want to explain every time "Please speak Chinese with me, but please be patient."
So I made this little sticker written in Chinese characters and pinned it to my sweater. It says "I am a foreigner, please speak slowly." My teacher commented today: "Oh, you are so cute." Haha!

Similar news from going to a food place which usually displays a menu on the wall or on a little sheet of paper. Cook asking: "What can I get you?" Me replying: "I can't read. What do you have?"
Life can be so fun, if you admit your weaknesses upfront!

first day of school -- the level test

The school told me that I can show up for the level test "from 1/7 to 1/9 any time between 1-3 in classroom 209". That's already a little strange -- it's more accommodating to students than I have ever seen before.
Now, since I am totally keen to start school, I did of course go on the first day and the earliest time. There was a bunch of other students who looked Chinese (so I didn't think they were students of Chinese language) and they turned out to be Vietnamese.
The teacher greeted us, asked our names and asked how much Chinese we have learned before. The Vietnamese students all just started learning one month ago (or was it three, I don't remember) and so they would do the beginner's course anyway, no test needed.
The teacher asked whether we had already studied Chinese writing and since I hadn't (in fact, I just started self-study on the day I arrived here!), I will also to the beginner's course! No level test needed. We'll see how all of this works out. I don't mind starting from the rules of pronunciation again, because I am still lacking some of the foundations. Since the Computer Linguistics course and some discussions about sounds in English, I am also more aware of how sounds are made in my mouth and hope to make use of that knowledge this time. Also, we will learn zhuyin / bopomofo (the Taiwanese notation for pronunciation, as opposed to the international pinyin), which is useful to communicate with Taiwanese people about pronunciation. The relaxed style that people have here gives me hope that I will later be able to skip some stuff that I know already and make good use of my little time here to learn new stuff. So I don't worry about being in beginner's level.

First day of classes will be next Monday, when we get some equipment from the school and then start at 8:10 in the morning every day until 11. That's gonna be my life for the next three months; until the 10th of April, in fact.