Toshuō

Last week one of my projects at Hack Reactor was to write a server (using Node.js) to emulate the functionality of the Wayback Machine– that is to download and archive copies of various web sites.

An interesting coincidence is that my old friend John just wrote about it yesterday. He’s designed and written numerous beautiful blogs and, sadly, destroyed them and broken all of my links to them. He’s started combing the wayback machine to bring some of that content back… for me. Now I can tell you readers who email me about not being able to find his content to go check out the dev.gd graveyard. Some of his old posts on language (and other) learning are great!

In terms of phonics, what’s the difference between -sion, -tion and -ssion? Why is it that it’s possible for students first encountering the words “devotion” or “nation” to be 95% sure they end in -tion and not -ssion? Why is it even easier to know when to spell something with -sion?

Since my arrival in San Francisco last summer, I’ve become aware of the new “hacker schools” popping up around the city. Their stated purpose is to take smart, motivated people who may or may not have a strong technical background and turn them into world-class junior developers in a short time.

The Starter League

The first school of this type that I ever heard of was Code Academy in Chicago (renamed as The Starter League due to name confusion after the online school Codecademy launched). Their system was pretty unique– students spend 8 to 10 hours per day for 2 months, working in pairs as they learn a stunning amount of ruby, HTML/CSS/JS and Ruby on Rails. At the end of this time, they have an interview day in which they demo their projects to various tech companies, including some of the hottest local startups. The school has only been running since 2011, but results have been excellent and even DHH, the creator of Ruby on Rails, is a fan of the program.

SF Hacker Schools

With that kind of success, it wasn’t long before similar schools started popping up in the Bay Area. The demand for top notch developers is extreme here, but very few companies are willing to train and they take only a tiny fraction of their applicants. A program to quickly bring students up to speed in the technologies that local start-ups are using is the perfect solution. It’s an incredible learning experience for the students that opens doors, the companies can hire solid programmers to join their teams and schools can earn money from either or both of the former two groups. From what I understand, Dev Bootcamp‘s first class was hugely successful–Over 90 percent of the students landed jobs shortly after graduation (at nearly double the average US salary) and of those who didn’t one opened a similar school called App Academy that focused on iOS development and the other opened Hack Reactor, an even more intense school with a stronger focus on JavaScript and front-end technologies. There is also another school, which I know less about since it doesn’t accept men.

In contrast with computer science degrees at universities, these schools have less of a focus on CS theory and more of a focus on building things. Students write a lot of code, and they use newer languages and frameworks. Another feature is heavy use of cutting edge tools and various automated testing frameworks that are commonly used in bay area start-ups, but not so common yet at larger, more traditional companies. Most striking to me is the intense nature of the study. No college I’ve ever seen puts students through 8 class hours of computing classes per day.

The bay area hacker schools remind me more of high-end intense language schools! There are a number of 6 hour per day intense language learning programs in which students work in pairs or small groups, work hard, and acquire a great deal of vocabulary, speaking skills and reading skills in a short time. In my experience learning mathematics as a teenager and then later learning Japanese and Chinese in my 20s, working at something 4 hours a day isn’t just 4 times as good as 1 hour a day. It’s closer to 10 times as good.

All in all, I see a lot of positives of this type of education. So much so, that I’m considering the possibility of running a school of this type someday… possibly even in Taiwan again! Entrance is very competitive to the existing schools, so it took a lot of hustling, but I’ve gotten into Hack Reactor class. I’ll be in class from 9am to 8pm six days a week, starting tomorrow. If you’re interested in the full story, I’ve put it up on my programming blog.

I may or may not be able to continue posting phonics lessons in my Phonics Friday Youtube channel, but I’ll try!

If I were to make a list of my very favorite things about living abroad, the opportunities for making lifelong friends would be very near the top. Katya Berry, a long-time expat herself, has published a piece I wrote about the topic. She coaches and mentors women who are living abroad or planning to move to a different country. She’s been living the experience herself since the age of 15 and has written a great deal about juggling responsibilities of career and family.

Check out the piece here: http://www.katyabarry.com/four-reasons-why-living-abroad-is-great-for-making-lifelong-friends/

As both a language teacher and as a language student, I’ve been in to extensive reading for a long time. Back in 2004, when I first experienced the benefits for my students, there weren’t that many people talking about extensive reading online. I wrote about it on this blog and later used graded readers from Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press as a cornerstone of the curriculum I wrote for Pagewood.

All things considered, it was no great surprise when Cambridge UP reached out to me about work on an EFL reader. The shock was what they wanted. What they wanted for their graded reader was me.

