This year I was enrolled in Chinese 3A in the first semester 3B in the semester just gone. I had quite enjoyed the previous year of Chinese and, to be fair, I also really enjoyed a subject called Modern Chinese Literature in the first semester. The problem I had was strictly limited to the pure language instruction and a great deal of this stemmed from the baffling choice of a textbook. At lower levels the textbooks used were modern textbooks that also focused on fairly practical uses of language. This year the text book was basically an 80s-era traditional Chinese approach (rote learning) textbook that was firmly focused on the geopolitical situation of China. I happen to know that that the desire to teach history and culture of China played a large part in the choice of the textbook. I know that because late in 2010 I hassled the head of school about what textbook would be using.

My approach to learning Chinese is to make light of things. It’s easier to remember the absurd, than the boring. Modern Chinese Literature in the first semester was very challenging, with vast amounts of vocab to learn. I was hammering the flashcards, reading Chinese heavily and being highly experimental with my written and spoken Chinese. I learned vastly more Chinese than I had ever before. I was making progress. I was friendly with the teacher, but quite critical of the horrific textbook, the chaotic teaching system and the terrible use of our very limited classroom time. I had, I think, a rapport with the teacher. That’s not hard when most of the class is bored shitless by the horrific coursework.

The net result was I learned vast amounts of Chinese. I played fast and loose with assignments, exams and so on because my Chinese was a LOT better than anyone else, I would rather make it a challenge and get it wrong. Tactically, this was disaster because they weren’t interested in anyone learning like that. I was marked wrong many many times for providing a perfectly acceptable answer, but a different one than was in the book. The exam was ridiculously easy, but the same thing again – unless you wrote what was in the textbook, you lost marks.

The net result was something of a shock to say the least. I got a pass. I think it was 64 or something. The lowest mark I had ever got in any subject by a very long way. An absurd mark when you consider my level of Chinese compared to my classmates. I also had put staggering amounts of work in. I learned every word in the text book, the whole year’s worth, not just the first semester. I learned to write everything. I was actually interested in the historical back stories and read further, and tried to (badly) put that in written essays beyond my current level of Chinese. I tried hard, I damn near failed.

On reflection, what was going on was that they didn’t appreciate my approach and I was being punished in a way. I don’t think that’s the whole story, it’s much more a case of the fact that they were teaching the same way as how teaching is done in China. However looking back there were a lot of cues I missed, easier than you might think given how indirect the Chinese can be. Incidentally I got a H1, the highest possible, in Modern Chinese Literature despite the fact that half the class are background speakers of Chinese. I mention that to tell you that this isn’t overconfidence, I was genuinely fucked over.

After the initial wave of shock and anger, this triggered some soul searching. I mean I’m paying a lot to be at university. Not just the thousands it costs in HECS fees I’ll have to pay back (much more than private tuition would cost for the same hours) but also the whole giving up my job thing. Fortunately I had already decided that linguistics was a better fit for me but one does not simply drop a pursuit you love just because of some bad grades. “They can get fucked!”, I thought. It was important that I thought that way, I had to maintain my motivation.

One of my earlier blog posts was talking about motivation and the L2 self. That came out of my studies in second language learning and teaching in the second semester. You see in the break when I had to decide my next subjects, Eg. continuing on to Chinese 3B which I could have have dropped and replaced with something much better and at zero penalty to me. In the end I decided to get analytical about it because some small part of my journey, and this blog I suppose, is to experience the hardship of learning Chinese as a Westerner and try figure out how to do it better, ultimately so I can help others. So I enrolled in Chinese 3B and Second Language Learning and Teaching with the goal to write about and reflect on my experience in this other subject. So that’s what I did.

I also did something else. I stopped trying to learn Chinese. I had a lot of other things going on, I wasn’t doing a hard Chinese subject this semester, so I just put it on the backburner. Instead I just did the minimum. I essentially just read and re-read each chapter of the textbook from hell (which at this point was turning into a communist propaganda organ, you would not believe the stuff in it…) and I practised the exact questions in the textbook. I only turned up to half of the big two-hour lecture too, since I had a clash. I just turned up and did my stuff like the other students. I learned almost no new Chinese, certainly nothing that would help you communicate.

At the end of it I ended up with a H2A, the highest mark in the Chinese 2A through 3B stream I had ever obtained. What an absolute joke. How utterly shameful. It was, perhaps, a lesson worth learning. I think people can intellectually grasp that there’s a difference in teaching between the traditional rote learning methods in China versus the West but even knowing that, I had no idea how one was basically broken when misapplied across culture gaps.

