bye, bye Taiwan; welcome new, enlightened life;

After I came to Taiwan, I had many strong impressions and wrote a lot about them in my blog. After about half the time, I started to see more details of Taiwanese life, and it became harder to draw simple conclusions. Also my language class changed the teacher, I was much impressed with the new one, and struggling between doing Chinese homework or working on my thesis -- with the result of not getting much done of either.

My blogging stalled for a while because I couldn't make any easy theories about Taiwan and the Chinese culture any more. I found out that many of the simplistic things that I had written before are actually not so true, but the actual more situation just eludes my ability to describe in written form. I think that's why most books and especially blogs will always only carry a one-sided view of another country and another culture -- the true truth is too hard to express. It is best not to make generalizations. But then we are left with an overwhelming pile of details.

I did not want my lack of understanding to prevent the written preservation of my adventures, so I started to write a diary instead of posting to this blog. I started a paper diary and an text file on my computer. Both of which I am still continuing to write today.

Already in the last days of my stay, I have made notes for a concluding post to this blog and now I resolved to write it.

The true religion for Chinese people is their own five thousand year long history. I think you could convince any Chinese of anything if you managed to make a good argument using a historical example and quotation.

My first day back in our grad student lab, one other student asked me the very smart question: "So what is your conclusion after having gone to Taiwan?" Although I had thought about the same question since the last weeks of my stay in Taiwan, I was surprised by her directness and how she got directly down to the matter. Puzzled, the reply I said was: "There are people who are very poor and who have to work very hard and still they are happy. So I should be happy, too."

In retrospective, this was a good reply and one of the main things I think really matter. The other main things are:

• My current purpose in life is to do research (and a little teaching) and to advance myself I have to face the challenge of turning my ideas (which look so great in a presentation) into something tangible and something publishable.
• According to the motto "Be the change that you want to see in the world." I shall try to incorporate into my life, the things which I like best about Taiwan. Two of those things are friendships and Taiwan's famous food. I have thus resolved to cook more for myself, especially try out new, different vegetables (which I think make up an important part of Taiwanese food's greatness).
• Replicating the Taiwanese attitude to social relationships is harder, if only because it's so intertwined with life, situations and personalities of people that I can't even describe it. But one thing that stands out is how often I have traveled in stayed over night in friend's apartments even those places were very small and the friends were sometimes not very close. I find that it is much preferable to sleep on a carpet or to share a large bed than to stay in an hotel. Cultural immersion. I want to offer the same opportunity for other people, too!
• Chinese people often react very enthusiastic when they notice that I speak a little Chinese. They feel good to see that a foreigner actually makes a real effort to learn their language. After coming back to Toronto, I have had a similar feeling whenever one of my fellow grad students spoke German to me. It is also a conclusion of my stay, that I will continue language exchanges with people to teach my language and to learn theirs. Language exchanges are not just a way to broaden your own horizon without spending money, helping somebody else to do the same, it is also a grass-roots way to promote the understand between different cultures thus to help accomplish one the goals of my religion: "to end all wars, forever". (After all, wars are always plotted by those in power who are tricking the common people to see others as their enemy. In a society where all are too smart to be tricked, there is no more place for war to spin his evil plots.)
  

Hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It is just like roads across the earth. For actually the earth had no roads to begin with, but when many pass one way, a road is made. -- Lu Xun 鲁迅

As well, as providing me with a bunch of surprising insights, my Taiwanese adventure has also left me with more new questions than it has answered:

• Do I have talent for languages? Will I ever go back to Taiwan or China (except for visiting friends)? What use if any will my Chinese language have for me (and the world)? Will I ever elaborate and publish my invention of a new Chinese writing system?
• Both Taiwan and China are changing fast. What is the constant focal point amidst all that change? In some respects where they were far behind Western Civilization they have already caught up and even passed other developed countries. For one thing, Beijing's fight for clean air has passed the more developed Taipei by a huge margin! Can anybody predict where the voyage of those countries is going to go? Will China be peaceful and democratic one day? (Given how flawful Western democracies are, it is not hard to imagine that a newcomer to democracy will even surpass them.) One thing, I am sure of is that I will always keep in touch with my Chinese friend in Beijing and I also think that the situation in China will never be as bad as to force her to leave. So I'll have at least a foot in the door for eternity.
• Do I love the Chinese so much because there is a little bit of Chinese in myself? Is there a little bit of Chinese in everybody? Or is it just because Chinese are so different, yet so alike, and living there helps me to break free from my own cultural corset?
• Who am I? Where do I belong? Will I be able to contribute to society by –in Chunming's words– "living a happy life and being a good person"?
  