They somehow found an old blog post I’d written. In it, I told how my ex-girlfriend from college had nudged me into taking an intensive Japanese course over a summer. In the past I had had no success with language learning, but she had already learned Spanish pretty fluently. During that summer, I was practically living in her apartment and I saw her using a much wider variety of language learning techniques than I’d ever considered.

I ended up with an A, the second highest grade in the course after her. I ended up going back to school, getting fluent enough in Japanese to largely understand TV and earning an entire BA in Japanese Language in only 2 years. After that, I ended up moving to Taiwan and learning Chinese. That was a long time ago, and I’ve since forgotten most the Japanese I knew and only maintained very occasional online contact with her. Still, I’m grateful. If you’re reading this, Diana, thank you! You changed the direction of my life and it’s been a lot more interesting as a result!

Sadly, Cambridge changed us into Australians and made us brother and sister in the retelling of my story. I don’t know if I’m at liberty to share the passage, but I got a good laugh out of hearing my own words leaping off the page at me with the diction of an Englishman! CUP offered me £100 and my name in the acknowledgments in exchange for using my story, so I figured why not?

I’ll definitely buy my grandmother a copy once I know which one it is. She loves that kind of thing.

In my last week or two in Beijing, one question I heard over and over was, “What will you miss the most?”

Most my Chinese friends seemed to think it would be the food or the attention of being a foreigner. Most my foreign friends figured it would be the “culture”, whatever that means after spending most my adult life in Taiwan and then Beijing.

I had the feeling that I wouldn’t miss anything really, except for some people. That’s natural I suppose, since I had already decided to leave. I was really looking forward to a better job market (for tech, at least), cleaner air, a healthier environment in general, and most of all a big opportunity for personal growth.

Now that it’s been a month, I have a different perspective. I really don’t miss the things that made me want to leave. But I do miss some other things.

A safety net

In all fairness, there is no real safety net in Beijing. There’s no public health insurance like there is in Taiwan and worse still, there’s the possibility of actually getting ripped off for being a foreigner, even at a hospital! Similarly, if you have any major sorts of problems, you just get kicked out of the country. One of my best friends was in China for grad school back during the SARS crisis and just got booted out… and he wasn’t even sick.

There is a different sort of safety net in China for a foreigner, though. That’s the EFL industry. Even without my background teaching, managing and then owning an EFL school in Taiwan, teaching always would have been an option. Unlike Taiwan, in Beijing the demand is so great that even the normally undesirable teachers can generally all get placed. In the US, there is no Taiwanese health insurance system and there’s no auto-job. It’s sink or swim.

Nightmarkets and Hutongs

Okay, maybe I do miss some of the food. It’s not really the food, though. I’m living in Chinatown and I can get pretty much any Chinese food I want. What I miss is how I could get the food! There’s something about a Taiwanese nightmarket or a Beijing hutong that’s supremely full-filling in the way that going to a single restaurant for a whole meal isn’t. Even Chinatown doesn’t have that kind of environment, probably due to pesky enforcement of food safety laws. I suppose I could find some strip mall here in California, go to the food court and buy a drink at one store and an order of chicken at another and then ice cream at a 3rd… but it wouldn’t be the same at all.

Pragmatic Law Enforcement

In some ways living in China is freer than living in the US. With the exception of a trip to inner Mongolia, I’ve never once felt like I was in physical danger. The police do a pretty good job with the available resources to keep society in line. But day to day life is very laissez faire in China, especially compared to the US! If you want to drive home drunk and get in an accident, you’ll go to prison. But if you want to have dinner with your coworkers and drink beer as you walk back to the office or the subway, nobody cares! The US has the most extreme open container laws I’ve seen anywhere in my life! Huge amounts of effort and money are spent trying to keep anybody 20 years-old or younger from drinking. Ditto for smoking. I’m not a big smoker, but the zealousness with which anti-smoking rules have been enacted since I left a decade ago just shocks me. One would think that soft drinks and junk food placed everywhere kids spend their time are the larger health risk… not that there’s any kind of sin tax for junk food in Beijing! Eat! Drink! Be merry! Play majiang loudly at 2 in the morning! Just don’t organized against the government or hurt people and they’ll mostly leave you alone.