The problem, as I see it, is this. A university will want to have PhD qualified staff teaching their university courses in a language. It is overwhelmingly the case that staff of that sort are native Chinese who did most of their studies, including university, in China. They’ve probably published some research on something in China, which a university cares about more than they care about their ability to teach undergraduates for all sorts of reasons, mostly to do with university rankings. The net result is that most Chinese native PhD calibre university staff are hopeless teachers of Chinese. There are some potent exceptions, and maybe another university is different. However out of all the teachers I had, only one seemed to actually design courses based on sound pedagogy and taught to the same standard and seemed to understand how important it was to use class time efficiently.

To this point I have been talking about the teachers that are going to actually teach you Chinese directly from a textbook on Chinese.  An altogether different thread are the courses based on literature. At my university, and many others, these are taught by Westerners. They’re fluent in Chinese, but they’re not really teaching you Chinese. It’s typical to get an element of language instruction in tutorials from native speakers. The notion of native speakers being the only good people to teach Chinese is very powerful. I think it comes from the idea of pronunciation which is, to my mind a total red herring because it’s an established fact that non-native speakers can understand non-native speakers speaking an L2 more easily than a native speaker and this is extremely valuable. There’s no real prospect of giving people native accents anyway, so the whole concept is flawed but nevertheless it endures.

Also, to a large degree, teaching of a language is not considered to be top shelf work at a university. There are few enough English native speakers that have mastered Chinese as it is. Those such that there are, having obtained their PhD in research in something to do with China and Chinese, are not going to now teach freshmen how to say ni hao ma. Which is to some degree fair enough but I do believe there are some vestiges of… I wont say racism, let’s call it institutional bias. It seems to me it’s much harder to get ahead as a native Chinese academic. Of course that could be due to the quality of work, ability to manage departments and so on… I don’t really know. At any rate, the native Chinese people are terrible teachers and they are the ones that have the job.

Anyway, I’ve finished the stream. I am one of relatively few that could actually go to Chinese 4A (which is sort of ‘next’ but is actually an entry point for native background speakers so it’s a LOT harder, particularly with spoken competence) but one quick check and sure enough, it’s an ancient Chinese style text book. Thank you but no. Instead I have Great Chinese Classics (in introduction to classical Chinese) and Chinese News Analysis. The former will be challenging but right up my alley, the latter will probably be easy. At some point I’m going to have to work out what to do as a replacement for proper Chinese instruction. I might look again to a private tutor.

First of all, I’ve now completed two years of my undergraduate degree in linguistics. I’ve completed the normal Chinese language instruction stream, or at least as far as I’m willing to take it at UniMelb. Now it’s literature based subjects which I’m actually good at and is much much better taught, so I’ll be feeling a lot better about Chinese in the coming year.

As I’ve said before, my direction has solidified towards the field of computational linguistics although I find myself in niche area that’s quite hard to pilot. I’m more interested in using computational linguistics as a tool within linguistics proper, rather than as a sort of vocationally-focused computer science dominated field of computational linguistics. Just after semester I attended another academic conference and I came away feeling much better about the prospects of finding a good path ahead.

Another major aspect I haven’t spoken about a lot on this blog is my revived interest in all things to do with ‘making’ or ‘hacking’. I have for some time felt pretty strongly that the consumer electronics boom has a lot to answer for in the atrophy of skills and the generally lesser inclination of your average man to get down to the shed and do something for himself. This comes from something of a perfect storm of events, mostly documented on this blog. Starting from the introduction to Python I had with the first computer subject I took as breadth. It might seem absurd, but I had forgotten how … capable (willing more than ability?) I am at just knocking things up out of the whole technical chain from web browser through to little things soldered onto a board. 2011 was the year of awakening of Mat as a Maker.

So at the very end of 2011, where am I at and what am I doing? It’s another couple of months until uni starts again so I’m firmly in the time-rich portion of the year where I get into projects. Some of my projects:

• The Inf0cube – A sort of kitchen-based explosion of old and new visualisation. Heavy electronics and coding project, probably the most impressive single thing I’ve ever built.
• Higgins – The Android-powered telepresence robot. Chassis works, Android hookup works, now crafting some genuinely innovative ways to use a dirty cheap and powerful smartphone as an all purpose robot brain.
•  Home Brew – I have brewed beer for years, on and off, but only as a ‘kit and kilo’ operator. Eg, you buy cans of stuff and just chuck it in a drum. Since I’m so poor now, I began brewing again just so I could remember the taste of beer. As my obsessive personality dictates, this wasn’t enough and I’ve progressed to ‘all grain’ brewing. I think this is a keeper, it’s easy, fun, lots of geek-out potential and everyone appreciates the results.
• Melbourne Mini Maker Faire and new Melbourne Hackerspace. I’m helping to organise this first maker faire event in Melbourne. It’s on something of a tight schedule. I’m doing things to do with writing about makers, bit of PR and marketing, and offering unwarranted opinions. The event is in January.

