Recently, I’ve been reading an interesting book called The 4 Hour Work Week
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Category: VideosThis summer, I managed to get a few videos of a class at my school when they had nearly finished their second semester. It’s a pretty good class in terms of student morale. The read from an extensive reader called The President’s Murderer (OUP Bookworm). As usual for my school, this class meets twice a week for two hours each time, they spent quite a bit of time on phonics and basic grammar drills and had regular homework of an audio-lingual variety. As they progressed, the classes got gradually less intensive and more extensive. Their current level is about the tipping point between the strict, low-level classes and the more relaxed intermediate level classes to come.
First they read from a vocabulary sheet to review words in the book that they haven’t learned yet from the school curriculum:
Then, they take turns reading the chapter the teacher read last week:
After that, the teacher reads another chapter to them, intentionally making a few mistakes they have to correct. He might ask a few comprehension questions, and then it’s on to the next activity. That’s pretty much how all the reading works for the lower level classes. This class had already read Aladdin, Pocahontas and two other readers of the same level as this one, so it wasn’t necessary to interrupt for too many explanations. It would be boring to spend an entire two hours reading, but I think most the kids really look forward to the half hour they spend on it each time.
All in all, I’m pretty happy with this class. Several students quit at the beginning of the semester because their parents thought the basic phonics and grammar we started with was too easy, but those that have continued have done great. That’s including four kids who hadn’t been to an English school before, and who were a bit shaky on the alphabet and struggled with phrases like “sit down”, “stand up” and so on. Everyone has worked hard, and they have all far, far surpassed the starting point of those who thought the class was too easy.
My friend David has recently shown me some of what he’s been working on with his site for learning Chinese, Popup Chinese. Popup Chinese has always had a great technical backbone, amazing talent in its instructors, and lots and lots of free MP3 lessons. That said, this last batch of upgrades is still pretty impressive.
The Writing Pad
This a cool writing application that has teaches how to write Chinese characters. The only thing I’ve ever seen like it is Skritter, also a neat tool. The writing pad enforces correct proportions in characters as you write them and also enforces stroke order. The strictness of the stroke order is a little bit frustrating for me, since stroke order isn’t entirely uniform amongst all writers and the stroke order conventions my teachers taught are slightly different than those in the Writing Pad. This issue would be irrelevant to any beginning students who aren’t already accustomed to writing a certain way, though. The app will teach you how to write correctly as well as any app I know of at this point.
– The Writing Pad
HSK Stuff
You don’t hear much about the HSK here in Taiwan, but if you ever want proof of your Chinese skills so you can go to college in China or brag to a prospective employer, this is the test to take. There’s an impressive array of materials on Popup Chinese to help you get ready for it:
One-Click Access HSK Tests, HSK Flashcards and HSK Vocabulary Lists
– http://popupchinese.com/hsk/flashcards
– http://popupchinese.com/hsk/test
– http://popupchinese.com/hsk/vocabulary
Spaced Repetition
I was pleasantly surprised to see that one of my suggestions months ago made it into the site! For anyone signed up, the site remembers which flashcards they’ve answered right and which ones they’ve missed on and calculates the ideal time to show them again for review. Even for students who are unfamiliar with spaced repetition, this is a huge plus.
Practice Speaking Lessons
I’ve heard about these types of lessons before. I guess if you’re living someplace where Chinese tutors are hard to find or expensive, this option might be worthwhile. People can get one-on-one feedback on their spoken Chinese with a premium subscription.
– Practice Speaking Lessons
Pricing
The prices have come down quite a bit. For the first time it’s in the price range of something I would have bought as a student. At just under fifty bucks, the “basic plus” subscription is far, far more useful than textbook in existence at roughly the same cost. I sure wish they had this stuff around back when I was in school!
I don’t think I ever saw Joel look so pleased with Taiwan as when we took him to guānghuá shāngchǎng. Oh, the computer goodness!
Unfortunately, our guest had little appreciation for Acer, a local Taiwanese brand. Not even these energetic Acer girls’ pitch about the “super super thin laptop line” had much success in repairing the damage all the crappy desktops they made in the 90′s did to their brand.
Acer girls by Mark on Zooomr
There was one bad-ass touch screen on display that gave him pause though:
Joel, a first time visitor to Taiwan, was busy with his camera while he was here.
This video is filming from the MRT on the way to Jiantan station while Nate talks about what they’re seeing:
Here’s a shot that shows off some of the greenification in the Dunhua area:
Light-bot is a pretty fun, if simple flash game that I wrote about last year. At that time, I realized that by giving the robot recursive solutions, it was possible to reduce the commands needed to win from the previous bests of 160 or so down to 132.
Recently, Mark Beyers has found an even more compact solution.
Already a lot of people have worked on improving their score for this game. I wanted to either beat the best known score (132 commands) or prove it to be minimal by trying every possible solution for every level and seeing if it completes the level.
To cut a long story short, the solver managed to beat the best known solution for level 8, reducing it from 10 commands to 9 commands. The solution is complex and I find it difficult to imagine how a human could discover this solution without assistance from a computer.
Mark Beyers: Light-Bot in 131 commands
Here is my old video for level 8 (apologies for the sound):
Here’s Mark’s solution, which uses one fewer command. Level 8 starts 45 seconds in.
I caught this off of John Biesnecker’s recently resurrected blog*.
This is pretty impressive. He definitely got a boost from his post-hockey drinking, though.
A reformed blog butcher
Steve Kaufmann – Bilingual interview in Taipei
*He’s a re-reformed blog-butcher now… bordering on legend. And every incarnation of the blog is still great!
I caught this on TED.com the other day, and it really reminded me of my friend Thomas. At least last time I met up with them, he was a programmer by day, and literally built a working spacecraft in his garage. The speaker Peter Diamonds is behind the X-Prize.
I have to say, this is a good week not to be back in Colorado.
It looks like bystanders are getting herded up, too.
And what’s up with the storm trooper look?
I watched Paul Graham’s talk Be Good last week, and I really enjoyed it. It’s always nice to see benevolence rewarded. It’s also had me thinking about my old school and its success– Ron was always completely focussed on what was best for the kids. “If the education is great, the business side will almost take care of itself,” he said.
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