There's no place where I can be, since I found serenity.

How to translate your name to Chinese? --or-- How to pick a Chinese name for yourself?

Say you are learning Chinese or visiting China (or Taiwan or any other place where Chinese is spoken). Why would you want to have a Chinese name in the first place?

• First, because in speaking Chinese, the language flows much easier when it is not interrupted by foreign-language names. Even if you only learn very few traveler's phrases, it will be easier to say them when there a all-Chinese and not interrupted by a foreign-language name: Wô jiào Xiàofeng, ni3 ne?
• Second, I don't like things pronounced wrong and it is easier for me to learn how to pronounce my Chinese name, then to teach everybody how to pronounce my foreign-language name. Besides I am guest in the country and it's better I adapt then ask people to adapt. (Now I know some people don't care about wrong pronunciations and will come to the habit to see their wrongly-pronounced foreign-language name as some kind of Chinese name. I think that's exactly how pidgin-languages are formed. But I don't like pidgins. I think we can make an effort to speak two languages properly! And I am willing to do my part of it.)
• Third, having a Chinese name makes it possible for Chinese people to read it from the written form, and instantly recognize the spoken form as a name. (Of course, the name must be recognizable as a name and not something entirely made-up.)

So, now how do you pick a name? Here are some ground rules:

First, choose the name from a set of existing names, so that people will recognise it as a name and not think of something else. It is possible to make up a new name (that is, one not in common use in the Chinese language yet), but this requires excellent language skills and talent to a level that even many native speakers don't have.

Second, when you have found a name, make sure you ask some friends about it, to check what connotations it has. Some very old names might not be thought of as names any more and rather be allusions to some historic concepts and event. You might be lucky and pick a name that signifies historic beauty and bravery (maybe at the expense of sounding fulsome and corny), but you might also have picked a name that stands for historic treason (such as 吳三桂), which is really unacceptable (or at least ridiculously strange).
Furthermore, your potential name might be shared by a contemporary public figure, which can play in your favor if it is a well-liked person or somebody, but it also can badly backfire if the name is shared by a famously corrupt politician or an actress know for sleeping her way up. You can easily avoid this embarrassment by asking a few Chinese people first. But ask people from the place you are going to, since Chinese from another place might not know the local celebrities. (For example, overseas-Chinese share a common history, but often don't share the common affairs with the mainlanders.)
Finally, asking for name feedback will help avoid having a name that is really a good name by itself but whose pronunciation is the same as some other thing that you really don't want to be associated with. This is especially important since your pronunciation might be a "little bit wrong" or ambiguous. If there is a word with very similar pronunciation you at least want to be aware of it and take care to pronounce your name so it clearly does not sound like that thing.

Third, and last, ground rule, it never hurts to ask your Chinese teacher or any other well-educated person about a name that you have in mind. People who are professionals in language (or at least very interested in language and culture) often have some additional information about names and their meaning. For example, only a few people knew of the Kung-Fu relation of my name and only one person actually knew the author of the famous Kung-Fu novels which use the name.

So, after reading those basic rules you wonder where to get a name from in the first place. Here are the possibilities:

• Transliterate your name.
• Translate the meaning of your name.
• Pick a name from a list that sounds nice.
• Pick a name from a celebrity or historical person or fictional person which you like or revere.
• Pick a name which in some way describes you.
• Just ask a friend whom you like to give you a name.