So that’s where I’m at. Now I should follow up by drilling into those subjects…

I’ve not really spoken about my Chinese language studies for awhile now, mostly because I’d categorise it as a total road crash. Essentially the language schooling at my university is of such incalculably poor quality that it’s managed to trash any enthusiasm I had for studying it in the classroom. Almost. My experience, it seems, is by no means unique.

Rather that get into that particular soap opera, what’s more interesting is that I’m also studying second language learning and teaching and coming to grips with the various theories that underpin how we acquire l L2 (what we call second languages). In fact, with full knowledge that this semester of Chinese – my fourth semester at UniMelb now – would be even more horrific, I enrolled anyway because I knew I’d be studying second language acquisition myself.

The idea being that I could make it a bit less personal and try take away some lessons for the sake of academic interest, personal discovery and maybe, just maybe, the start of of a journey where I might be apart of some attempt to improve matters. Today was a rather interesting day in this regard because in today’s lecture we took at look at the various theoretical frameworks surrounding motivation. This is a pretty powerful factor in the L2 learner’s ultimate success, needless to say, and it’s a pretty interesting area that crosses over into psychology.

I also learned in the lecture of a brand new study on something so close to home it sent shivers up my spine. A study on long-term motivations of a number of students of Chinese at my University. This has been summarised in an article appearing in Australian Review of Applied Linguistics entitled The Changing Face of Motivation: a Study of Second Language Learners’ Motivation Over Time. (pdf)

This article examines motivation using concept introduced by Dörnyei as the ‘L2 Motivational Self System’ which I have only now come into contact with. Campbell and Storch’s article does a finer job of summarising it than I can here (and I highly recommend it, it’s half-way down the second page), but assuming some people with less interest in the subject might read a short summary, I’ll try to paraphrase. Essentially the theory is a view of motivation as three aspects of the ‘L2 self’ as follows:

• L2 Ideal Self: A view the L2 learner has of their ideal second language capabilities.
• Ought-to L2 Self: A view the L2 learner things they should have in order to meet pragmatic expectations such as a career, meeting the expectations of others etc.
• L2 Learning Experience: Perhaps the easiest concept, the situational factors of the learning experience so far.

The key thing here is that this is a view of motivation throughout the process of L2 acquisition and not some snapshot in time. Realistically all language learners go through highs and lows. The things that motivated them to set up learning a language may not be what motivates them to continue, and of course motivation can fade, learners could even give up.

The study concludes that the learners of Chinese were aware of their motivation. I can attest to that personally, sometimes I feel as though I wear my motivation as armour and refuse to be beaten down by my ever plummeting L2 Learning Experience. Even before I read the paper, having just been introduced to the L2 Self idea, it feel like a pretty powerful idea. So where is my L2 Ideal Self? Where is my Ought-to Self? It’s spent a bit of time in thought thinking about this on he way home on the train today and I think it helped.

I realised that my motivation has two positive flows. I have an L2 Ideal Self where I think my ability to speak Chinese is ideally part of who I am. This in itself is quite complicated and has a few facets. A few years in now I think I can frame this as feeling like I’m really in a journey. I don’t feel like a beginner but I’m still embarassed at my lack of ability somewhere. I’m aware I’ve put more effort into this than anything else in my life and there’s no chance I’m throwing it away when it can turn into something I’m intensely proud of, if that makes sense. That’s my L2 Ideal Self.

So what about the Ought-to Self? Well, it’s much less than it was. I don’t feel I ought-to, and I think the best evidence was when I switched my major to linguistics. I would absolutely feel some ought-to with regards to my Chinese grades were it not for the fact that they’re absolutely nothing to do with my Chinese and everything to do with memorising the diabolical pile of communist propaganda that passes for our text book. That’s interesting, isn’t it? I think my L2 Ideal Self was always there, but my initial feeling is that  it’s had to step up and fill the void of a rapidly diminishing Ought-to Self.

