Doubting to shuō

Over the past several weeks, I’ve been learning a bit more of the Taiwanese (AKA Minnan) language. One interesting thing I’ve recently discovered is that Minnan is one of the many languages included in the spaceship voyager’s greeting message.

I was listening to the greeting message NASA sent out of our solar system to see how much I could understand, and was very surprised to hear something understandable as Minnan at about 2m50s into it. After a quick check at NASA’s website, sure enough there was Amoy, the prestige Minnan dialect! Here’s the Amoy clip from NASA’s page.

I never would have guessed this would be one of the languages we sent in our greeting, though in terms of the number of native speakers, I suppose it makes sense.

There are two customizations I always perform when I install Firefox on a computer.

First I merge the location and search bars into a single bar that can be used for either. This is especially useful if you ever have problems with the bars getting too scrunched up when you’re not using the whole screen for your browser.

The second customization is setting up search bookmarks. These time-saving shortcuts that let you do searches on a specific site without going to the site first.
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Today, I found this announcement via Hacker News. Google says their servers were attacked, and that the primary goal was the gmail accounts of rights activists. They said that their security protecting email data wasn’t breached. However, their own investigation revealed that several rights activists email accounts have been routinely accessed by what appear to be third-parties using valid login information. This would suggest that the rights activists’ passwords have been discovered via keyloggers, packet sniffers or some other surveillance at their end.

In response, Google has decided to stop complying with the PRCs filtering regulations.

We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that “we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.”

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer: A new approach to China

Related: A Chinese analysis of the situation
Related entry: Google Rejects DOJ Subpoena

There are some great Chinese study apps out there on the iTunes store! For anyone with an iPhone, or iPod Touch, there are enough apps available to outclass dedicated electronic dictionaries in many cases. Better yet, there are enough free apps to satisfy quite a few language learners!

The Basic Tools

The things that I’m looking for are as follows: A dictionary, a lot of audio, flashcards (preferably with an SRS), and maybe some games.

Study Arcade

This is one heck of a study app! It can import vocabulary lists from ChinesePod, Anki, or a dozens of its own archives. These include HSK lists (in simplified or traditional characters!), resources for other languages ranging from Esperanto to biblical Greek, and even prep materials for standard tests such as the GRE or LSAT. The includes a flashcard “game”, that can be set to either cram mode or a spaced repetition mode based on Super Memo 2. Amazingly, the only limitation on the basic service is downloads from its own server. It starts by allowing the user to download five modules, after which it is necessary to “earn” them by reviewing 500 flash cards. Talk about motivation! Here’s the iTunes link for StudyArcade.

Pleco

The Pleco dictionary has been a popular choice on PDAs for years. Many, many people have sung its praises. The iPhone/iPod Touch version just released this week doesn’t disappoint. As usual, the interface is snappy and the choice of dictionaries is top-notch. In addition, they’ve gone to the trouble to improve upon Apple’s already good Chinese character recognition software. While I hadn’t had any complaints about Apple’s character handwriting recognition, Pleco went the extra mile and added full-screen input, cursive recognition and a time-saving double-tap interface. Very impressive.

In the past, I’ve been put off by Pleco’s absurd prices (their palm version cost as much as an iPod Touch!), but with this version, things are a bit better. First of all, the complete package is now “only” $150. Secondly, dictionaries can be downloaded from within the app (after registering). The initial dictionary is somewhat pitiful, missing even common words such as “Sydney”. Some free dictionaries offered are a notable improvement, such as the ever growing Adsotrans dictionary. One final improvement in the value offered by Pleco is that the options are very modular. I have no interest in voice readings of the dictionary entries and it’s possible for me to avoid them. If I wanted to purchase just the Guifan Chinese-Chinese dictionary without paying for the ABC dictionary as well, that’s possible, too.

DianHua

DianHua is a free dictionary available on the iStore that I found via some discussion boards. It’s based on the CC-CEDICT, which has some advantages over the built-in Pleco dictionary. Like Pleco, DianHua supports traditional Chinese characters fully and is fairly friendly to Taiwan-based learners. The one major advantage of DianHua is its integrated flashcard system. It makes it easy to review the words they’ve looked up, and it uses a spaced repetition system to make sure that you’re reviewing at optimal intervals. It’s a great dictionary, and it’s better than a number of non-free competitors in the iStore.

