It’s been a nail biting couple of weeks as I waited for the University to answer my mid year application into a Bachelor of Arts. A couple of days ago I got an email with my offer. This is epic news, failure to secure a place would have thrown things in disarray since I don’t have the money to fund another semester at full fee. It means I get a Commonwealth Supported Position, so a good chunk of my fees are paid by the government and the student contributions go on an interest-free loan to be paid back when I’m earning again. Oh, and I get a student discount for transport. Woo.
At least 50% of the time when I start my PC, the Wacom Bamboo Pen & Table fails to move the mouse. What’s necessary is stopping the TabletServicePen and restarting it. This problem is very well known among Wacom users and it’s pretty damn annoying. So the question is, why don’t they fix it? Latest OS, latest drivers, the whole shebang. I don’t really care who’s fault it is, whether it’s Windows 7 or Wacom drivers, but one of these guys should pick up the phone to the other guy and say “Hey buddy, how about we fix the issue that’s pissing off thousands of customers?”
In other news, Dreamhost has gone back to snailing. Kevin Rudd ejected by shady trade unions and big business largely because he did what they wanted (kill the ETS), new PM chick promptly caves to miners demands making a sell-our liar of herself but the Australian public, who have just been shafted to the tune of billions, increasing their taxes and lowering their public services, really like her because she’s a woman and she doesn’t sound all educated like that Rudd guy. Australian politics is depressing.
It’s one week until Uni results are out. My mid-year application is in, there’s little to do but sit tight. I’m working hard getting up to speed on my part time gig and of course studying Chinese every day.
I’ve spoken a lot about Chinese IMEs on Android before but the really exciting developments lately have been in English/European keyboards. I’m referring to the numerous continuous gesture-based keyboards which have tipped up with Swype being the most famous. These are, to be frank, pretty revolutionary. They’ve utterly transformed what you can do with a mobile phone now and for me, at least, gone a further significant step towards obsoleting the trusty campus netbook.
I’ve tried out all the ones that are available: Swype, Shape Writer and SlideIT. The latter two can be simply downloaded from the Android Marketplace right now for free. Swype needs you to head to their site and sign up to the beta, at which point you can download an app which itself requires you to log in to your beta account on your phone, download the Swype keyboard and installs it. They had a bit of trouble with the various ROM cookers slapping Swype in their ROMs so they seem to have gone all medieval on their ass which is kind of understandable.
I think I can say with a fair degree of certainty that Swype is the best of the bunch. That’s not to say Shape Writer and SlideIT are bad, they’re both way better than using a tappity-tap qwerty keyboard but they are certainly less polished. The keyboard graphics are a bit on the naff side, or even weirdly blurrily resized, and ultimately they’re let down a little by deficiencies in being able to accurately and quickly deal with punctuation and capitalisation – as well as generally being more temperamental in getting the right word. Ordinarily I’d say go download one of those since it’s just a tap in the marketplace, but I’m confident enough that anyone will love the input system enough – you may as well go and sign up for Swype and get a copy of that.
Eventually they’re going to charge, one presumes, and I really have no problem with that idea at all. I’ve paid for things which have given me a lot less utility than Swype has. I mean… I actually reply to fairly complicated emails in a reasonable length, with one hand while walking back to Melbourne Central from UniMelb… which is quite a way removed from what was possible with the old tappity-tap keyboards.
In other pretty exciting news, a chap I know on Google Buzz has just today kicked out a beta of his Han Writing app, a Chinese/Japanese/Korean/English handwriting IME. It’s kind of bewildering, very advanced stuff. Essentially you can draw squigs that look a bit like cursive Asian script and it will pick them up. Obviously this is most of use to people who are more at home squigging Asian characters than they are using a qwerty keyboard. This, sadly, is not me by any stretch. However if you’ve any interest in this sort of stuff you should definately search for Han Writing on the Marketplace and give it a spin. It’s impressive work.
