new bicycle inauguration tour

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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...