Friends

Having moved so many times, this is a constant. Of what I leave behind, it’s always my friends I miss the most. I wasn’t even there for two years, but I will definitely miss hanging out with Wilson, his roommates, Simon, his Dashilar crowd, Martina, all the people she introduced to me from her tour guiding job, including Paul who encouraged me to move to the bay area, and so many others… I’m going to miss my co-workers, too. I would say that both the bosses were awesome to hang with and talk to in different ways, and some how I ended up getting along with all the Singaporean interns so well that I made a trip to Singapore to visit them after leaving! One fun guy there, Jim, is from the bay area, so I’ll probably see him here in the future after he returns to continue his work of bringing the singularity near. There’s also a really cute girl I met in the elevator of my apartment building the day I was leaving to move across town and take my job at SmarTots. I miss her too.

Work

Sounds strange, huh? SmarTots really was a cool place to be. It was the first time I was directly able to use technology to help lots of kids instead just a single class at a time. As mentioned above, it was a great crowd of people and after the first couple of months I was able to contribute and learn quite a bit. It was also likely the closest peek into Chinese corporate life I’ll have in a long time.

On the whole

When all is said and done, I don’t really miss Beijing that much. I miss it a bit, but I’m really enjoying San Francisco!

Since moving back to the US, I’ve been living in the San Francisco Chinatown. It’s been interesting in a lot of ways. In some ways it’s very familiar to me both from my US and my Chinese experiences, but in others it’s still a little bit alien.

Traditional Characters

One welcome feature is that everything is in traditional Chinese characters, and sometimes English, too. Even after my 20 months or so in Beijing, I still read traditional characters with more ease than the PRC simplified forms. After all, I did live in Taiwan for most my 20′s.

Cantonese

Unfortunately for me, “Chinese” doesn’t mean Mandarin here. It means Cantonese. Every single one of my neighbors speaks Cantonese fluently and, as far as I know, natively. That isn’t to say that Mandarin isn’t useful. It is! None of my neighbors has ever said anything more than, “yeah”, “hello”, or “okay” to me in English. About 1/3 of them can speak enough Mandarin to chat with a bit. Shopkeepers are a bit better. I’d say half can speak at least so-so English, and probably 90% can also speak Mandarin.

Sadly I’ve spent only a total of 10 days in HK, and I only know about 50-100 words. Basically I can tell people, “Hi, my name’s 小馬. Can you speak Mandarin? No? Uh ah, uh where’s Waverly street? Thanks. bye-bye!”. It was useful once or twice when I first showed up, but I’m not learning any more and I don’t think this is a good place to learn since it’s such it’s in America and I’m not Chinese-looking. I may get a subscription for Pop-up Cantonese and listen to podcasts at some point, but it’s not a priority.

…Hong Kong?

Based on the prevalence of the odd combination of Traditional Characters and Cantonese, I kept asking myself, “Why doesn’t this feel like Hong Kong?”

It’s kind of hard for me to explain, but it really doesn’t feel like Hong Kong. It’s super hilly and it’s full of tourists, but it feels less free-wheeling. There are a lot of restaurants, but no alleys full of food stands. Also, people in Hong Kong struck me as very short and very fashionable. I haven’t really seen either of those trends here. Not that many people seem to smoke or drink here, either.

Also it’s way cheaper to live here! This area has the cheapest rents I’ve seen in any safe area of SF.

The weather

It’s really not what I had in mind when thinking of “Summer in California”. It’s fairly warm in the day, though not as warm as anywhere else I’ve ever lived, and it’s cold at night. Even wearing long pants and a fleece jacket, it’s a bit chilly when walking home from tech events.

I left the US for Guatemala right after I graduated in 2002. A couple of months later I moved to Taiwan, where I spent 7 wonderful years. After that I spent a bit of time in Hong Kong, then headed into China and lived for a while in Kunming and finally Beijing. Though I visited the US a few times during those years, it took me nearly a decade to move back.

Having just done a stint at a start-up, working on a framework for educational iPad and iPhone games, I found myself drawn to California, more specifically the Bay Area. It’s been a shock in all kinds of ways, mostly good.

I couldn’t help but feel excited as the plane touched down. I don’t remember if I’ve flown through SF Airport on the way to visit family or friends in the US before or not, but this time was memorable. I knew I was at a life inflection point, returning with the intention of staying.

The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART)

As expected, the subway system was accessible directly from within the airport. It was sort of an odd experience. On one hand, everything was in English. On the other, it felt like I’d traveled back in time. The subway system felt horribly dated compared to those I’d used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore or even Beijing. When buying tickets, instead of a pictoral display from which to select the station I wanted, there was a paper subway map, a paper chart of station names and prices and a text only ticket vending machine. After seeing that a trip to Powell station would cost $8.10, I put in my $20 bill and then had to hit the -$1 button 11 times and then hit the +10¢ button.