Now, here's what the means in detail:
Transliterate your name. This means you simply pick some Chinese characters that are pronounced similar to your foreign-language name. Usually anybody who can write Chinese can do this for you, but the better educated they are the more likely it is they will choose characters with fitting (and positive!) connotation. This transliteration might end up with a name that is also a proper Chinese first name, or it might end up with a character combination that is not used as such. Then people seeing will usually deduce that it is some kind of transliterated foreign name.
Furthermore there are some foreign names, especially English names and those of foreign public or historic figures who have already been transliterated and for which one transliteration has become standard. A typical example is the name David, whose standard Chinese form is 大卫/大衛 (simplified/tranditional). Other typical examples are the first names of American presidents and famous actors. If, for example, you pick the standard translation of George (乔治), the Chinese will link you to George Bush and George Clooney. If on the other hand, you don't want to be linked to those people, you can intentionally choose a non-standard transliteration which gives you a different Chinese name that it still linked to your name, George.

Translate the meaning of your name. This is a very interesting way, because most Westeners don't think of their names as having meaning or at least not as much as Chinese names have.
But what is the meaning of a name? It can be the name's origin, it can be it's connotations. Many Western names are of biblical origin or go back to some king or queen. Others originally were descriptive of desired qualities -- just as Chinese names are! It is certainly worth looking up the etymology of your name to provide you with input for your name choosing. Once you know about your own name, you can ask Chinese people for Chinese names of similar meanings or origin.

Picking a name from a list. I think you should at least be familiar with some common, popular names to get a feeling for their sound and structure. A simple list with popular names is easy to find (TODO: where did I bookmark that link... can anybody help?) If the list contains notes about the name connotations even better. But once you know a little Chinese, you can also look up the characters in a dictionary.

Picking a name that describes you. There are countless of names that allude to beauty, filial piety, studiousness and all the other traditional Chinese virtues. A friend of mine is 静 (meaning: "calm") and she really is a quite girl (now a woman). It will be harder to find a name that represents a Western virtue such as "confidence" -- boo!, we Chinese want "modesty"! If you want to pick a name for yourself rather look out for which Chinese virtues you represent (or revere) and pick reflecting those. It will be a more natural Chinese name than translating Western concepts which do not exist in China.

Picking a name that sounds well. Obviously you need to pronounce it correctly. If you don't know much Chinese, best thing is to have it read by a friend. Also make sure that you pronounce your name well. If it is too difficult too pronounce for you, rather pick something different!

All of these sources can be used together. In fact, you will want to have a name that sounds well and has a nice, fitting meaning.

Finally I shall say where my own Chinese name comes from. My Chinese family name in traditional characters is 衛 (the simplified is plainly 卫) and it is a transliteration. The character 衛/卫 is often used for transliteration. It is also used as a family name in China. So it is easy to recognize as a name and still links to my family well.
My first name is 啸风 which I picked from a Chinese pirate character in one of my favorite movies. The individual characters have nice, powerful meanings (风 means wind, 啸 is used to write several different words, one of them being Tsunami) and the name itself is also used in some Kungfu novels. This name expresses my energy to stir things up and also my love for the sea.
Before I went to Taiwan and when I didn't know much Chinese I used the names 小虎 (from a Kungfu movie made by my favorite director) and, later, 小猴. The latter refers to my birth year, which is a year of the monkey. It also portrays me as me being a cute little guy. I don't like that so much any more, but would accept being called so by very close friends (and my lover).
Finally, there is one transliteration of my Western first name which I like a lot: 萝卜, which means Raddish. I like this because I like to eat 萝卜糕. It's also fun because it can be combined with the imaginary family name 白 to yield 白萝卜 which is even more precisely a vegetable: White Raddish (Daikon or Japanese Raddish in English).

As you can see, names can be a lot of fun. A way to define and extend your identity. Don't waste the opportunity to get a little closer to the Chinese culture. Pick a Chinese name for yourself!

war in China

From a recent article in the English section of the Taipei Times:

The Pentagon said in a statement: “On March 8, 2009, five Chinese vessels shadowed and aggressively maneuvered in dangerously close proximity to USNS Impeccable, in an apparent coordinated effort to harass the US ocean surveillance ship while it was conducting routine operations in international waters.”

Highlighting mine. This sound to me just like what I've heard about Mainland Chinese people's driving behavior!

After have read so much about China, I will finally go visit the Mainland a couple days from now. Stay tuned for first-hand reports!