That’s when I started to feel a little uneasy about this idea because under this internal scrutiny it became clear that the combination of a terrible set of L2 Learning Experience and plummeting Ought-to Self cannot be sufficiently balanced out by a growing sense of L2 Ideal Self. There can be only one conclusion, my motivation is in fact lower than it was when I started. I knew it too, I just didn’t want to admit it. Shit.

Just knowing that is pretty valuable. It makes me want to reclaim my motivation armour, tarnished as it is. It might still be more than my class mates but that’s not saying much in the UniMelb Chinese road-crash. I want to be more motivated and I think I can see what I need to do. None of it is going to be easy.

This, in fact, is exactly the conclusion of Campbell and Storch. Firstly they found that L2 Learning Experience was most likely to contribute to demotivation. “These factors are important and certainly need attention” Yes. 

“At the same time, it is clear that if we could employ strategies to bolster learners’ sense of L2 selves, it may help learners to overcome negative experiences, and continue with the enterprise of L2 learning.”

Absolutely although I’m not really sure how we can do that. One of the greatest problems with the current model is that there’s no real contact with a mentor. No guiding hand to help boost motivation, provide study advice or really give you any indication of how you’re travelling other than the entirely-too-late system of grades. There’s much to consider here.

Computational linguistics and natural language processing ought to be field which combines the talents of  two very different academic disciplines, linguistics and computer science. Having somewhat stumbled into this fascinating area by chance (by taking a computing subject as ‘breadth’ while studying towards a linguistics major), I’ve been hooked ever since but in this post I want to talk about the curious cross-discipline  characteristics of linguistics and computer science.

Now having passed the half-way mark in my undergraduate course work, this 40-year-old nuisance student has finally arrived in the depths of linguistics and, this semester, a formal course of study in NLP called Language and Computation. At UniMelb this subject is marked as ‘breadth’ which means that no matter if you’re studying science or arts, you can opt to study the subject as part of your compulsory cross-school breadth units. Linguistics is a very popular major. I don’t have statistics but I can tell you that in the core subjects we’re talking about the larger lecture theatres. There’s probably a couple of hundred linguistics majors in any one core subject.

It would follow, then, that Language and Computation would be an obvious subject choice for linguistics majors right? In fact I’m the only one in the entire class that’s a linguistics major, 90% or so are science majors, engineering, computer science, that sort of thing. If I may make some sweeping generalisations, not edge cases but overwealmingly true by mere observation:

1. Linguistics is female dominated. I’d say at least 70% of the students. Most of the staff.

2. The school of languages (European) and linguistics appears to have a very low competency with technology.

3. Computer science is male dominated. The L&T class has I think one girl in it. *

4. Computational Linguistics is dominated by computer science-type problems of a practical nature rather than technology applied to the study of language itself.

* My first year comp-sci subjects appeared to perform better than this with much more women, curiously Asian students made up at least 3/4 of the mix. Most of the students appeared to be economics and business though.

I’m not claiming that this is any way empirical but I think the basic trends I describe would be recognisable to people who work in those fields. My sense, and this is rampant speculation, is that the field of NLP sprang out of a necessity to come to grips with language in so far as tricky problems in computer science are language comprehension bound and have very high levels of practicality. Everything from search engines to voice mail systems, sentiment analysis, automated agents and AI.

Conversely at UniMelb there’s a strong theme of studying Aboriginal languages (which are linguistically fascinating) which really is the other end of the scale in not being very practical (a few thousand speakers in remote Australia) but rather seeking to grow the body of human knowledge around the fundamental forms that language may take, how it arises and how we teach and acquire it.

Computer scientists and practitioners of NLP must find formal and rigid ways to analyse language, devise ingenious mechanisms and machines to achieve better results with results gauged in hard percent terms, then ultimately made practical by building into some system with a tangle benefit. Linguists live in a stunningly obscure and diverse world of trying to describe an ever shifting, exception laden, measurement-error prone study of what is essentially an aspect of human nature.

The long and the short of it is that the means, goals and focus of Linguistics resides within the approach of  the school of Arts and Computer Science resides in the school of Science respectively . Female and male dominated areas respectively. I find that fascinating but there are also some concerning imbalances which I think has given rise to vast black spots where the collective natural inclinations of these different schools-of-thought, in a more literal sense, means that many of areas where linguists and computer scientists could really make a difference.

For a start, there should be a lot more linguistics taking computational linguistics courses. They would find programming difficult to start but it is just another language, really, and it in a very short period of time they could gain some extraordinarily powerful skills and tools which they can apply to virtually anything else in linguistics they do. I feel so strongly about this I’m going to see what I can do to improve matters at UniMelb.