Inside the trains, there isn’t a visual display showing what station you’re approaching or a map of where you’re headed. You’ve got to know the names of terminal stops and hope you can understand the garbled announcements over the loud speaker… or just ask random people until you get there like I did. People were surprisingly helpful!

The Money

The money has just gone weird. When I left, American money was green. Canadian money, monopoly money and other currencies were funky and rainbow colored, but real money mean greenbacks. I do have some recollection of some $20s that were blue-ish when I was visiting my ex at Dartmouth a few years ago, but it wasn’t enough to prepare me for what was waiting. Five dollar bills with a big, obnoxious purple 5 on the back! Ten dollar bills with HUGE Alexander Hamilton heads not reined in by any oval-shape frames! Dollar piece coins given to in change at multiple locations! I wasn’t gone that long, was I?

Cars

The weirdest thing happened to me, multiple times. As I was walking up to an intersection, I saw some approaching cars. So I slowed down. And they stopped! Multiple cars in different lanes stopped for me, a single pedestrian! In China I always had to kind of wait until there were 5-10 pedestrians waiting with me to cross in a group. Drivers really had a lot less patience for pedestrians there, crosswalk or not. This change is still catching me off guard now and then, but I’m sure I’ll adjust quickly.

The Environment

In Taiwan it wasn’t too bad, especially out of the cities or up in the hills on the jogging and biking paths. There was some wonderful natural beauty. It was also unbearably hot and humid.

In Beijing, the air was absolutely terrible. During my first week there, I made the mistake of going out for a 90 minute jog in the Hutongs. I spent the half hour in a shower clearing out phlegm, all of it brown. I became well acquainted with bjair.info and learned to see any pollution index of under 200 as “pretty good”.

In San Francisco, it’s been great! The air is clean, the sky is blue, and the bay view is breathtaking from the hills, especially after climbing them! I feel like this is just a healthier life than I had in Beijing.

Free Beer

It seems that almost everywhere I go, there’s free beer being offered. The hostel where I stayed gave out free beer every night at 9:30. They had some kind of vodka company sponsoring them and the manager kept trying to get us to play beer pong with vodka shots. My second night in town I went to a talk at Adobe on mobile gaming, and got free pizza and beer along with some great talks, including one by the creator of the Corona SDK. The next night, at a SFJS meet-up, I got some organic burritos and free beer as I learned about the Meteor.js framework. Ditto for the Ruby on Rails hackathon I attended.

Also, it’s worth adding that not only is it free beer, but it’s free good beer, including stuff from my home state of Colorado– Blue Moon, Sunshine Wheat and others.

Technology

While the subways may have felt like a jump back in time, everything else feels like a huge leap forward. It’s absolutely stunning how many tech people are out here and also how technical a lot of random people working in other jobs are. A random lady I asked for directions on a train tried to recruit me to do mobile development for her ad agency. I heard coffee shop employees discussing the possibility of a 15″ MacBook Air.

On my way to a meet-up at Change.org, I incidentally passed the main offices of Adobe, airbnb and Zynga. I was looking for this when I moved, but I didn’t fully comprehend just how much different the concentration of smart technical people was here than in other places. Even compared with Boulder, CO, where I lived before, this is amazing.

Social Ills

Never before in my life have I seen so many homeless, desperate and just crazy people concentrated in one area as I did walking back to my hostel near Market Street from the talks at Adobe. I’ve seen poorer people, for sure. In Beijing, the high-end beggars may have been doing alright for themselves, but in Kunming there was a good deal of outright poverty.

San Francisco is different. Its neighborhoods are very granular. Walk 10 minutes in one direction from the financial district and you’ll be in the center of Chinatown. Walk further up hill and you’ll be in a very gentrified old neighborhood. Another ten minutes down another side of the hill and you’re in a street full of homeless, hopeless and mentally ill people. Another 10 minutes and it’s upscale tech offices. While I’m grateful that I’m not personally confronted by beggars outside my apartment and that I feel safe in my neighborhood, it’s still disturbing. I’ve only been here a week. I don’t understand the situation, its background or what people are doing to help.

It serves as motivation though, both selfishly to get a job and not fall through the cracks, and altruistically to gain the kind of power to help people who most need it.

Idealism

Surprisingly here in the home of so many lucrative tech companies, I’ve met a lot of people here who genuinely seem focused on making the world a better place. In some other places I’ve lived, I’ve gotten a very strong sense that money rules. Here, despite incredible disparities in wealth, I’ve found a lot of people to be cooperative with potential and even current business competitors. A girl I met on the subway told me her dream of being a volunteer worker.  Highly paid professionals collaborate to make free classes for those wanting to break into their industries.  Strangers at every meetup.com I’ve gone to have gone out of their way to help me.  I’m embarrassed to admit that having lived in Beijing even for a couple of years, I feel wary. I’m not used to such a high-trust society, yet. On the plus side, I’m feeling more inspired and more motivated than I have in quite a while.