PS: I don't think that I will go sailing, but I wouldn't miss out on an opportunity if it would present itself. :-)

PPS: On China's military expansion rhetoric:

“They claim Taiwan, obviously. They claim the Senkaku Islands, which are between Taiwan and Japan. Japan also has sovereignty over those at the moment. They claim the Paracels, which Vietnam claims. They claim the Spratlys, which Vietnam, the Philippines, Brunei and Malaysia claim.”
“They claim lost territories basically wherever you can find a piece of Chinese porcelain from 500 years ago,” [Democratic Senator Jim] Webb said.

a method to divide and conquer Chinese characters

Writing this other lengthy post helped me to sort out my thoughts on Chinese characters and increase my understanding. Shortly after, I had a mental break-through: as many characters are composed of other characters it seems that two different methods of learning are necessary: one method to memorize the shape of a non-composed (atomic) character; and another wholly different method to memorize which parts make up a composed character. Some of the recurring parts of characters are not characters themselves and they make learning harder, because you have to learn the part while also learning the composition. The key insight is to factor out those parts, give them invented names and memorize them seperatly!


This idea revolutionized my learning of the Chinese script. While the thousands of characters still remain arbitrary, there is at least an optimal, non mind-numbing method to memorize them. Don't look for a deeper meaning; just decompose and memorize along the actual shape of the character. Realizing this and using it in practice I also realized how uneffective the "etymological method" of teaching the characters is: first of all, you learn sometimes have to learn components of a character that used to be components in earlier forms, but are not any more represented in the current form. This way, you first learn a wrong character and then add the correct, modern version without any further story to memorize the modern component. You only know that it is somewhat similar and simpler than the original one, but that's not precise enough to memorize it. It is especially ridiculous when comparing it to the length and elaboration of the story explaining the old, now wrong version of the character. Furthermore, the etymylogical approach does not help to memorize small differences between characters which are very similar by appearance, but have a completely different ethymology. I already complained how this approach makes it hard to locate a character in a dictionary. It's a trial and error process that's completely unnecessary: character lookup should be based on shape alone, since that's all that the user has when he needs this function at most!


Right when I had this insight to split my learning into memorizing of basic shapes and memorizing of of compositions, I thought that I should turn my notes into an interactive website just like zhongwen.com. Using Unicode it is technically trivial now to display characters on the web and typing them up on a website with links is not much harder then typing them into a notes file as I currently do it.


I had already started to plan the design of such a website when I thought that my idea being so obviously great, somebody might have had the same idea already. And indeed! No long websearch was necessary to reveal the wonderful book Tuttle Learning Chinese Characters Volume 1: A Revolutionary New Way to Learn and Remember the 800 Most Basic Chinese Characters I bought it, and I really like it. This book takes the only reasonable approach: no matter how insane and complex the Characters are, just look at what's being given --the character shape-- and memorize it using the most efficient approach. If I should ever seriously try to learn the Chinese script, I will do it using this book. And I will use the same method for learning characters which are not in the book -- using zhongwen.com and other sources to research the character components.

Taiwanese encounters

Unexpected rain led to three unconventional encounters. Here comes the summary.

一。I was packing up Bunny to take the MRT when suddenly somebody held the bike for me, so that I could easily wrap it up. I since I was bent down to hold I bag, I couldn't even see who was helping me. When we were done, the young man started a conversation with me (the typical where are you from... how long are you staying...) and after the most typical things were said he offered me to exchange contact information, so I can call him when I need any other help in Taiwan. He said that he might go to Germany at some point and would like to know somebody there. So this somebody would be me. He told me that he just graduated from school and wants to try to work in several foreign countries. He was really very nice and so we exchanged addresses.

二。In the MRT the train windows were steamed from inside since the rain cooled the outside down. A girl was drawing Tictactoe on the window. I drew a grid next to hers and we played a game. Of course it was a draw. After a short pause, I decided to start a conversation like Taiwanese do and asked "How old are you?". We had a short conversation and she couldn't guess where I was from. Unfortunately she got off at the next stop. Sometimes it is so interesting to talk to people, but unfortunately not many people offer such a nice ice-breaker as Tictactoe.