I’m not really sure what can be done about the low technical competence within the linguistics department, I don’t really feel it’s my place to make waves. I also haven’t the faintest idea what can be done about the almost depressingly narrow focus of NLP related research I see coming out of the field other than to just hope more linguists make an entrance.

I’m also pretty tired of  the focus on European languages. Alright, obviously I’m biased but honestly you just don’t see anything other than bloody English while some cavernous problems lie totally untackled such as the utterly diabolical state of machine translation for Asian languages.

Again this is because computer science people don’t speak any other language, they have little interest in tackling those problems – and even when they do, they don’t seem to work on them. Is there an image problem?

Most of the NLP work on Asian languages appears to come out of a very narrow set of universities in Asia to the point that they have their own tools and approaches. (I say this on the basis of reading a few papers as I tried to solve word segmentation for Chinese, noting that the citations were almost invariably scholars from the same three or four universities in China and Singapore).

There’s a gulf between languages here that you don’t see in linguistics as a whole. I don’t really have sufficient insight into the field at this point to say more but I already have the sense that a few more linguistics, a few more ladies, would do wonders for driving the field forward.

It wasn’t true then and, since I packed in my career to return to university, I’ve discovered it’s even less true than I thought. Academic journals are really the bulk of the world’s knowledge, there’s thousands of them, stretching back decades. Sometimes the press covers headline grabbing studies and summarises them, more often than not they go straight into some journal you’ve never heard of and are seen by a quantity of eyeballs numbering as little as the thousands or even hundreds. Occasionally when researching something via Google you’ll get a tantalising glimpse from an abstract on something like JSTOR, one of the world’s largest electronic repositories of journals. So it’s not that this knowledge is only in print, far from it. Yet it is nevertheless firmly walled off from the average internet user.

To the lucky few, the doors to these riches are open. Virtually any student at any university in the world generally has access to these stores via a deep and confusing network of affiliated log-ins, tying up your academic authentication with access to the main store. In fact even less students use these resources than they should, because the methods of access are often complicated and arcane.

However by the time students move into graduate research, they will know the journals of their field intimately, they will be familiar with the work of leading lights in their field, and they then become one of the knowledge elite themselves.

Many universities, including my own, have staggeringly complicated meta search engines that act as a front end for the various journal repositories around the world. Unimelb’s is called supersearch and it’s here where on a near daily basic I’m confronted by the massive gap in online material between the ‘open web’ and the ‘academic web’.

When trying to look for anything fairly detailed, your Google search will be dominated by countless results from Wikipedia and from the millions of websites which apparently simply rebadge Wikipedia content. I wonder how many people have needed to resort to “-Wikipedia” on the search bar just to try look further afield?

Yet in mere minutes one can access authoritative journals, several alternative cited sources, studies, abstracts and raw data on just about anything via an academic gateway such as supersearch. Wikipedia by contrast offers up a sort of global abstract of immensely variable quality and often merely cites a journal, as a source, which cannot itself be read by the readers of the Wikipedia article.

There are reasons the system is as it is and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s all about money. It costs money to produce and manage academic journals. Universities are part of a massive network of funding that that provides access to the journals while the journals are sold, at remarkably high prices in many cases, to professionals in the related sector.

Without having access to the financials of the situation, but having some experience in the economics of publishing, it is my feeling that the sums of money involved are not large in the scheme of things.

It strikes me that the single greatest thing that could happen right now for the advancement of human knowledge across our entire planet, and not merely those fortunate enough to be engaged in tertiary education or employed in small sectors of industry, would be to make those journals available on the web.

It seems like a relatively minor undertaking to change the financial structure, to find a way to fund the work of journals, without this walled garden?

What I’m saying isn’t a revelation, Google Scholar is an example of what should exist although as usual you will typically end up at an abstract and can get no further. Wikipedia asked the question recently about why academia was not more involved in Wikipedia editing.

That’s a *really* good question – if you’re just written a damn journal article why would you not at least immediately summarise it in a couple of lines with citation on Wikipedia? Obviously the open encyclopedia is looked down on in some academic circles but in my experience that’s not universal. There is wide recognition of the value of Wikipedia.

Even in academic circles, Wikipedia is often an excellent launchpad for a broad overview of a topic for undergraduate students before getting into the academic material. Academic material, such as text books, is rarely as clear and concise and never as well linked with inter-related subjects.

Journals are a vital link in academia, they always will have a more heavily curated, peer-reviewed and ultimately authoritative content than the rank and file personal web page on the internet. No one is saying random internet users should be able to edit such material, and doubtless having access countless amateurs will bend articles and research to match their agendas.

