I think it only really becomes a factor when your weekend is somewhat indistinguishable from the week. Like last semester, I have a couple of nightmare days in the week which have a bunch of lectures and tutes crammed in starting from the morning and ending late afternoon. This is a nightmare because it involves a crammed morning train and an even worse evening train (since I likely wont get a seat). Not enough time in the morning to crank out my news stories on my day job so the spare hour here and there in the day I need to scurry off to find a place to set up laptop and get my side job stuff done.

The good news is majority of my uni work is genuinely interesting which wasn’t really the case last semester. The bad news is I still have real problems with my approach to getting things done, whether it’s an assignment or a simple news story. I take too long to do it, I get side tracked, I do it more thoroughly than I should and then get stressed over the time I’ve taken to do the thing. If there’s an upside it’s that my work is good, in the case of my uni assignments it’s very good indeed so that’s not too bad.

I’m falling behind a little in Chinese homework. Mostly because it’s kind of less productive to do the actual homework than to do self study in a different way, eg. flash cards, Skritter, reading actual Chinese I haven’t seen before and sketching up problem characters and sentences on my whiteboard. So this is somewhat tactical again, because the work I’m doing is better aimed at what I know I’ll need to do for the big marks in assessment. Last semester was bad ass for Chinese assessment and despite the fact I got a good grade I really wasn’t happy, it was more of a reflection of everyone else doing badly too.

I should try kick out some more blog posts, because there’s plenty to talk about but … there’s a Chinese idiom that springs to mind. 轻重缓急. To weigh the relative importance of things. I should remember that when I’m done this blog will be my lasting record so a little more 重 then.

Anyway, one of the most interesting developments is that there’s actually another mature student in not one but two of my subjects. We have somewhat similar interests, picking up a subject on Asia and we’re both majoring in linguistics, but she’s interested in the middle east. Today we were having a coffee in a break between lectures and got to talking about tutorials. She said she had a tutorial and it was awful (it’s her first semester so this is all brand new), no one would speak! So she ended up doing a bunch of the talking and then got the impression that the tutor was annoyed with her.

Haha, you’ve no idea what it means to hear that because I expected precisely the same thing. It’s not like I particularly crave hanging out with people closer to my own age, although I suppose there has to be an element of truth, it’s more that talking to another mature student allows me to figure out what’s me and what is more universal. We’ve had a jolly old time talking about lecturer’s poor use of power point, how irritating some of the kids are in talking in lectures and so on.

Also, I think it’s about the first time I’ve actually been able to talk to another student on campus that is genuinely interested in what we’re studying and able to relate it into what they want to do… I’m assuming this will improve as I progress and things start thinning out a little into specialisations. I didn’t quite realise how oddly lonely the campus was for me last semester until I had it contrasted with something more normal. I feel an inclination towards communicating more with academic staff than fellow students but that doesn’t extend to any social contact because of the undergrad/teacher divide.

I completed my semester of subjects in the Community Access Program with very good marks, three H2As and one H1. I needed an average score of 70%, which I think is a H2B, so I had comfortably blasted it in. Of course I was conscious of the scores I needed to get so I didn’t mess around but the actual results were still something of a surprise. I would have thought it rather more likely to have attained a H1 for Philosophy, Politics and Economics or Intercultural Effectiveness (I got H2A for both), than the H2A I got for Chinese. The Chinese result just dwarfs any other possible concern.

There are considerable differences between the effort applied and the quality of the work as judged by myself. There is no doubt in my mind that the quality of work I submitted for Chinese wasn’t worth a H2A. However if you consider the effort I applied, well that’s H1. I this case I benefited from the subject difficulty and being scaled with my fellow students. For PPE and ICE, I’m perhaps a little surprised at the lack of a H1 (particularly ICE), but the subjects were pretty easy for me and I did pretty much sail it by the seat of my pants – choosing to divert my efforts towards Chinese.

I got a H1 for Literature and Performance. I’ve been writing professionally for a very long time, but a sort of dull technical descriptive writing. So when it became apparent that the markers for this subject wanted to read essays that were, hmm, flowery shall we say, entertaining at any rate – I responded to this well. I had to be very strategic with this subject, the reading workload was massive yet I still stumbled upon areas so fascinating I spent days reading and researching, Samuel Taylor Coleridge  for example. I spent far too much time researching and agonising and not enough time writing essays, but in retrospect I suppose that’s good.

