Toshuō

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!

It’s about time Brendan got some love for his skills! When he showed me around Beijing the summer before last, I was amazed at his Chinese. To me, he sounded completely indistinguishable from a native Beijinger. Admittedly, coming from Taiwan, the Beijing accent is a bit hard for me to judge, but there were other signs. When got in a taxi on the way to a punk concert, the cab driver was in a pissy mood. Within a minute or two, though, Brendan’s chit-chat seemed to have to guy at ease. Even though we didn’t know how to get to our location, the guy was smiling and chatting cheerily with us. Then there’s his disturbingly large vocabulary of characters. Despite the fact that he lives in Beijing, he seemed to have an eidetic knowledge of traditional characters, and their etymology over the couple thousand years.

At the time, my thought was, “this guy’s an animal“. Now, the China Daily seems to think so, too:

Anyone who has been in Beijing for a while knows how the taxi drivers behave – they talk a lot about everything. Hence the other day, Brendan O’Kane, an Irish American who has been living in Beijing for the past four years, was not surprised that the cabbie started chatting even before he’d gotten comfortable in his seat.

For about 10 minutes, the driver tried to convince him that “foreigners can never really learn Chinese”.

O’Kane was amused. Apparently, the taxi driver had assumed he was a Chinese. Dark brown haired, O’Kane is of medium height and has a slim figure. He admits that from time to time, people in China mistaken him as a Uygur.

“I am American,” says the 24-year-old in articulated Mandarin, as clearly and fluently as one might expect from a native speaker.

The taxi driver was suspicious. For a while, he threw several glances back at his passenger.

China Daily: Linguist left speechless

Brendan recently found a really interesting story titled Software does judge’s job in China [AFP via Yahoo! News].

BEIJING (AFP) – Judges are not usually at risk of losing their jobs to modern technology but that may be changing in China, where new software is handing down sentences automatically.

The Zichuan District Court in east China’s Shandong province has installed programs on judges’ computers that provide advice on the proper verdicts in criminal cases, the state-run China Daily reported.

It looks like the software only handles sentencing as opposed to verdicts. The original article is “量刑软件”会不会“腐败,” (”Can sentencing software be ‘corrupted?’”).

I’ve also noticed that Brendan has put up a translation of the most amusing poster I saw during my whole vacation on the mainland.

Today, I met Brendan O’Kane (Bokane). He showed me around the city a bit. First we got a meal at a Sichuan place, then we hit a local punk concert, and after that we went to a popular hangout for “intellectual lăowài”, and got some Xinjiang food. It was a great day!

As I’ve previously read and added some of his Chinese writing to my delicious links, I knew Brendan’s Chinese would be good. I was completely unprepared for how good it would be, though. All I can say, is that guy is an animal! Not only does he read and write great Chinese, but his speech sounded just like a local Beijinger’s, at least to my humble ears. Not only that, but I hear he can do a pretty convincing Uygur accent!

I’ve known quite a few foreigners who speak better Chinese than I do, but Brendan was something different. Not only were there no communication difficulties, but his speech and demeanor seemed to put people to ease. When we were in the cab, he and the cab driver were using so much 兒音化 (Beijing “R” pronunciation) that I could barely follow them. What was clear though, was that he didn’t know exactly where we needed to go, and that the cab driver was smiling and happily dealing with route changes and our confusion. That stuff normally pisses cab drivers off. I swear the guy will be fending off CCTV show offers with a stick if he keeps this up much longer.

The Sichuan meal absolutely blew away any Sichuan food I’ve had in Taiwan. It was a nice restaurant, it was the first time I’ve been served genuinely spicy food in a Chinese restaurant outside the US, it was tasty, and it all cost the equivalent of about $150 Taiwanese dollars. A similar meal at a restaurant in Taibei would be at least $600, wouldn’t really be spicy and would be corrupted to suit the Formosan palette. Beijing definitely wins hands down when it comes to food.

The punk concert was also something very interesting and different to me. In my experience thus far, nearly all Taiwanese and HK songs I’ve heard were either wussy love ballads, wanna be hip-hop, or rap. That isn’t to say I don’t like some of it. I do. A-mei, Cai Yiling and Wubai, in particular, have some songs I like. But this was a totally different animal. Beijing has rockers; guys that come here with nothing but a guitar, 100RMB, and a dream; girls with green hair and piercings; foul mouthed announcers; and most of all, harder music. No wonder so many Beijingers think southerners are wusses. I sure felt like one.

Punk ShowHosted on Zooomr

The Xinjiang food and the intellectual lăowài gathering was kinda cool too. I met David, of Adsotrans, Joel of Danwei, some long haired translator guy, as well as some others. All in all, the food and the company were both great. It was an enjoyable ending to an enjoyable day.