三。Off the MRT it was still raining a lot. I saw a man waiting at the MRT exit, waiting for the rain to subside I thought. What hope did he have that it will end soon? I asked myself. Maybe if he is waiting I should wait to. In great conversation mood I greeted him and asked: "Where do you have to go?" and another nice conversation followed. He told me many things of which I understood some. He said that he expected the rain to lessen in half an hour (but now, 90 minutes later, it still seems to be raining). After twenty minutes I decided to go and brave the rain and he parted, too.

I never had so much smalltalk with strangers on any day in my life before. But here in Taiwan it's really interesting. People are not the same as home and it's a way to get to know them. When I am waiting somewhere where other people are, I am always debating with myself to start a conversation or not. At home (be it Germany, France, or Canada) I usually don't do this kind of smalltalk and I am usually happy that way. Here it's different...

三个短篇小说

看繁體字

晚上约会

我们在朋友的家约会。我的脚踏车放在她的客厅里。一起去夜市吃晚餐。然后去買东西。回家。很好玩儿。

语言交换

我以前的语言交换同伴去高雄了。所以我要找新的。找到两个人。一个是男的，我们昨天晚上约。一起吃晚餐，然后去咖啡厅。说中文一个钟头，以后我就很累了。然后说英文一各种头，以后他很累。回家。再下个礼拜见。

其他的找到人是女的我们下个礼拜第一次约。

颐和园

昨天夜晚我看了大陆电影。他的发音很清楚，但是大部分我听不懂。有一个句子我听懂了我觉得很美丽。“我心里没有你。你心里没有我。” 很美丽，也很愁绪。

Why I don't like 中文字譜(zhōngwén zìpǔ) that much anymore.

I was much impressed by Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary and the associated website zhongwen.com when I bought the book and started using the site. But am starting to be disappointed and eager to try out other resources. Here's why:

• Even though finding a character in the dictionary is easier than with a traditional radical-based dictionary, I still sometimes get stuck in dead-ends and skimming through long lists of very tinily printed characters is no fun.
• The etymological ordering in the dictionary is great to find components of a character and characters that use the same components which is a great help for learning. However, since the ordering is etymological and not just by character-shape, this is often not what I want. If a component of a character looks like 日 (for example) then I want to memorize it what that component and not with some other more complicated component that is given as the root in the dictionary and was shortened to 日 during the course of history.
• The website has some bugs (characters not displayed properly) and is not very much maintained any more. (Although it is running Google Ads on the side and I suppose the author is still making good money from it, as well as the book royalties, given how popular both are.)
• The website precedes unicode and all the characters are embedded as graphics. That's really impractical compared to newer dictionaries to and from which I can simply copy and paste characters to my notes or directly input a Chinese character from the keyboard, instead of doing a search for it. Hardcoded graphics also mean that the website is stuck with a very small font that clearly shows pixels and sometimes has the (complex Chinese!) characters unreadable in the list views. (Note: some of the historic characters and only-component characters are probably unexistent in unicode, but they could easily be kept as (better quality) graphics while the rest of the page is transformed to use scalable (and anti-aliasable) fonts.)

In spite of all this, I am still using the site to dissect all the new characters I want to learn...

study principles --or-- how to keep myself sane

I have to remind myself of the following strict order of learning:

ONE. learn words and expressions first by their pronunciation and their use in speech. write down the pinyin or bopomofo. look at the characters used to write that word (if available) to see if you already know any of them. if yes, this will help you remember. if no, don't even look at the characters any further. and I mean it: resist the temptation to discover something new! you might learn something interesting, but as arcane as the characters are, it is impossible to remember anything no matter how profoundly you investigate those characters. concentrate on using the words and expressions in oral first!
Obviously, you need to get your pronunciation right and need to use the word often in life or learning to remember it. hearing other people use it, will teach you more about different uses and shades of meaning. if all goes well, you have now learned a new word, that you can understand in listening and use in speaking. excellent! your Chinese has advanced. don't let the writing bother you!

TWO. if you find a word is written often, or you need to be able to read it, then study the characters which make up that word. But don't undertake this lightly: learning a character takes a lot more time then you think it would and trying to learn to many will make you confuse and forget them and all your time will be wasted. yes, wasted. I mean it. you can study half a day and not retain any result from that! figure what I meant by keeping yourself sane.