Yet that doesn’t seem to be any sort of argument at all as to why the greater body of internet citizens shouldn’t have access to it. Whether that’s interested individuals, journalists (who now have no excuse to be ignorant), or keen young minds born into circumstances around the world which still preclude attending libraries and universities.

One one studies history of science and learning, a common theme emerges. Only a few hundred years ago, learning was the exclusive right of the elite. I believe in decades to come we’ll look back at these times and say much the same thing about how output of our universities was locked away from the world.

I make this distinction because since these type of subjects mean that even if you learn everything, know every fact, you’re still going to have to sit down and work through it with exercises to get some level of competence. Obviously all language study falls into this bracket but phonetics and obviously programming is like this too.

I’m finding it pretty taxing but it also imposes the need to get organised and figure out exactly when and how you’re going to practice these skills.

The computing subject is a welcome respite in a way. For this it’s quite clear what I need to do, so I can just sit down at home and do it. This week I handed in the first phase project assignment two weeks early. It was something I could just do on a Saturday versus the sort of non-specific variety exercises I need to do for all the rest of the subjects which lend themselves to doing in different places. Reading Chinese literature works well on the train.

Lectures and tutorials are absolutely fantastic for Chinese listening skills practice. As compared to last year, these are all in rapid fire Chinese, no hand holding. My listening skills were disastrous last year largely because there just wasn’t a hell of a lot of spoken Chinese actually going on apart from listening to the course material in a listening comprehension workshop.

The result of just a few weeks of the new regime this semester is remarkable, I think I’m probably a bit ahead of the class curve here possibly due to the focus on vocabulary. One of the most astounding and welcome developments this semester is how I’m increasingly recognising vocab in spoken Chinese which I know from my own study but which I’ve never heard anyone say before. Correspondingly identify and recall a word I don’t know and look it up or ask the speaker.

That might sound a bit obvious but it in Chinese it’s actually very easy for someone to say a word you know but you don’t recognise it. It happens constantly. European ears are more attuned to different mechanism of differentiating words, it seems.

A common scenario is this: Someone says a word. Other person doesn’t understand. First person repeats word clearly. Second person looks puzzled. First person writes word down. Second person says “Ah!” and repeats the word with slightly better pronunciation.

It’s actually quite common to see Chinese people not understand eachother until they attune to an accent. Having recently looked at the sounds of Chinese on the phonetics chart, it’s surprising how grouped the sounds are of Chinese, versus a wider distribution in European languages. That’s before you consider tones.

This semester I also met the only other person in a similar boat to me. Almost my age, also doing the Chinese subjects I am and likewise very motivated. However he’s focused on skills, tutoring, podcasts, exchange parters and so on. I remember on the tram he said something to the effect that learning a language was pointless unless you had the ability to communicate it face to face.

He’s worried about performance in the Chinese literature subject and is okay with the Chinese language stream, while I’m quite the reverse. I can read and translate pretty complex Chinese very well, he can speak quite fluidly.

I find myself envious of his speaking ability. I’ve tried to address this before by engaging language exchange partners but this hasn’t worked out well. For two reasons, firstly if I’m given the chance I’ll focus on knowledge based written language stuff in our time, diverting attention away from me needing to say anything. Secondly, language exchange partners have not been anything like as motivated as I am. It’s an age thing mostly.

Hence the move to a tutor where I have set out the goal of just being able to say simple things fluidly when prompted. I’m hoping if I get over that barrier, then my real vocabulary with tumble out. We’ll see.

I was put on to this by the lecturer in a computing subject I took up this semester as a breadth component of my degree in arts (linguistics). Since computational linguistics has doubtless triggered his Google alert, I should say “Hi Tim, you can stop reading now ”.

As I mentioned when I started this sort of return-to-uni blog/diary thing, when I decided to go back to university it was to study Chinese and China with a flavour of politics and international relations. I had constructed a kind of plan which revolved around picking up the skills and knowledge to add to what I was doing for a living so I could go and apply that to the whole growing nexus of all things China.

In my life I’ve caught a good few lucky breaks and that was reinforced when I set off to travel the world. Lots of bad stuff happened too but for some reason the fact that good stuff happened purely by accident had more of an immediate impact on my life philosophy. On that basis I tried to work to a plan but be prepared for strange things happening and to go with the flow.

