I’ve Been Chain-blogged!
February 23rd, 2006 by MarkBattlePanda just hit me with blogging’s equivalent of a chain-letter. I hate this kind of thing, but it would seem rude not to accept, so I’ll do the sensible thing… go along with it and grumble. I’m not really much of a movie guy, though, and I don’t go on many vacations either. Grumble, grumble, whine, whine, grumble.
Four Jobs I’ve Had
1. Fast Food Slave Team Member
2. Home Painting Franchise Manager
3. Bartender
4. Programmer
Four Movies I can watch over and over
1. Dead Poet’s Society
2. The Matrix
3. The Princess Bride
4. Any Zhou Qinshi Movie
Four Places I’ve lived
1. Boulder, Colorado
2. Austin, Texas
3. Xela, Guatemala
4. Jiayi, Taiwan
Four TV shows I love:
1. DS9
2: Babylon 5
3. Highlander
4. Friends
Four highly regarded and recommended TV shows I haven’t seen (much of):
1. Battlestar Galactica
2. That one with the writer of Seinfeld
3. That other new show everyone’s talking about
4. The other one… you know?
Four places I’ve vacationed:
1. Chicago, Il., sort of
2. Vancouver, BC
3. Hualian, Taiwan
4. Home (to see my family and friends)
Four of my favorite dishes:
1. Combo #5 (at any Mexican restaurant)
2. Pad Thai Phet
3. 宮寶雞丁
4. Pizza (Jalepeno and Black Olive)
Four sites I visit daily:
1. slashdot.org
2. theregister.co.uk
3. cnn.com
4. technorati.com
Four places I’d rather be right now:
1. Beijing, China
2. Harbin, China
3. Chengdu, China
4. My grandma’s house in Colorado
Four new bloggers I’m tagging:
1. Matt’s Wiki (that’ll kill this thing for sure)
2. Frequent Sinosplice commenter, Carl
3. Warren
4. Darin
February 22nd, 2006 at 1:31 pm
By ‘Daren’, do you mean me, ‘Darin’, or someone else who’s name is ‘Daren’?
February 22nd, 2006 at 2:09 pm
<quickly fixes the error> Of course I mean you!
February 22nd, 2006 at 2:11 pm
You mean my ex-roommate Carl?? That’s kind of bizarre… He doesn’t have a blog, though. He did once, long ago, but it has long since died.
February 22nd, 2006 at 3:00 pm
February 22nd, 2006 at 3:01 pm
grr..
http://www.imbermedia.net/users/darintenb/files/2006/02/22/daren.jpg
February 23rd, 2006 at 5:19 am
Eww Eww Eww! Chain-mail is icky! Blogmemes are much more fun than that. And they don’t come with a “if you don’t pass this on to seven other people in the next seven day you will DIE!!!” disclaimer, so they’re more relaxed too.
Funny that all the places you’d rather be is in China (except for grandma’s house). Are you in Taiwan more for the money?
February 23rd, 2006 at 5:42 am
You got me, Darin! Sorry about that. Apparently you’re cursed to have your name mangled by everyone, Japanese or not.
John, I’m talking about the Carl who’s “+3 in vitality gave him the strength to comment twice” on your thread about how living in China is like an RPG . I had no idea he was your old roommate.
February 23rd, 2006 at 6:17 am
No, BP, I’m not here for the money. Until this last year, I only made about 1/6 of my old salary from the US. Even now, working about 10-12 hours a day, 6 days a week, I make less money than I did in the US. I’m sure that if I’d worked as hard at home as I am now, I’d be independently wealthy by now.
I came to Taiwan initially because I didn’t know any better. I had friends like Warren and Irene who were born here, and I figured I’d learn Chinese just as quickly here. It seems like most of the westerners I meet here with really good Chinese have lived in mainland China, though. A few Taiwanese people I knew in the US really gave me the hard, “Traditional chracters are just better” sell, too. Looking back on it, though, I think I would have had a lot more opportunities in tech jobs there. Here, I know very few westers who aren’t teachers, or editors.
I guess I’m still here in Taiwan because of momentum. I’m hoping to get my students up to a level of English that’s good enough for them to study abroad before I leave. Of all the work I’ve done before, none has been as rewarding as helping kids progress literally 4 times faster than they would at other schools. I can’t influence that many people, but I know I’m affecting lives for the better. Just last week an old student’s mom called me out of the blue just to tell me how much of a difference I’d made on her kid’s life. It’s an awesome feeling.
Also, I know enough traditional characters now that I really figure I might as well put in a year of school and get to where I’m funtionally literate before I go. It would be a waste to just forget them all. All in all, it’s kind of nice to learn traditional characters. Make no mistake about it, though. In the long run I’m far more interested in learning the characters and the usage employed by 98% of the Chinese speaking world than I am in the ones pretty much only used in Taiwan, Hongkong, and books older than my parents are. I will go to the mainland eventually.
February 23rd, 2006 at 6:34 am
Yes. The traditional characters are pretty and I think it was a tragic mistake (among many) made by the communist Chinese leadership to butcher them into simplified forms…however, what’s done is done and westerners can hardly be blamed for wanting to know the form of written Chinese understood in China. The good thing is, it is much easier to go from a working knowledge of traditional forms to the simplified forms than vice versa, for obvious reasons.
Of course this would never happen now, and part of me feels heretical just for suggesting it. But I think it is too bad that when they decided to do away with traditional script, they didn’t go the whole hog and phoneticized the sucker. Chinese can be phoneticized exactly using the bopomofo system.
February 23rd, 2006 at 10:11 am
I’m trying to get a blog setup on my website. Wordpress looks like a good starting point. Unfortunately, I don’t have administrator access to create a new DB, so I’ll need to ping Jason Cook to set one up. When it’s online, I’ll link to it from my main page.
