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 seen a number of interesting uses of English in Chinese but mostly they are word-based in nature. Coincidental allophones seems to be a powerful motivator but this observation is a different animal altogether. Chinese has little morphology and indeed many words, including 安装 (an zhuang), are verbs and nouns which need context and syntax to disambiguate them. A syntactic example: 我正在安装一台新电脑。（wo zhengzai anzhuang yi tai xin diannao). The 正在 tells us that 安装 is a verb and we’re doing it in the present.

The English morphological rule of using the suffix -ing to indicate the present continuous action of the verb struck this native Chinese speaker as useful enough to use instead of the Chinese structure which would have been 正在安装. In fact a quick Google search turned up millions of such occurrences in the Chinese blogosphere on this and other verbs.

I’m was at a bit of loss as to why this might be but I’ve come to suspect that it’s a coincidence of practicality as well as a coincidence that the English form happens to be an easily said phoneme that is an existing Chinese final phoneme.  In essence 安装ing is actually easier to say than the native Chinese form and flows perfectly naturally. The final piece of the puzzle is the ideal vector to introduce it into the language, namely how others will recognise it when they see it for the first time.

That little -ing is a handy little package of information which is obviously English, given the latin alphabet, provides the pronunciation (the final exists in Chinese pinyin) and they’ll be be aware of it from their English-language tuition in school. I imagine some small part of appearing ‘cool’ by using English in such a way is also a motivator. It certainly seems to occur more often with the younger Chinese speakers.

Chinese has relatively little morphology or none at all depending on how you look at it. The best example is the plural marker 们 (men) although it’s highly limited to animate objects. There’s also the 者 (zhe) agent marker, which similarly doesn’t really exist stand alone (a bound morpheme) but though it sounds quite useful to indicate someone who does a particular thing, like adding -er in English, in practice it’s extremely limited again and most of the time there’s a proper word.

As far as verbs go, the past perfect 过 (guo) marker and to a lesser extent the muddy but generally past tense 了 (le) marker are the best evidence that the Chinese find affix-morphology an easy to deal with concept. I suspect that the reason that they have not become a more consistent system in Chinese is because of the clash of compound words made from compliments. Something like 出去 (chuqu), out-go.

In fact if we consider the most common ways you would want to modify a verb, tense, then in fact we can say Chinese has a pretty good system of tense modification but it seems to just be missing that last piece. You can say it happened, or it happened past tense perfect but you cannot say it’s happening now, for that you need to do something entirely different and use a syntactical structure.

As an aside here: It is interesting that even the morphologically-rich English does not indicate a verb will be performed in the future by adding a morphological suffix. Instead, just as with Chinese, we use an auxiliary such as ‘will’.

I have only observed evidence of Chinese wanting to say verb-ing something. The clash I mentioned with two-character compliments really raises the question of whether Chinese will adopt something like 出去ing. Whether this sounds like it’s a good idea for a Chinese speaker may shed some light on whether they actually consider 出去 (and the thousands of similar compliments) actual grammatical constructs or if they think of them as individual words, something I’ve pondered for awhile.

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.

In the Android desktop shot of my Nexus One, you can see some cool Chinese written down the left side in a lovely glowing font. This is in fact the time written in Chinese, designed to be more aesthetic than practical. In order to do this I used three different components.

1. Minimal Text: A fantastic text widget that does some stuff like text-based clocks out of the box, but it’ll also accept locale variables.

2. SL4C and Python for Android: This is the actual script that generates the string of Chinese characters, writing it out as utf-8 to a file on the SD card.

3. Tasker: This fires every five minutes, runs the script and then reads two lines out of the file on SD card and loads them into variables. It then copies the variables to Locale variables.

The Tasker bit is a bit long winded but you can’t seem to write locale variables from SL4A. That said there’s a lot of possibilities to lash stuff up in Python and write things onto your Android screen in beautiful fonts. Note that the CJK font has been replaced with something much nicer than the Android stock font as I discussed in a previous post.

Incidentally the background is a live webcam of my back yard in the Dandenong ranges. The temperature display is from an external weather station and the light gadget toggles my wireless ‘infolights’, another project.

When I had a bit of a whinge about the font in the new Android Pleco beta (more on that in another post), Pleco’s Mike Love pointed out it was just the Android default font and asked if I thought to change it myself. Well, no, I didn’t. So I looked into it, found out it wasn’t that hard and switched the Chinese font on my phone to the Kaiti font from Windows. Here’s how…
First of all you’re going to need a rooted Android smartphone. No getting around this as far as I know. Once you have that, you just need to download an application called Type Fresh knocked up by Timothy Caraballo. It also wants another application for selecting font files called AndExplorer.