My final essay was very difficult. As I read widely and constructed my argument I realised my preconception was wrong and turned it on its head. It was very difficult to weave in such rich and heavy recent lines of research and thought into an essay, realistically one shouldn’t do this – it should have happened earlier, been assimilated and discussed and then writing of a paper would be more natural. I blame journalist deadline mentality for that.

I had been under such spectacular pressure for Chinese, however, that I diverted all efforts towards that even to the point that I had to make a strategic decision to do an extra day cramming for a Chinese exam at the expense of handing in my major English essay a day late with a 2% penalty. I fluked that one nicely because I just scraped the H1 Lit & Perf result and just scraped the H2A Chinese result too. I definitely learned that I should at least read heavily through the semester on the subjects I think I’ll be writing about. I definitely do my best work when I’m able to just write rather than needing to go off and research again.

I feel sad for Lit & Perf because I enjoyed it so much, I wish I had just a couple of spare subjects so I could keep my hand in. It’s the only subject which felt remotely “art” like in my studies. I landed a part time job writing technical stuff for an old mag in the UK. This is a great relief as far as finances are concerned but this sort of web browsing, paraphrasing, technical slapdash stuff isn’t writing at all really. If I write something good, or something really bad (with shit grammar and typos), no one is any the wiser really. Oh well, a job is a job!

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 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.

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.

While this was supposed to be a blog post it turned into an extended essay. If you’re interested, click to read more.

Rudd’s speech curiously isn’t available in full text and neither is the full video. The opposition leader Tony Abbott’s is, however. As a disclosure I find the opposition party to be borderline racist (recent discussion around immigration) and lazily opportunistic when it comes to raising political debate. However it’s his job to take the government to task and I think he did it quite effectively in his speech;

Adelaide University’s Gerry Groot has identified one of the key problems: in high school, when hard choices have to be made about maximising tertiary entrance rankings, teachers, counsellors and parents will often tell students to drop languages – they are too much effort and too high-risk for too little likely reward.

The Prime Minister has promoted ‘Asia literacy’ as a key goal of his government but there is little reason to think that the National Asian Languages and Studies in Schools Program, launched in 2008, will reverse current trends.

I think the first paragraph is pretty good summary of the problem and the second reasonably points out that the government’s program looks to have been pretty ineffective. Abbott’s speech goes on to deliver a rhetoric about how a Liberal government would seek to reverse the trend but it’s weak on details.

The next Coalition government will work with the states to reconsider and to reinforce the weightings and other incentives which are supposed to encourage high school students to stick with foreign languages. Shortage of teachers means that it would be difficult to make foreign language study compulsory any time soon but our ultimate objective should be to ensure that every student has at least some familiarity with other languages and that a significant percentage have studied a foreign language through to school leaving.

I’d say this is characteristically weak on details and further saying that it’s simply “difficult” to make foreign language study compulsory is certainly true if you examine the Asialink reports about the state of Asian languages in Australian schools. Although I don’t see why you simply cannot state it as an objective and then work to that goal. In truth it would be politically difficult to do, particularly from the political party which is simultaneously scare mongering about the invading hordes of immigrants.

Reading though this I did, however, wonder if the Prime Minister’s well known Asian literacy is a help or a hindrance. While it’s true they enacted the NALSSP program, it’s being funded to the tune of $62.4 million over four years. That’s tiny. Only in the last month has it announced round 1 funding to schools. I took a look at the list and essentially it’s grants of $10 to $20k in order to enhance Asian study programs. This link shows the grants in Victorian schools. Eight of them seem to be directly language related and a glance through them does reveal some pretty awesome projects but really the bulk of the funding is going into larger projects intended to help on a national scale. There’s some great looking projects there which you can see by taking a look at the PDF, each is a bit less than half a million dollars so it’s significant.

This is worth looking at because it seems to me there is some real action going on here. For example UniMelb in conjunction with ANU is conducting a program to create online learning resources for Chinese language teachers. This is worth quoting what they’re doing:

Three national leaders in education are collaborating to produce multimedia Chinese language teacher education modules which targetthe specific learning challenges that Chinese presents to English speaking secondary and late primary school learners, taking into account the needs of both native speaker and non‐native speaker teachers. Delivered online, incorporating new technologies, the modules will provide new and experienced teachers with the specialist education in teaching Chinese language and culture they have not received. The result will be significantly higher quality of Chinese teaching in both content and delivery. Increasing student numbers in Chinese without first improving the quality of teaching will only mean increasing student numbers dropping out before the senior years.