Now to start learning that character, take your Zipu or (zhongwen.com) and find the components of the character. after the first couple weeks of learning Chinese writing you'll only know a ridiculously small fraction of useful characters, but at least you will quickly learn the most common component characters which is important to memorize more complex characters. The characters may have their origin as pictograms and ideograms, but of this is a useless fact when you try to memorize a character. it just doesn't help you to distinguish characters. instead, you will learn to see components and then you can memorise a single, composed character just be memorizing which are its parts. good thing: for the most complex characters there is often a clearly distinguishable largest component which gives the pronunciation for the entire character. but note: most characters which you learn are of moderate complexity and don't have that feature. as a cynical aside: the simplest characters which are easy to remember and often occur as components to other characters are not actually in use by themselves anymore.
So, now you have the components of a character which you want to learn. you commit them all (with pronunciation) to your study notes next to the character that you are trying to learn.
if you already know some of the components, that's great, it will make learning much easier! for those that you don't know, take half a minute to see if they are used to write another word, which you already know. in that case, there's a chance you might actually be able to remember that character, too. so add that word to your study notes. all the characters which are not listed as parts of words which you know, leave untouched! don't think you can just learn an extra new word from the dictionary unless you already know a lot of other words from that area. chances are that the word from the dictionary is a rarely used one and people will instead use a synonym, or that it's meaning and use are slightly different than you thought. it's usually a waste of time: new words are best taken from other people or real-life situations. the primary reason to write down all those component characters is to memorize their form, so that the work of memorizing the target character becomes less, or actually: becomes possible in the first place. besides, those components later help to the distinguish your character from new ones that you'll learn (because you can compare characters on a more abstract level) and they will also be of help to learn other characters which contain them (then you have part of the work already done).
The notes about component characters (and their pronunciation, just so you can say something to yourself while reading) will be your key to remember a character. your path leading to it, so to speak. don't expect too much: the components are not a logical explanation for a character, they are only a way to break characters down to something that links them to other characters, even if that link is often just random (and often by sound). to me, the components offer access to a character and turn learning to read from a sanity-destroying activity to a merely mind-numbing, tiring activity. if you keep your components clean, learning more characters doesn't become easier, but at least reinforces what you have learned before. if you do it without this essential abstract structure, I think you'd confuse the characters more and more, the more you learn them. anyway, it seems insane to me.
Once you can read the character, you will also be able to write it with a computer or cell phone using a pronunciation-based input method. on the computer it can be very easy because you can type an entire word and if that word is in the input method's dictionary, it'll give you the correct characters automatically. if the computer doesn't know the word or it's a one-character word, you'll have to select from a list and that's where you need your reading skills.