Podcasts

Clearly, iPods were made for podcasts. Or maybe it’s the other way around. In any case, load it up! Seize back that time on the subway that would have otherwise been wasted!

Games

This is an area where I haven’t found anything compelling yet. I’ve heard of a game something like a Chinese version of Boggle, but I haven’t seen it. Anyone who’s found an app that manages to educate and amuse, please share!

I’ve long been an occasional user of the Perapera-kun plug-in for Firefox. It’s pretty handy for quickly looking up Japanese words online.

Once it was installed, you could right-click on any web page, pick “perapera” from the right-click menu, and then hovering the mouse over any word bring up a pop-up display with both the English translation and the pronunciation of the word in question. The Chinese version worked pretty much the same way.

Unfortunately, the developer decided to merge the Chinese and Japanese plugins and abandon the old right click interface and instead add an icon at the bottom right hand corner of the screen (incidentally, the same spot I use for my pinyin plugin). Instead of text, the developer decided to use flags.

Here is the result:

Using flags is a poor user design choice

Needless to say there are a lot of people in Taiwan who would rather not fly the PRC flag on their desktops. Though I’m not a very political person myself, I felt a bit uncomfortable with this on the computers at my office after the upgrades today. I doubt the secretary would much care for seeing it and while I could explain it to her, it could be more awkward if students see it on the computers.

An icon with the character 中 would be a better choice. Also, from a purely functional standpoint, I miss the right-click interface. It was much quicker than having to go to the lower right-hand corner of my browser and make two clicks.

I’ve long been interested in the Sapir-Wharf hypothesis, and how one’s language affects perceptions of space and color. Interestingly, there’s now some quantitative evidence that metaphors can have a strong influence on our perceptions. Primary metaphors, those that are so deeply embedded in our language that we aren’t usually consciously aware of them, are so strong that we confuse our basic physical senses with the things our language has linked with those senses metaphorically.

Bargh at Yale, along with Lawrence Williams, now at the University of Colorado, did studies in which subjects were casually asked to hold a cup of either iced or hot coffee, not knowing it was part of the study, then a few minutes later asked to rate the personality of a person who was described to them. The hot coffee group, it turned out, consistently described a warmer person–rating them as happier, more generous, more sociable, good-natured, and more caring–than the iced coffee group. The effect seems to run the other way, too: In a paper published last year, Chen-Bo Zhong and Geoffrey J. Leonardelli of the University of Toronto found that people asked to recall a time when they were ostracized gave lower estimates of room temperature than those who recalled a social inclusion experience.

In a paper in the current issue of Psychological Science, researchers in the Netherlands and Portugal describe a series of studies in which subjects were given clipboards on which to fill out questionnaires–in one study subjects were asked to estimate the value of several foreign currencies, in another they were asked to rate the city of Amsterdam and its mayor. The clipboards, however, were two different weights, and the subjects who took the questionnaire on the heavier clipboards tended to ascribe more metaphorical weight to the questions they were asked–they not only judged the foreign currencies to be more valuable, they gave more careful, considered answers to the questions they were asked.

Boston.com: Thinking Literally

The question is, how universal are primary metaphors between languages?

I came across this study this morning, and it boggles the mind.

Chronic radiation is defined as the radiation received slowly or in a low-dose-rate from various sources. It is completely different in nature to the acute gamma or neutron radiation generated from the atomic bomb explosions that occurred in Japan at the end of World War II. Tantalizing insights from people living in higher-than-normal background radiation areas in the world and from nuclear energy workers receiving excess radiation over long years have suggested that chronic radiation might paradoxically be beneficial to humans. However, in the absence of an epidemiological study, it has been impossible to conclude whether chronic radiation is harmless or indeed beneficial to human beings. Fortuitously, an incredible Co-60 contamination incident occurred in Taiwan 21 years ago, which provided the data necessary to demonstrate that chronic radiation is beneficial to human beings.

Chronic Radiation Is Beneficial to Human Beings by Yuan-Chi Luan

I hope I’ve been exposed to similarly beneficial radiation and or contaminants during my time here in Taiwan.

Recently, I’ve been reading an interesting book called The 4 Hour Work Week, by Tim Ferriss, and stumbled across his blog. In it, he had a video in which he and Kevin Rose that was primarily about things related to the business of start-ups. But then, surprisingly, in the last 5 minutes of the video, the conversation turned to learning Chinese. Skip the first two minutes of the video if you’re easily disgusted!

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