With these installed, next up we run Type Fresh and hit the backup fonts option. This will basically copy the Android fonts to /Fonts on your SD card. From here on all we need to do is select the font we want to change, in this case it’s DroidSansFallback.ttf, and select the new ttf file from our SD card. SIMKAI.TTF comes with Windows and is excellent if a little large. I’ll come back to the choice of font later.

There are some caveats here. If you are only replacing the DroidSansFallback font (which has the Chinese characters in it) then you are pretty safe. Your smartphone should always boot even if Android doesn’t like the font, which is sadly quite common. However if you change the DroidSans font, and the font doesn’t work, your handset isn’t going to boot. Obviously the right thing to do here is a Nandroid backup for such an eventuality.

Uses of custom ROMs like Cyanogen may find Fresh Face needs you to select ‘apply fonts’ several times before it works. I found it sometimes took up to four attempts. When it works, it’ll also talk about the need to reboot, offer to reboot but nothing happens. So I needed to do it manually.

On the choice of font, some may prefer a slightly thicker font because this action replaces the Chinese in SMS texts and they’re not as easy to read in the default SMS app. I find it fine though. Alternative SMS apps will allow you to bump up the font size also, which would be another solution. The other thing is the Windows SIMKAI font is 11MB. It’s entirely possible that a smaller font will work just as well. I found a couple of fonts that were suitable (typically all discussion around this comes from the old Windows Mobile where it was necessary to do this sort of thing to display Chinese at all) but Android didn’t like them.

Fortunately it just means you get little squares instead of Chinese so providing your phone isn’t set for a Chinese user interface, you can simply launch Fresh Face, change or restore the font and reboot. If you want to see what KaiTi looks like in Hanping and the Android Pleco beta, click through on the images for the full screen grabs.

The Chinese keyboard plug-in for Smartkeyboard Pro IME is almost as good as Google’s Pinyin IME so that’s what I’ve been using and that’s what TouchPal is going up against.

TouchPal’s motion touch, for want of a better phrase, is still deeply wonderful. The idea is that you are able to type capital letters with a quick gesture upwards starting from the letter you selected. If this seems familiar, it’s because Swype does it. TouchPal did it first. Even more usefully, you can flick down to select a symbol. Most useful symbols are on the standard full-qwerty keyboard. Not only that but there’s genuinely useful buttons to go to other pages such as a web tab which enables you to quickly whack on .com or whatever. Since Swype actually seemed to go from amazing to crap in just a few updates, I’ve gone back to the old style peck-and-predict keyboard but TouchPal is at the pinnacle of this sort of thing, particularly with ease of symbol typing.

There’s also a nice ‘edit’ button which enables cursors, copy and pasting (faster than long-press), deleting and so on and a button for voice input, something I don’t use but you always see people moaning about the lack of it on keyboards in the Marketplace comments. There’s a smiley button which is populated with stupid Japanese smileys so is pretty useless I found – it wasn’t apparent to me how to just add some normal smileys but you’d have to think you could?

The prediction is extremely good, not just for English words but word-ahead in English and for full Chinese sentences. All in all, it’s a very functional, very polished, extremely effective bi-lingual keyboard which has usurped Smartkeyboard Pro for me.

That said it’s not without issues. The standard behaviour is to hit space to accept prediction entries. If you want another entry and click on it, it wont put a space after it, you need to do that yourself. This is counter-intuitive after so many keyboards will insert space after you make a prediction choice. There’s some odd stuff going on with updating. I grabbed the current version from the Marketplace and then clicked on the software update inside the app, at which point it grabbed a new version. Why isn’t the one on the Marketplace the newest?

Furthermore the new version looked substantially different keyboard wise than the one I installed from the Market and not particularly better. I also find tapping keys at the bottom of the keyboard sometimes ends up with undesirable results, closing the keyboard, backing out of the app. One can only assume because I’m touching the soft-keys on the Nexus One. I can’t really say, only that it’s a problem I’ve only really had on TouchPal.

You have a choice of where to download add-ons from, the Android market (which as we’ve seen is not the latest version), CooTek direct or something called the Hiapk market. I imagine these choices are necessitated by the need of providing access outside of the Android market. Some add-ons can be downloaded including a Chinese handwriting IME. I gave this a spin and it’s hands down the best one I’ve ever seen, it recognised my hanzi perfectly, has excellent prediction and is all-round pretty fabulous. It’s faster for me to type pinyin being a laowai but I will still find it useful in a dictionary by sketching a word I don’t know. Something I had to use the rather diabolical Android Hanzi Recogniser to do (or rather more likely pull out my iPod and Pleco).