THREE. hey, now you can use a word or expression orally, you can recognize it in reading and type it on your computer and cell phone. I hope you have opportunity to do all those things, because otherwise you'll forget it again. note that when using an expression only in oral, you might still forget how to read it! both needs practice. reading has the benefit of practicing character recognition and word use. I don't have anything which I am able to read besides my text book, so I use that.
Now, you think that if you can read it and write it on the computer then you should also be able to write it by hand?! ha! what for? who writes by hand anyways? even many natives forget how to hand-write certain characters, now that computers are everywhere. Ok, I understand that you want to try it at least, so here's my advice.
for handwriting, I find that there are two separate skills involved and one of them is actually of a gentle nature: you notice your own improvements and you have good chances of actually keeping the skill over time with only little practice. the other skill is a recipe for insanity in my opinion. it takes vast amount of time. progress is hard to measure. sometimes it seems easy and to realize that you forgot it again, or that you got it wrong. you literally invest a huge part of your life and you have huge chances of forgetting large parts of it later. just because you don't practice hand-writing in real-life. and because it's so ridiculously hard. (I am just preparing another post which illustrates this with some examples...)
Now, here's the first skill, which I think you want to learn, once you spent so much time with Chinese anyways. it's the skill of copying! writing a character which you can see written somewhere. why is that a skill at all? because it takes practice, to get the proportions right! it also takes time to learn the stroke order. and you should learn the stroke order! it makes writing easier and also, once you are able to write very neatly, you can speed up writing by making less precise strokes, sometimes not lifting the pen between strokes and then the hastily written characters will look similar to other people's (normally hasty) written characters.
To learn this skill you just take a character that you already know how to read (and therefore know some words and expressions which use it), look up it's components in your notes, take a book or website that has the stroke order (where you can easily find the character and components with the pronunciation which you previously wrote down). and then you write all the components, each until it looks it, and then the character itself until it looks neat. it's important to practice both, because components have to be scaled properly. that is, squeezed horizontally or vertically until they fit and the entire think looks like one character. make sure that the components are aligned properly, touch each other where they should, and are very close where they don't touch. you'll notice that you improve. be happy about that! for this short moment of time, you can write the entire character, neatly, and without looking at your book. you might even write an entire phrase without looking. but don't think that's the skill you have learned. the more new characters you learn, the quicker you'll forget the old ones. your skill is not writing something you want to write (as it would be in any other language or writing system), it is merely to make a neat and correct copy of characters you can see written somewhere. that's the part that you have acquired for long-term use! the part that you won't forget if you keep it up with just a little practice.
Now for the second skill: learning to write the proper character, properly for something that you perfectly know how to say and just want to write. should be easy after all that effort and base of skills that you aquired by now, you think? maybe you are already used to reading menus, signs, even some subtitles on TV (or even the newspaper!?). that's all good man, but reading in the world of Chinese characters is just not writing. to properly recall and write characters you need to practice a lot. and forget again, and practice again. have the stroke sequence run through your head while you walk, shower, shit, eat, sleep. it's mind consuming, time consuming, in short: life consuming. it takes time during which you could practice reading, talking, listening, learn new words, do something fun, do something productive, ... think about it as a question of ressources: learning to write by hand just takes more time than you'd think and more time than any other comparably useful skill.

summary: talking first, reading second, with good choice of which characters you need to recognize, and then writing, choosing your target characters with extreme care or you'll just waste time.

trying to read...

I just invested an hour of work to look up some characters that were written on a form. Looking up characters doesn't meet to understand their meaning, it only means looking them up in a dictionary. Usually I will write the pronunciation next to the character so I can find it easily again later.
Looking up characters has become faster with modern dictionaries which offer better indexes. With a dictionary like Zhongwen Zipu it also becomes faster when you know more other characters, because then you can navigate directly to a similar character which is (hopefully) listed close to the one you are looking for. (In obivious cases such as 厅 and 听 this almost always works, but those cases are only few...)
In short, half an hour for looking up a couple characters (using several dictionaries, because I just didn't know where to look anymore in the first one) is still quite fast. However, now that I have all the characters, with many meanings provided for each, but I still can't put it quite together! I found the characters, but they just don't make sense...
While it is normal that two characters who are put together to form a third one don't really contribute much to that characters meaning, it is sadly often also the case that even two characters standing side-by-side to form a word, do not contribute that much to the meaning.
I have noticed quite early when I came here that it is actually more the sound makes the meaning by pointing to a word that is used in speech. Indeed, it is not hard to read Chinese text if you know all the (spoken) words that occur in the text, even if you don't know all the characters! Some character pronunciations can be guessed from the character's similarity with know characters and from the pronunciation of the characters in context. (For example 厅 and 听 above are both pronounced the same.)
Trying to read something whose words and their use you don't know beforehand is indeed very hard!

艾许莉&萝卜 ／华尔奇丽雅

(View this post in Traditional Chinese/繁体字.)

昨天我们去了看电影。

I can't write much more Chinese yet. Suffice it to say that this post's title is making fun of Chinese transcriptions of Western names...

我的第一个考试。

My first exam in class was actually much easier than I had thought. It was not in dictation form! Instead, for the first question the teacher would read a long sentence and then ask a question about that sentence to test our oral comprehension. Example: "The cat's in the house, the dog's out of the house. Where's the cat." We only need to know the Chinese characters to write the answer.
Other questions were even easier: in one exercise, we have to fill in one-word (one or two character) gaps in a text, which only requires reading skills and the ability to write those two characters. Other exercises include "make up a sentence from two given words" and multiple-choice among multiple sentences to indicate which one is grammatically correct. The funny bonus about all this, is that the text questionaire contains many, many Chinese characters, mostly used in the context of phrases. So if you possess general reading/guessing skills, you can find characters on the questionaire and then just copy those for your answers!
The way our classes are set up is that grammar and (oral/pinyin) vocabulary knowledge usually exceeds students ability to hand-write characters. Therefore, the entire questionaire is rather easy, provided you actually know how to hand-write the characters needed to answer. But you can copy them from the questionaire itself!
Just the day before the exam I had come to the conclusion that handwriting is a rather useless skill. This exam basically confirmed my belief. I will write more about this later. Now have to go to school!