This is probably just the beginning of a much longer adjustment, but so far it feels good to be back in my home country.

A while back, I wrote a Firefox extension that converts pinyin with tone numbers into pinyin with tone marks. The specifics of the conversion process are identical to those of the online pinyin converter on this site.

After installing the extension, a blue square will appear on the right side of the add-on bar at the bottom of your Firefox web browser. To use the tool, type some pinyin with tone numbers into any plain text field on any web page. Then highlight the text and click on the blue 拼 on your status bar. It will convert the tone numbers into the appropriate marks over the appropriate vowels. For example, if you type in “zhong1wen2″, highlight it and hit the button, then it will be converted into “zhōngwén”.

As John suggested, I’ve also made this version add apostrophes for in words like Xī’ān. I haven’t tested all the cases yet, though.

As usual, feedback is welcome and I apologize to anyone who lost this plugin after updating Firefox. The original code works fine in the current version of FF! It’s just that when making a plugin, you have to specify the maximum version of Firefox it will work on. And once you update to a newer version than that, the plugin gets disabled automatically. In order to avoid the hassle of doing this again for a while, I’ve set this version of the plugin to work with anything between v1.5 and v25.0!

Go to the download page to get it.

It’s been a long, long time since I’ve written anything here. Part of the reason is that I’ve made some fairly big changes. I moved away from Taiwan, where I’ve spent half my adult life, and I’ve moved on from EFL. When I first started this blog back in 2005, one motivation was to keep in touch with friends and family back home, but it also served as an outlet for my interests of learning Chinese and teaching English to others.

Why I stopped

I’m not teaching English anymore. My former students meant very much to me and I’d love to hear of their progress from time to time, but I don’t have the same passion for teaching that I did 3 years ago. Similarly, I’m not so as interested in studying Mandarin as I was before. I’m still interested in languages in general, but it’s way more exciting for me to learn a few phrases in a language I don’t speak everyday, like Swedish or Cantonese, than it is to study more Mandarin. I’m not in Taiwan anymore either, and a large chunk of this blog has been about living in Taiwan. I miss a lot of things and a lot of people in Taiwan, but it’s not home anymore.

Another reason I stopped blogging is that I’ve been weighing the upsides and downsides of having an online presence. On one hand, the vast majority of the contact I’ve had with others through the internet has been good. I’ve even made some good friends through this blog. On the other hand, there are a few truly nasty people and it only takes one to ruin my mood! Beyond them, there are a lot of people with various axes to grind that just get tiring to deal with. Worst of all, I noticed that arguing with people online has a tendency of locking me into whatever views I hold at that time, potentially retarding my personal growth.

I never made a conscious decision not to blog… I just started writing more an more in my paper journal. This was good in some ways. I’ve been more comfortable writing things I wouldn’t necessarily want on a fairly high-traffic website. One example was a dream journal. I’ve been fascinated in Lucid Dreaming ever since high school. Keeping a daily log of dreams is a basic tool in lucid dreaming, but it’s not necessarily the sort of thing that others would get much value out of reading. As I wrote more and more that wasn’t appropriate for toshuo.com and got busy with other things, weeks became months and now it’s been nearly an entire year.

Why I’m resuming

Despite its drawbacks, writing online is worth it for me. I organize my thoughts more clearly when other people will be reading them than I do in my paper journal. People drawn to what I write are self-selected and often have something to offer me in return. Some of the most interesting ideas I’ve encountered for language learning (and learning in general) were due to John‘s various now defunct blogs. In personal terms and even in professional terms, the good has far outweighed the bad.

Also, while I’m not in Taiwan and I’m not teaching EFL anymore… I am still me. I’m living in Beijing and I’m working at a tech start-up which has built the largest platform for educational iPhone/iPad apps. So there is some continuity. Even if I were to move to California or enter an entirely different career, I expect that an interest in technology and a love of education will still be a very important part of me.

Posting older journal pieces

I may post some of my paper journal entries here. My initial struggles adapting to standard PRC Mandarin, my visa run to Mongolia, my thoughts about Taiwan after leaving and a bunch of other entries fit the site well. If I do that, I’ll probably post them, and then after a week or so, update the date of the entries to the true date of when I wrote them.