Sad to say I think in more recent years I’ve let go of that that guiding principal and tended to be more bloody minded about pursuing a goal. Mostly because I realised I had effectively become a jack of all trades but a master of none. Chinese is a good example, you don’t stumble into Chinese. At some point you decide you want to do it and you keep doing it, through the endless hours, the tireless regime of study every single day. In truth I had come to admire people who did something extremely well, particularly if it was something very hard. Some small part of my motivation for Chinese is along these lines, if I’m brutally honest.

So anyway, when I took up a computing subject the plan was just to make things a bit easier on myself as I started a part time job (which really killed me this semester) so I could keep my focus on the ‘hard stuff’, the ‘hard plan’ if you like. Yet already the best laid plans had morphed into something new ever since the first semester when I realised that a) World plus dog was doing politics and it was doubtful I could apply any of this except for going down a journalism path, and b) The University of Melbourne was Not Cool in terms of Chinese stuff. I also realised that I’d hit a dead end regarding post-graduate stuff if I focussed exclusively on this. That may be nonsense but I perceived that linguistics and Chinese was a tighter focus where I already had some big ideas around Chinese and SLA and my technical skills would be useful.

I still believe that, but when I took up a computing subject I realised that not only am I pretty good at technical stuff, I mean computer related things, but I really love it. I’m not aware of anything that will have me sat down working on the same thing for an entire day than hacking away in Python, my new love. (It’s almost as cool as REBOL only other people actually use it). Still, that by itself wouldn’t convince me of some new kind of path but rather it just seemed to add validity to the idea of combining linguistics, Chinese and computing at least as far as my skillset.

What ended up being the major MOAB of serendipity was the fact that this lowly first year computing subject was taught by folks who had an interest in natural language processing, or computational linguistics as it’s sometimes known. This was really interesting, particularly as I found that Python could do unicode perfectly well. The projects were actually kind of bad-ass in terms of scope and for my final one I actually got right out of my depth and had to try solve fundamental weaknesses in my extremely patchy programming ability. It was totally awesome.

Reaching out to Tim with some enthusiasm for this area of study, Tim put me on to some resources including the ALTA conference. I expected the conference to be way over my head since I’ve only begun to study linguistics, let alone computational linguistics. In practice people spoke about things in terms of functional blocks. What they were trying to achieve, name dropping algorithmic approaches (I think Naive Bayes was the only one I actually knew) but by and large it was perfectly clear what they were doing and most of it was totally, indescribably awesome.  They were talking about tools and techniques which I know I’ll absolutely love to learn about and then form into a practical skill.

At the same time, there was an almost total lack of coverage of my particular area of interest. I could absolutely see myself standing up there delivering a presentation for a paper about something I was researching.

I do, of course, have a hell of a lot to learn yet. Knowing this pathway in advance is extremely useful because it can not only inform my choice of study areas, subjects and so on, but it gives me something to self study too. Second semester next year I take my first proper computational linguistics subject but by that point I will have worked through the book authored by one of the guys who cooked up the natural language toolkit for Python in the first place, hopefully already applying this stuff to Chinese.

I’ve already identified some serious weaknesses in the various Python modules for Asian language support so I think a reasonable goal would be to emerge from undergraduate studies having build a proper module, advised by my studies and maybe even some undergraduate collaborators (someone Chinese!) all set for post-grad studies.

While some of the fog had been clearing over the past few months, the pathway has only really crystalised in the last week. Confucius might have said: The stumbling man occasionally steps on the right path. If he is wise, he will know it. Only that’s not very Confucian at all, but inventing your own idiom is probably less effective

Take a big comfortable pen. Other pens may feel and look nicer to start but by the end of th exam you’ll be happy you had that comfy rubberized pen.

Be prepared for something really general. Swot ahead of time about the subject in very general terms and just practice working in individual points from elsewhere. This is mainly an essay writing point.

Reading time: Don’t bother reading the whole exam. You can take note of what sections may be more difficult and use this to allocate time but reading all the questions serves no purpose, you’ll only have to do it again. Better to actually look at the first questions you have to answer and mentally prepare the answers. You should be able to write really good answers for those with the reading time on top.

Revision: Lots of subjects hand hold regarding what you will be examined on. So review the lectures and look at what is examinable and ask yourself if you know that, could you answer a question. If not, this is a directed swot target.

Fact based/multiple choice: It’s going to focus on the jargon. Swot a glossary list.

Be fast. Then review. Don’t agonise on anything, there isn’t time.

If it’s Chinese: It’s probably been dumbed down so forget about the vocab and the characters, concentrate on grammar and practice translating simple things to Chinese.