Which brings me full circle to the area that most affects me with keyboards on Android and that is how to efficiently handle multi-lingual input. I type a lot more English than Chinese, but I type enough Chinese, and typically embedded within English, that it’s actually quite irritating the process of switching keyboards with the long-press system. Han Writing is quite interesting in this regard because it offers a qwerty tappity-tap keyboard mode where you can type pinyin and Chinese characters will appear for you to tap. Unfortunately at present the qwerty mode is really pretty basic for English, so it’s not really a solution, but it highlights this niche.
What I want is this: I want Swype to be able to process pinyin. I’ve thought about this a bit and I think it’s probably unreasonable to have Swype just operate in a mixed mode Chinese/English because lots of the pinyin is going to look like some sort of English. It would be better to have a simple mode button you press to switch. At which point the keyboard only looks at the very limited set of pinyin phonetics. Obviously the way prediction works with pinyin keyboards is slightly different, we break things down into words rather than individual characters. Since there’s like a bazillion different “shi” individual characters but not that many “shishi” ones.
If one restricts to writing actual words, the point you lift off sends a confirmation just like English. So when you squig out jingchang and lift off, pretty much it’s clear you mean 经常 and that should appear. I was also wondering about a further idea, taken from the way that Swype handles capitalisation. You can perform an additional gesture by scramming a finger to the top of the screen to indicate a capital. I wonder if you couldn’t add four gestures, maybe even the corners of the keyboard, to indicate a tone.
I have the sense that this wouldn’t be necessary a lot of the time, but sometimes it would make the difference between needing to select a character from a pop up list or inserting the correct one right off the bat. Particularly for, say, single character verbs and the like. Of course this is pipe dream stuff, it seems the IME guys working on English and the IME guys working on Asian languages are very distinctly different people. The only mixed-mode keyboards I’ve seen so far are the Chinese guys who often put in a sort of barely functional English keyboard. Interestingly the developers of the Android Sogou replied to me a couple of days ago about a list of suggestions to fix their English keyboard. Some four months after I sent them the email. I think that sort of thing summarises the priority this area is getting from people in either camp.
My first semester as a returning old bastard student at the University of Melbourne is now complete! It’s been awhile since the last update, mostly since it this was the whole exam period but also because I’ve kind of shifted to using Google Buzz rather than posting blogs. At least that way it’s not quite like talking to yourself. The main goal of this blog was to chronicle the process of going back to uni and studying Chinese so, semester complete, some updates would seem to be required!
What was required to complete the assessments varied considerably between subjects. Literature and Performance was a large essay worth half of the mark. This was pretty fun, a struggle at times to tie up a central point to match the topic I had chosen, but it was also a great learning exercise. Further close reading and analysis pretty much tipped my natural inclinations on their head and I came out with an opposite view than I went into it with. I was contrasting the role of childhood as seen in Romantic Movement poets and their literary inheritors. I actually put up Great Expectations and Jane Ayre to make the point. Proper slog this paper, lots of work!
Intercultural Effectiveness was rather easier in a sense, I merely had to subject a portfolio with commentary. It was stuff I follow anyway and I think I have a good grasp of the issue so it did’t take too long to do. Unfortunately I had a pretty horrendous experience with the prior assignment, a groupwork assignment, because only one of the other three students working on the project really had any inclination to help out. So I ended up writing 75% of it right at the point I was most rammed with Chinese stuff. We pulled a H2A for that, which meets my goal but it was a frustrating experience.
For my ‘IDF’ subject of Philosophy, Politics and Economics, I had a final bad ass 2 hour exam. This entailed writing two proper essays on set questions. Now I honestly can’t ever recall writing an essay by hand before. Having belatedly come to realise that I’m far better off preparing for the exam condition than actually swotting up on the knowledge, that’s what I did to prepare for this and wrote out some essays by hand. The shock for this exam was that it was held in some huge hall near the Melbourne Museum. There were over 5,000 students sitting some sort of exam all at the same time. I cannot for the life of me figure out why they do that. Why not run several sessions throughout the day so there’s not a massive pack of people? No idea. Anyway… it was alienating, stressful but I sat down and wrote two seriously bad ass essays. I expect a very good mark, and given the exam was 50% of the mark, this is a good thing.