There’s $455,900 allocated to this and I have to say it looks like a well targeted program featuring some good collaboration with national universities and curriculum organisations. There’s several more like it. So on the basis of that I think we can say that NALSSP is off to a pretty slow start and isn’t particularly well funded but it’s definitely doing good work.

It’s worth remembering that the doom and gloom figures for Asian languages are actually kind of old themselves and it’s going to take longer still until NALSSP initiatives start to have any impact at all. It’s difficult to see how Abbott can make the sweeping claim that “there is little reason to think (NALSSP) will reverse current trends”. Well maybe it wont, but it’s a tangible program with real stuff being done on the ground.

What Abbott did talk about (well, by quoting someone else anyway)  is the fact that language study is hard, and that there’s a tendency to drop the subject in order to ease workload with a view to scoring better for entry into universities. I think this a critical issue and it’s going to need more fundamental education review. The fact is languages *are* hard and they have an image problem too. I recently commented on an Australian story about the issue and there were a number posters that made claims about how languages were pointless and money should better go into other areas, like science and so on. Which is moronic but overall I think worth engaging with because attitude to Asian languages is definately part of the problem.

I see the heart of the problem as  follows; everyone acknowledges that there’s a solid case for upping the weighting and incentives supplied to the study of language. The problem is already 90% of those undertaking Asian languages are from background speaking homes. Anecdotally it doesn’t seem that high to me (in my classes) but the reports are pretty clear about it so I’ll bow to the research. At any rate native background speakers are an absolutely huge problem. Why? I’ll tell you why. They’re already very good at the subject. The way subjects evaluation works is that grades are dispensed on a ranking basis. It doesn’t matter if you take the world’s hardest subject. If you did middle of the pack in terms of performance, you will get a mid score. So you’d have to be an utter idiot to choose the hardest possible subject you can do (I don’t think that’s debatable) and one where most of the people in that class already possess much of the knowledge and skill.

How it’s supposed to work is that students are supposed to be split into streams. So all the background speakers get put into their own classes and the genuine beginners are in their own classes. For whatever reason this just doesn’t happen very effectively. My own classes have a majority of obviously background speaking students, presumably with Chinese parents, who have an excellent grasp of spoken Chinese. I’m kind of ambivalent about that myself, although it hurts because I need a big score in this subject and I was already playing catch up. Other non-Chinese background students, on the other hand, are actively hostile about it. We already know a vast number of students dropped the language already (90% attrition rate in Asian languages in high school!) so it doesn’t seem unreasonable to suggest this plays a substantial role.

There’s a few reasons for the failure of the streaming system which I think I can identify:

1. Critical mass: Some schools simply wont have the numbers to make it practical to run all the classes they ought to.
2. Unbalanced capability: I know students who ought to be in a higher level (than me) are not because their knowledge of academic language points such as grammar and written capability is not sufficient. However their spoken and listening capability is extremely high.
3. Students lie: They don’t want to be in a higher stream. They don’t want harder work, they want easier work. There are some students in my classes who absolutely fit this model, I have heard them discussing it.

(Just on that last point, there’s two students in my class who have Chinese parents and have a particularly high capability. I was in the lift with them as they went up to see the subject coordinator to beg not to be bumped up a class. This followed a class where the coordinator was explaining the exam proceed with a stark pointed warning that students very good at the language would be bumped up. I was baffled at the time why this would come up in the very last week of classes…)

Anyway, these problems exist. So if you lump on incentives to choose language, what you’re really doing is targeting all the people who are already speaking that language at home in order to by association target the vanishingly small number of non-background speakers who are actually brave enough to study the language. There’s a fair bit of debate about that already as seen in some of the raft of newspaper articles.

So what do you do about that? Well, Abbott certainly didn’t put forth an answer in his cursory knee-jerk manifesto. Say, for example, you did manage to stream perfectly so that basically you had a class full of non-Asians in a class and then you target all your incentives at them. They’re going to be predominantly white. Are we now saying that we encourage studying of language but only the white guys? That would be all kinds of bad even if  it’s actually pretty fair because those are the people you want to encourage the most.