February 23rd, 2006 at 12:37 pm
Interestingly, MacArthur suggested exactly that for Japan when he was Shogun after World War II. It was decided that they couldn’t go entirely phonetic, due to readability issues and the number of homophones, but many simplifications did result. Before that time the script used in Japan, and that used in Taiwan now were the same.
Chinese can also be phoneticized exactly, using pinyin. To be honest, Taiwan’s constant mis-romanization and revisions of it’s “official” romanization system bother me far more than the traditional characters. Still, I think abandoning characters as Korea has would be a loss.
<puts on flame retardant gear> Why are simplified characters a “butchery”? Weren’t they already in widespread use, albeit with inconsistent versions all over the place? I’ve seen Taiwanese people write 3 different simplifications for 龜, but I’ve never seen them write out the traditional form. Isn’t it better to standardize on 龟, which everybody will actually write?
February 24th, 2006 at 1:08 am
Matt, Wordpress is pretty nifty. It’s super customizable, and a code junkie like yourself could make a pretty sweet site with it… if you wanted to spend the time on it. If you just want to get a blog going quickly, then go with blogger. It’s unbelievably convenient, and it’s still fairly customizable. With Blogger, you don’t need Cookie Monster to make you a database, either. That punk didn’t even answer my email when I headed back to CO last time! Peh!
February 24th, 2006 at 3:16 pm
Mark,
Heh, yeah, that’s the guy… He’s a smart, funny guy, but he only bothers to leave funny comments occasionally. (And he’s way too lazy to maintain a blog.)
February 25th, 2006 at 5:28 am
Well, I guess it’s hard to take an aesthetic issue and tell you exactly why X is better than Y. Though I think it is a clue that calligraphers on the mainland still use traditional characters instead of simplified. it wld be as if ppl started to to spel english lik SMS MSGs all the time.
I find it interesting that Chinese can be phoneticized exactly using pinyin. I guess I kind of assumed from the disasterous romanization in Taiwan that mapping Chinese pronounciations onto the roman alphabet is just a lost cause.
There would be much less homophone issues in Chinese than in Japanese. I think the gains in huge gains efficiency from switching to a phonetic system would overcome the total loss in aesthetic qualiy wheras the partial gains in efficiency in switching to the simplified system is not worth the near total loss in aesthetic quality.
I actually think that the Korean phonetic characters are pretty ingenious. I don’t know much about them, except that it was once explained to me how each character contains all the components phonetically necessary to the sound. I’m not explaining it very well…anyhow, it is unique and I’m sure it is a much more efficient system than borrowed Chinese characters.
February 25th, 2006 at 5:55 am
Ha! You didn’t figure that all the China scholars would make a broken romanization system, did you? It’s just messed up in Taiwan because they started with Wade-Giles and then neglected to use the apostophes (which are vital in that system). I wrote a bit about it here. At the syllable levels there’s a one-one mapping of pinyin to zhuyin. Actually, I’m planning on adding a conversion tool to my pinyin tool, sometime.
I’ve met a lot of Taiwanese people who really hate the modern characters. I guess I never picked that up because I first saw both sets at about the same time, as an adult. As a result, my impressions about their comparative asthetics are different. I can see what you’re saying about calligraphers using traditional characters, though. I took a calligraphy class back in Colorado once, and it was mind boggling just how complex they could make a single latin character.
The Korean system was designed by linguists. No naturally occuring system could ever make so much sense.
February 25th, 2006 at 5:58 am
Woah, hold on a second! Battlepanda, are you saying that as a native Chinese speaker you still feel like Chinese characters are inefficient compared to an alphabet? That’s interesting. Do you just see them as inefficient in terms of the time it takes to learn them, or do you think using them is inefficient even for adults who grew up with them?
February 25th, 2006 at 8:24 am
Well, I guess I should qualify that a bit. I left Taiwan at the age of nine, so while I feel like I read at an appropriate native level for my age, my writing abilities have never gone beyond third grade level and have by now sadly atrophied. Writing anything beyond a simple “mom, i’m out to get milk” note is torture for me, much ameliorated by typing using bopomofo, but still deathly slow compare to the rate in which I can express myself in English (60+ words a minute typing).
Even for native chinese students, learning the characters are a colossal chore. They have to be learned stroke by stroke (as I’m sure I don’t have to tell you) laboriously and because there are no rules (or scant rules) governing their construction, they are easily forgotten with disuse. Sometimes I wonder (pure speculation, of course) whether the kind of rote learning that is just plain necessary to master chinese characters make rote learners out of all Chinese students in other subjects as well. (Who knows. Maybe I’m just thick and other people don’t find it quite as onerous as I do.)
Of course, efficiency is not everything in a language. Otherwise we’d all be speaking esperanto, right?
February 25th, 2006 at 12:27 pm
Hmm… I don’t know if there’s an easier way to learn characters or not. I’ve seen stuff floating around on the net about it. So far, though, it’s been sheer suffering trying to learn them.
Believe it or not though, using 注音, I can type at about 85% of the speed in Chinese as I can in English (which is quite fast). Still, I have a buddy from HK who’s a sysadmin. He types Chinese with 倉頡 at over double the speed I can type English. He also claims that he never forgets how to write a character since that typing method is based on the structure of characters. I’m not sure if I believe him, but I’ve never been able to catch him with a character he that he can read but not write.
February 25th, 2006 at 8:40 pm
Hot damn! Maybe I should look into 倉頡. I’ve always been pleased with bopomofo and automatically assumed that it is the most efficient system. But maybe I’m just wrong and horribly mismaligning my own language.
If there is a way to type chinese efficiently, I guess it is not as big a deal that it cannot be written as quickly. I still maintain that it takes longer and causes more misery to learn though.