Chinese, in what is clearly the theme of this blog, was the nightmare to end all nightmares. I put an astronomical amount of study into this and with good reason, the examination process was crazy. It consisted of a written composition test (1 hour), an oral presentation test (10 minutes), listening comprehension test (1 hour) and a final written exam (1 hour). I completely fluffed the written composition test, despite the fact I should have owned it. Nerves, annoyance at slow writing of hanzi… didn’t help. Herculean effort on the oral presentation and I think I did okay but the listening comprehension was an utter face of a test. I had ruthlessly drilled the listening material over and over again. I rock up to the exam and there’s this ridiculously easy and pointless pinyin annotation section, then on to the dictation. It was astronomically harder than anything we studied. It was unfamiliar, it was LONG. The paper was written badly, wasn’t clear at all times if it would be repeated or not but the greatest crime of all was that it was too damn soft. I sat at the front and I couldn’t make it out. The students looked completely shellshocked after, I was just resigned to another hopeless exam.
Fortunate then my final Chinese exam was the written exam. This is my strongest area by far. Again the examination procedure was draped in incompetence, the invigilators appeared to be 18 year old kids which were waiting for exam books to arrive, until someone pointed out the exam didn’t need any. Then as we’re kicking off some workmen start drilling into the wall. You can’t make this shit up. They could have maybe gone outside and told them not to, you know? Nope. Even the papers themselves were poorly photocopied and some of the characters were illegible.
None of this would make a difference. I’m good at this stuff. I had studied even bloody harder for this. In what was a common theme of the exams, two sections were ridiculously easy. The translation into English (okay, that’s my strength so maybe it was harder for others) and then a weird multiple choice section – which didn’t match up the “find the error” style we were told to expect (I had drilled HSK find the error tests for this). So thirds of the exam I would have got 100% on, there’s just no room to get it wrong.
The first third then was English to Chinese. This was actually pretty difficult. The sentences were more complicated than anything we’d practised. I also detected few possibilities to use the specific grammatical patterns which were we had been learning all semester, realistically it was an excersize in how to translate complex sentences with clauses. This is, incidentally, nothing at all to do with anything the text book teachers, there’s no complex sentences in that at all. So yet another case of a badly targeted exam, wrong levels of difficulty, failing to actually test what we had been learning.
I wouldn’t have got 100% for that first third, it was actually quite difficult. That said I finished the exam nearly 15 minutes early so I looked at it a few times and scribbled corrections. I can think of one example where I probably put something in the wrong order though. Still, overall, they tried their hardest to provide a deeply crappy exam but this was home turf for me. I expect circa 90% at least for it. Unfortunately it’s ‘only’ 30% so it doesn’t really make up for the fluffs of prior exams. Although thinking about the listening exam, since the stupid pinyin section was a third of it and since all the rest was multiple choice… I’d have to think no less than 60% for that. So we’re at around 40% already, I did all the class work and homework stuff diligently with good scores, that’s another 10%, at least 80% for the oral, and, um, let’s call the written composition a total wash on 50%. In fact I’m pushing up to 70% territory, dare I hope for a H2B?
So it’s all over now. I should have aced the other three subjects anyway, so overall a high average. This ought to put me in a good place for the mid-year application. I’m very confident of that really. So now we begin the break and I take care of other stuff like beginning a new job doing web news for my old UK mag PC Retail (just called PCR now), that in itself was a real find. It’s not huge money but it’s sterling which goes further in Australia and should allow us to get by without being on the breadline.
Overall, a good experience. I enjoyed the subjects a lot even if Chinese was epic bad. If this was a full year I might have given thought to switching to Monash because I’ve heard some annedotal evidence of their Chinese program which I find encouraging, but they’re not doing mid-year entry and in any event I think I’ll have an easier time of it second semester at UniMelb because I’ve played the catch up and made the big mistakes.
I’m also developing a pretty strong sense of how screwed language acquisition is and have some ideas for helping to build stuff to make it better. I quite like the idea of turning a bitter experience into something positive.