Australia has a real problem here. We’re extremely reluctant to target people of a certain ethnicity, and doing so has a powerful history of creating resentment. I think this thorny issue is utterly critical to helping to address the problem, in addition to other massive problems like a lack of suitably trained teachers and so on.

There’s also one final area which I think is worth mentioning. The total body of knowledge one has to acquire in language is, I subject, vastly higher than any other subject you can do. In addition to that, you actually need to remorselessly train the practice of this knowledge into developing an extraordinarily difficult skill. This is so far removed from other subjects a student will choose at highschool that it’s a complete mystery to me why we then insist on essentially ramming this very large very square peg into a tiny round hole. The round hole means that even after years of study in high school the students that pass second language, particularly an Asian language, are still elementary at best. Which begs the fairly reasonable question of why you were doing it in the first place.

I think this is a critical question too. In the UK the only people I ran across who had studied another language (which invariably tended to be French), they would refer to it as “A level French” which I took to be synonymous with enough capability to utter the top ten phrases from one of those travelling language booklets. That’s not to say that it’s worthless someone studying a language which ultimately falls into disrepair. I mean you might as well say that about anything, I can’t remember ever using the mathematical techniques that I learned for example… you wouldn’t say it was useless though.

However the discussion about Asian languages is Australia is taken in the very particular context of Asian literacy. To provide tangible benefits to Australia through communication, business, relations and so on. If that is our aim then quite frankly something much more serious needs to be done. I’m talking about pretty epic measures, something like this:

1. Introduction of an Asian language at primary school.
2. Double the subject workload for non-background speakers. Eg. One language subject is two other subjects.
3. Severely modernised tertiary education systems with a compulsory element of immersion.

That’s pretty radical stuff but I think if you actually want a language major to come out of university and be capable in that language, this is what it takes. The double subject area I think is particularly critical. There’s precedent for this, when I was in highschool I did Maths I and Maths II as high school subjects. If you’re doing a language from beginner level I firmly believe there’s a case that it should be double the hours, double the credit, double everything. Certainly in years 11-12 anyway. I would forsee that European languages would still be significantly ahead at high school graduation which means this regime probably doesn’t need to be continued to tertiary schooling to attain functional use of language but it’s very likely that Asian languages would.

The last point I could write another massive essay on so I’ll leave that to another time. My point, overall, is that the government and opposition can do all the hand wringing they like. Newspapers can kick out as many depressing stories about the disastrous situation of Asian languages in schools as they like with the associated amateur analysis that seems to be the Australian press stock in trade. None of this will change anything until it’s understood that there are some fundamental education policies which need to be reviewed and beyond that a raft of extremely tricky logistical issues to tackle before we see any genuine headway.

Perhaps even before we start we should look inward a little and ask why it is that this situation has arisen in the first place. Do we have a fundamental lack of respect for the skill of multilingualism? Do we somehow think that it isn’t necessary to move towards the future with our Asian neighbors? Or maybe, what we’re saying, is that it’s all well and good but let’s leave it to those who had Chinese parents because our education system is ultimately incapable of rising to the challenge? That view, surely, cannot be allowed to prevail.

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…

It’s actually going to be a pretty relaxing finish to the semester, I don’t feel anything like as time constrained as I was at the end of the teaching period. Home study works quite nicely for me and with all four subjects if I get tired of something I can switch to something else. At home I’ve got the gas fire at my back, my desktop computer, a working stable Internet connection and of course as much coffee I can stomach. Chinese, continuing the theme of the semester, is more work than the other three combined. There are four tests in total including a couple of exams.  I will also need to develop a relatively poor skill of mine for a one-on-one 10 minute oral exam in 10 days time.

Other than Chinese the next major cause for concern is a written exam for “Philosophy, Politics and Economics”. Not because of the subject, that wont be difficult at all, but because the exam consists of basically hand-writing two 1,000 odd word essays. I can’t recall the last time I wrote so much by hand, my mechanism of writing is all about electronic editing so this is something I need to do practice.

Ramming that point home, I felt I did poorly in a Chinese written composition exam last week because I was simply unprepared for the exam conditions. I was extraordinarily well prepared in terms of background study but I had never practiced writing a short essay in Chinese without any aids. Add on some exam pressure and it was borderline disastrous. It’s quite difficult not to be angry with myself for not seeing that one coming but fortunately it wasn’t a lot of marks in the scheme of things. I’ll do mock exams before the more substantial one later on. I wont make that mistake again.

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.