The tutorial is quite focused on Chinese, the user manual is entirely in Chinese. It seems to have lost some of the complex motion touch features that the IME used to have on WinMo but likely to make it more usable, and I think it kind of works. Given it’s free and it’s actually my favourite Android keyboard, it’s pretty good going really. The focus on Chinese is welcome for me but probably a bit of a mistake in terms of marketability. The keyboard is good enough to go head to head with the best on the Marketplace English keyboards but likely people will be put off by the Asian focus. Oh well.

Anyway, welcome back CooTek. I’s nice to see an old friend return and that they’re still in excellent health.

First of all, Google has been updating their default Android English/European keyboard and the Chinese pinyin keyboard. Google pinyin has a button to fast switch to English but there’s no way of getting back. Fortunately Smart Keyboard Pro added Chinese recently. This has a simple iPhone-like button to switch between any languages you have enabled. Finally we have a one-button switch between English and Chinese.

The English keyboard is very good, at least as good as Android’s default keyboard although you may need to get in and change some settings like getting auto capitalisation and training full stops/spaces to work etc. The Chinese keyboard seemed as competent as Google pinyin although of course it doesn’t have the sync to cloud stuff.

Mark Carter, the guy behind the Hanping dictionary on Android, prompted me to take a fresh look at the handwriting IMEs. Now I don’t think these sorts of IMEs are useful for non-native speakers, as a rule, because we tend not to be super fast at sketching hanzi and quite experienced with pinyin.

However one app really surprised me, gPen. It’s available in traditional and simplified variants. When you run it you get a large qwerty keyboard with an animated advert on the top. Oh oh! And it makes horrific tones out of the box, so you hit the settings and they’re all in Chinese which is going to prove problematic for some.

However… once I turned the tones off and dialled up the time I had to write a character (increased the delay allowable before the IME goes with what I’ve written), I found it very good! What you do is sketch on top of the qwerty keyboard, it’s genius really. So you can tap out stuff in English if you want, or sketch out characters.

At first I was painstakingly drawing characters with limited success but later on I just scribbled them and it seemed to work better somehow, not sure why that is. It looks like it’s stroke order sensitive, which is fine if you’ve been religious about stroke order when you learned characters like I have been. Maybe that’s the extra information it needs to work so well even on messy scribbles?

Now I’m not sure I’d actually use gPen much because I find the Smart Keyboard Pro option much more useful for me. However the IME is so good that it’s absolutely useful in terms of sketching a character you don’t know into a dictionary.

It may also be worth mentioning an app called Hanzi Recognizer. This is a standalone full screen app which allows you to sketch out a character and get a list of candidates and CE-DICT entries for them. It’s free so I suppose I should try be nice, but it’s hard having been spoiled by Pleco’s recognizer. You need to finish writing something and then hit recognize. It also seems to put odd stroke labels on what you’re sketching, as if you’re certain about those on a character you don’t know… still anyway, it seems useful in light of no other Android apps like this.

Firstly, these guys love themselves. Rather than just put the damn thing in the market, for the last year we’ve had to mess around with a craptastic seperate installer app, frequently dig out old usernames and passwords for a beta to get reinvited to download the thing again. On top of that at one point the craptastic installer wouldn’t register the keyboard so it unhelpfully just whinged about not being the right device because it thought you had stolen it. Turns out the solution was a weird hack of pressing back, right at the end, rather than OK. Nice…

Then there’s that fucking pop-up. This is what makes me think they’re not even using their own keyboard. If you select a word that’s down the list of choices, because of a custom word you entered, Swype helpfully pops up this message to tell you what’s happened and tell you that you can delete the word if you like. That’s great, but it pops up every fucking time this happens. There’s no control to disable it. What’s more, it’s persisted through at least one update. This is just plain baffling.

Worse of all, however, is the fact that whatever was good about Swype they’ve just gotten rid of. Where once I used to be able to sketch out words and write away with minimal corrections, now every second bloody word needs to be corrected. Sometimes I’m just tapping the keys because I’m in a bloody hurry and can’t be arsed taking my chances on whether Swype will get it right again. I thought this was maybe me, but today I spoke to someone else who had exactly the same experience. Swype has basically gone shit.

All this time, you can’t buy it, the endless beta bullshit, the lame show stopping obvious bugs, and the virtually broken actual swyping, and we’re ready to call it a day. It’s frustrating because they recently added an actual swypable Chinese keyboard. It’s kind of nifty although they’ve not really thought through about how much of a time waster it is to disambiguate two things in a row for single characters. There’s also a handy way to flick to English, but the long press scroll through entire list of languages to get back to Chinese.

It’s actually easier to use the Google pinyin keyboard and switch to English, even without text prediction, than it is to have to switch entire languages. I switched to the standard Android keyboard earlier this morning and already I’m not going “oh for fuck sake!” at my phone at yet another Swypo. Thanks Swype, you were good when you were young but now you’ve let yourself go and you’ve become far too much hard work, I’m ready for the next big thing.

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