How to guess Chinese?

It is a common misconception that Chinese characters carry a lot of meaning and the meaning of the characters can be used to guess the meaning of a multi-character word. There are just too many examples, which totally defy this notion. Here just one which I recently saw: combine 性 (sex) and 格 (line, shelf) to obtain 性格 (personality).

Now, this post should be about how it actually works. What's often the key is not the meaning of the characters, but their pronunciation! Chinese kids who learn to write obviously already know most words by pronunciation, use, and meaning. As a foreign student living in China, I also know more words by pronunciation than I know by reading and writing. This is much opposed to Western "library scholars" who tried to understand Chinese only from looking at written words!

Here's one good example of how to guess a Chinese word. From my previous experience in writing funny labels I know the word 老 which pronounces lao3 and is the first character of the word "foreigner". I also know the character 市 pronounced shi4 and meaning "city", because it appears on many signs (e.g. "Taipei city"). From taking so many Chinese I know the word lao3shi1 "teacher", although I never saw it written. So today I saw the written word 老師 which I had never seen before. But I know how to pronounce the first part (lao3) and I know that composite characters often pronounce similar to their largest parts, so I guessed lao3shi? something and remembered the word for teacher. Context of the word suggested that I had guessed correctly. (Because it was in our class text, which doesn't have such a large vocabulary.)

With this guess I have learned two new things: first, the pronunciation shi1 of the character 師 and second, how to write the word for teacher: 老師. It is important to stress that the latter is not just a corollary of the former. Knowing that "teacher" and "foreigner" both start with the sound lao3 doesn't mean they start with the same character. Only from seeing the combination 老師 written, I know that it is indeed the same first character as in 老外.

I would think that one of the most common orthography mistakes in Chinese is to write a word with characters that sound just like the word meant to be written, but which are not the correct character for that word. It's the problem of homophones just like "their, there, they're" in English. I find that English and Chinese are not so different after all in their writing systems. Chinese and English both differ from languages like French, German, Korean (and most other written languages probably) in that their pronunciation does not correspond directly to the writing. In English the gap between writing and pronunciation is bad, in Chinese it is catastrophic.

nice example how a homophone is resolved by grammar

Today in class we met the following two phrases: Nǐ zuò shénme qù táiběi? and Nǐ qù táiběi zuò shénme?
The pronunciation zuò refers to two different words and from the position in the sentence they can be disambiguated: 你坐什么去台北？(Which transport did you take to Taipei?) vs. 你去台北做什么？(What for did you come to Taipei?)
Note that you don't need to know the two different Chinese characters for zuò to be able to distinguish the two words which have the same pronunciation. Basic knowledge of every-day speech grammar is enough.

a ride out with Bunny

During the last week I rode more than 100km on Bunny, mostly along the shore of the various rivers which encircle Taipei: Xiandian river in the south, Danshui river in the west and Jilong (Keelung) river in the north.
Yesterday was my longest tour. I didn't even plan to cycle around, but I met somebody for language exchange and once being outside the weather was just to good to go back in. So I rode northward along the little park that's underneath / on top of the Danshui subway line and then along Jilong and Danshui rivers. When I thought I would soon arrive in Beitou (halfway between Taipei and Danshui), I was actually already arriving in Danshui itself. I later saw on the map that I had ridden more than 40 km this afternoon and was surprised about this until I remembered that a single commute to my Chinese class in Toronto was also 38km round-trip. That's probably why me and little Bunny passed most other cyclists on the way. Even those dressed in Lycra and riding big bikes. It seems that Bunny's lacking high gears are really not an issue any more.

• Some photos from the cycle path (more are in the photostream)
• Some photos of Bunny
  

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!