Toshuō

I’ve long been a fan of David Lancashire’s Chinese-English dictionary and anotation engine Adsotrans. I’ll admit I’ve had my share of frustrations with its previously poor support of traditional characters, but I’ve always loved the engine.

Since he David joined Chinese Pod, his various technical marvels have been springing up here and here throughout their service, and I love it! Their new dictionary is huge and growing at a good clip– rapidly closing in on the total size of ABC Chinese-English dictionary. More common entries also have example sentences, which are fully adsostated with pinyin pop-ups and accompanied by voice recordings.

Here’s my Firefox search bookmark for the CPod dictionary: http://labs.chinesepod.com/?q=node%2F4&search=%s

I love it when other teachers put up videos of their students. This school is obviously quite a bit different than mine is, but the kids sure are cute.

Here’s the final performance. The costumes sure were involved, but they didn’t have real hammer pants like I’d never admit to having wanted when I was 12.

Three of my 1st and 2nd graders are ready to move to my evening classes. Here’s one of their spelling drills. They haven’t memorized these words; it’s all based on phonics. I’m not used to having so few students, and the video is a bit sluggish. I’m happy that I was able to get help filming them at all, though. Thanks, Somimi!

They’ve studied English for 6 hours a week for 10.5 months. They’ve covered about 40 spelling patterns, but they occasionally forget some of the less common ones (such as eigh).

For a more detailed explanation of how these phonics drills work, see my earlier post on them.

Ever since I visited the Chinese Pod office last summer, I’d been meaning to really put in some time listening to their podcasts. Unfortunately, one thing came up after another- I changed jobs, I moved twice, Martin and I got really into watching DS9, etc… It wasn’t until this last couple of weeks that I actually bought an MP3 player and started listening to multiple CPods every day.
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Since regaining my motivation to learn languages a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been trying out some of the methods from Barry Farber’s text, How to Learn any Language.

There are several components in Farber’s system, but the one that has helped me the most is the use of what he calls “hidden moments”. The idea is nothing new, but I’ve found it incredibly effective. The premise is simple. Forget all of those over hyped language programs claiming that you can learn a language in 20 minutes a day. It’s just not that simple. Learning a language is a gigantic undertaking and it takes time. The trick, is to free up time you didn’t know you had. continue reading…

As my motivation for language learning surges, I find myself practically stumbling over more useful tools. I’ve recently found an absolutely fantastic essay about language learning on Scribd. It’s both inspirational and full of useful advice.
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Last night, Rika threw a dinner party over at my place. Since she and Martin already sold most of their things, including their refrigerator, to the Tealit vultures, she had to make the food over at my place. I’ve been really busy with work recently… but hey, they’re leaving and the party needed to be thrown. I wasn’t that thrilled with the idea initially, but in the end it turned out better than I possibly could have expected.
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Steve Kaufmann, a well known polyglot, gives an English/Mandarin interview and talks about his experiences learning nine languages.

I’ve always liked Steve Kaufmann’s writing. He presents himself as a linguist only so far in as he is a language learner. He’s very down to earth, and makes good points about the importance of learning words in context.

David, turned up a surprisingly balanced article from the Taipei Times about learning Chinese in Taiwan. In the past, I’ve found most of that papers pieces about tourism or learning Chinese in Taiwan to be little more than advertisements, this one was long and pretty well thought-out.

Learning Chinese is hot, but you would hardly know it here in Taiwan, where many people want to speak English. From kindergarten to business school they believe it is the key to higher earnings. They may be right, but the gains of teaching the world to speak their own language have been relatively neglected and the government is scratching its head and wondering what to do about it.

Taipei Times: Chinese, if you please

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How does this video make you feel?