The only good thing the REH has going for it is that it’s a quiet and well lit environment. Other than that, it’s horrific. My Understanding Asia exam was deeply unpleasant. It was very hot and from my position I couldn’t make out any clock at all, which is of a critical concern when faced with an Exam Paper From Hell, the sort that requires multiple hand written essays on various subjects. Fortunately I just completed my final essay at the end of time, although had I been able to see a clock I would have spent a little less time on the previous five smaller essays. Six essays in one exam and a multiple choice section, horrific.

My second exam at the dreaded REH was Informatics, which is a subject which is pretty easy for me having been a computing tinkerer for years. I did swot on things to catch me out but sure enough these didn’t come up. The common theme in my weak areas of exam performance in all subjects has to do with rather more mundane skills which get in the way of being able to answer a question. For Understanding Asia it was my ability to write by hand. That was about eight full pages of the exam booklet written by hand. My handwriting has never been good and other than the odd hand scrawled note, it’s just something I haven’t needed to do in my life since, well, high school. As a consequence, I’m very messy and I’m slow. The slow thing hurts because it hampers me getting down what I want to say.

The second skill I found more embarrassing although I’m not sure I could tell you why. When I was doing Informatics, a couple of super easy questions came up regarding storage capacity of things such as digital images and audio. The problem was it didn’t go neatly, I had to divide 15,000 by 53. You may tell where this is going. I completely and utterly forgot how to do long div. I remembered what it looked like, sort of. I was ahead of time so I played around but what I was getting didn’t match my order estimation (probably the most useful thing in Maths I have ever learned). So in the end I just showed my working as to knowing the size of the raw data and then an estimated value.

I should have been able to do this. Maybe I could if I wasn’t kind of freaking out about it at the time, when I got back I managed to do it okay. Seriously though, we had calculators when I was a child. I have never once had occasion to have to do something like this. Even the simplest phone has a calculator in it. I can work with rather complicated formula when the occasion arises, my basic maths is okay but this is a skill that is so rusty it was not available to me when I needed it. Of course everyone else in my class will have thought those questions a gift. I have no doubt they had to perform all sorts of complex calculations by hand in their VCE maths exams.

Anyway, the super easy linguistics exam was ending on a high. At least until I went by the linguistics department and picked up my last assignment. I got a mere ‘pass’ for this, by far and away the lowest grade I’ve had for anything this year. There were certainly valid criticisms but there was no way the work warranted that sort of grade. It rankled me quite a lot and kind of destroyed the good feeling of having finished exams for the year. Which is totally absurd and not at all logical since I’ll probably get a good grade for that subject anyway.

The fact I felt so wounded by the grade is something I’ve sought to understand over the weekend. It seems to me I should be accepting of this kind of thing rather than defensive. In the end I realised that had I been graded as such by the guy teaching the course, eg. a lecturer with a PhD, I’d have been fine with it. The problem was I got the grade from a tutor which I wasn’t assigning the same level of authority on some subconscious level. Not the least because I don’t really like the guy particularly. The realization was a bit of an eye opener since I thought I was past this sort of thing.

The fact is, it was low quality work by my standards. I still feel the grade was unfair by general standards, and there were no end of mitigating factors such as my choice of subject creating a mass of work for myself, but nevertheless it wasn’t what it should have been, I willfully ignored a directive in the assignment and that’s got absolutely nothing to do with how much I like the guy who marked it.

I want to talk about the Chinese exam stuff separately since I have at least as much again to say about that…

My usual sorts of study are entirely visual so this is probably why. I’m also an obsessive reviser, I go over and fix things, and say a short thing again and again until I’m happy with it which is exactly how I write things too. It’s not, of course, how you speak. I’ve had two weeks to prepare, so I planned to put together my four possible candidate topics, write out some talks and practice them solid for a week.

That wasn’t how it worked out, I only finished my last story yesterday but I’m in better shape than I was last semester for this exam and I have to remind myself I actually did okay at this last time as well. Although this time they’ve changed the rules and you don’t get 10 minutes between finding out your topic. That’s unlikely to affect me, as ever it’ll be the mysterious brain freeze.

I’ll spend the rest of the evening taking a bit of a different approach and not looking at anything I have written down apart from a few brain-jogger topic queues and chat away to myself trying not to repeat/revise anything. I don’t anticipate being entirely successful, yet again I’m stuck by how I should have discovered and implemented this method rather sooner than now. 临渴掘井 (lin ke jue jing) springs to mind, an idiom that means not digging a well until one is thirsty.