Last Tuesday Canberra hosted the Asialink and Asia Society 2010 National Forum. This was important enough that the Prime Minister and leader of the opposition were in attendance and gave speeches. A few days later the Asian Education Foundation issued a release (PDF) about the drop in Asian language take-up in Australian schools. In fact this release is the announcement of the release of a number of reports about the current state of Asian languages in Australian schools. The timing is kind of curious because the reports were completed some time ago. A cynic might say that the government didn’t want to deliver further ammunition as to how poorly the current government initiative has worked, ahead of Kevin Rudd’s speech (video). There was no way of sugar coating it though, Asian language study in 2008 is 22% down over 2000 levels.
While this was supposed to be a blog post it turned into an extended essay. If you’re interested, click to read more.
The teaching has finished for my first semester back at uni, next week is what they call the “swot vac” . This is revision time for the exam period that starts the following week and it’s also when final assignments are due for subjects that don’t have a final exam. I’m 50-50 with some assignments due and a number of exams. I’ve got a list of due dates and assignments stuck on the wall of my study so I can prioritise my time.
There’s still a lot left to do but I have a good understanding of what I need to do and I’m comfortable preparing at home. My home study is a better place to be than the campus anyway, at least as far as study is concerned. There are quite limited places to set up work on campus, particularly in the winter when everyone is trying to get inside. I will miss the interaction with lecturers are tutors though. I just need this last push to cement some solid results which will hopefully carry me across the line for a mid-year entry into a CSP Bachelor of Arts course.
The contingency plan was to use CAP for the second semester, at which point I’d have a very strong application through VTAC. Unfortunately my side work with my former employer didn’t materialise and we’ve incurred unexpected expenses. There simply isn’t the money to full-fee the second semester. So I really need to a CSP offer… No pressure then…
Today I turned 39 and I got a couple of awesome presents. One of which was the dropping of Android 2.2 which I installed on my Nexus One fairly sharpish and painlessly. The big question is that of Flash support and in particular whether the awesome Skritter would actually run. Well, sitting here wrapped in my home-made Tom Baker-style scarf of ownerage (my other present), I can confirm that it does!
Unfortunately you can’t actually use it… That’s because if you try and draw it will just scroll the browser window around. Which is something so obvious you would have thought they’d have inserted some sort of UI control to stop this from happening. If they have, I haven’t found it. Presumably this is an easy fix though. The only thing that’s now required is for the Skritter guys to craft a mobile web page with an appropriate sized flash app, probably the text will need to go on the top or the bottom rather than on the side like the current desktop version.
Still, the holy grail of mobile hanzi cramming might just be upon us. Sometimes I don’t even care if I’m getting old.
I got a pamphlet through the post a few days ago, looking for all the world like some official police or government related notice. In fact the large picture of Ted Ballieu inside revealed it to be a party political mailshot from the opposition in Victoria, the Liberal party. In case anyone is confused, and it’s easy to get confused about Australian politics, the Liberal party are actually the right wing guys. And playing to your typical right wing manifesto, the mailshot was a text book example of the politics of fear. I’d actually scan part of it but I was so infuriated I placed it in the fire.
One of the side effects of getting old, besides the hair growing out of your ears and a propensity to complain about various bodily functions, is that one feels a curious inclination to whinge about the ‘youth of today’. Of course we don’t actually interact with much of this youth so commentary is limited to encounters in the shopping center and on public transport.
It’s on that basis that we had despaired of the future as badly dressed, loud and sweary teenagers kick back with their feet on the chairs on the trains (when they’re not drawing on them with markers), sipping alcopops, cataloging cigarette supplies and generally being offensive in weird mock-Californian accents which seem to be all the rage. It’s, like, bullshit dude.
So when I headed back to university, particularly in full knowledge that the one I had chosen was pretty much a big zero for mature students (or non-school leavers as they like to call us), I expected to be holed up in classes with these same folk, this time with their feet up on lecture theatre seats. This was, I find myself delighted to report, not the case at all…
