I got a pamphlet through the post a few days ago, looking for all the world like some official police or government related notice. In fact the large picture of Ted Ballieu inside revealed it to be a party political mailshot from the opposition in Victoria, the Liberal party. In case anyone is confused, and it’s easy to get confused about Australian politics, the Liberal party are actually the right wing guys. And playing to your typical right wing manifesto, the mailshot was a text book example of the politics of fear. I’d actually scan part of it but I was so infuriated I placed it in the fire.
One of the side effects of getting old, besides the hair growing out of your ears and a propensity to complain about various bodily functions, is that one feels a curious inclination to whinge about the ‘youth of today’. Of course we don’t actually interact with much of this youth so commentary is limited to encounters in the shopping center and on public transport.
It’s on that basis that we had despaired of the future as badly dressed, loud and sweary teenagers kick back with their feet on the chairs on the trains (when they’re not drawing on them with markers), sipping alcopops, cataloging cigarette supplies and generally being offensive in weird mock-Californian accents which seem to be all the rage. It’s, like, bullshit dude.
So when I headed back to university, particularly in full knowledge that the one I had chosen was pretty much a big zero for mature students (or non-school leavers as they like to call us), I expected to be holed up in classes with these same folk, this time with their feet up on lecture theatre seats. This was, I find myself delighted to report, not the case at all…
Today marks the three month anniversary since I started learning Chinese hanzi. The above chart is a chart of my progress taken from Skritter which has been my study tool of choice. Actually I’m a day early but I pushed on and made it to the 800 character milestone. The dip you see is the result of a holiday. It’s typical to come back and find you’ve forgotten a bunch of characters so it takes a few days to get back up to speed.
I started off with a wordlist which I made from the textbook we’re using at uni. That took me a couple of months, which in theory means that I ought to be able to write anything that comes up in the exam. However since I hadn’t previously studied there were a lot of elementary characters I didn’t know how to write. I could guess at them because I can read several thousand, but that’s no good a lot of the time. Particularly since at exam time they wont let me take in my beloved Pleco. That in itself feels kinda unfair to me, I don’t plan on being anywhere without it. You’re allowed to take in a dictionary, which is basically the same thing just infinitely slower.
To flesh out the elementary characters I moved on to studying the HSK1 list for awhile and then switched to a ’500 most common’ character list and a word list for another, more elementary, textbook which is also used at the university. The problem with Skritter, for me anyway, is that ability to nail a character in Skritter really isn’t the same as being able to write it legibly. I put that down to a general lack of handwriting experience. That’s tending to get better though, particularly with the amount of stuff I need to write in the classes each week.
This does, of course, represent some extreme effort on my behalf. Around half an hour to an hour every day. The steeper line towards the end of the graph is closer to an hour a day. On the other hand I’ve picked up a knowledge of how to write Chinese which is in excess of the students in my class that have been doing studying Chinese writing for several years. Of course they have lovely handwriting compared to my scrawl but you don’t get marks for that 
Learning to write hanzi has also improved my reading ability substantially too, I think. Particularly differentiating characters that look the same, it has certainly fostered a wider understanding of radicals. Aesthetically too, I’m glad of having this skill. I’ve never been an artist, my mind seems to be the sort that draws geometric shapes and diagrams more than curves and pretty things. Nevertheless when I write Chinese I look at it and think, wow that looks lovely. I plan to give calligraphy a bash with some good old fashioned brushes, soon as I have some breathing space and can find someone to teach me.
Having scratched my chin copiously regarding the seemingly highly variable battery life I was getting out of the Nexus One, I decided to take a closer look. First of all I powered the device from an external supply and measured the current, then I conducted tests disabling and enabling various functionality such as the wifi, GPS and so on. It seemed to be a sort of widely held belief that it was GPS that was the real killer and indeed Google Maps running with GPS with the near constant network activity due to the streaming maps is indeed just about the highest power usage I saw.
However my usage statistics showed something else, the device was using a LOT more power when I was out and about on campus. This ended up being a stronger correlation than the usage of Google Maps, although it was easy to blame Google Maps because it tended to be used during these points. What I ended up discovering was that it’s the AMOLED display on the Nexus One that is the power demo. The CPU too, if you can find ways to get it to do a lot of work, is a serious drainer. I think that CPU is better clocked at 850Mhz but the press/public latched onto Snapdragon being 1GHz so it became a marketing arms race.
The reason for the huge change in power drain was because of changing the screen brightness up to the highest level to read the screen in the bright Australian sun. I also want to make some comments on quality of display of LCD vs OLED.
Over half way actually, but the milestone is having submitted major assignments in all subjects and having got back some actual marks. Well, so far only one actually, an essay I wrote on the villainous Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello. I take it as a good sign that I thought I did okay, without being overconfident about it. So I was blown away when I got a H1 for it, the highest possible mark. I can’t help post the comment:
Mat, this essay was a real pleasure to read. You make a number of very interesting points and are highly sophisticated in your analysis. I look forward to reading the next one!
It’s not that I’m insure enough that I absolutely require this sort of feedback but when engaged in something as radical as this move is for me, it’s good to get some sort of tangible response that you aren’t over your head. So this means a lot.
I’m stunned how long it took for someone to come up with a Chrome extension that worked like the ones available on Firefox. Unfortunately the various third party global pop-up annotators (which work on text in all apps) were not compatible with Chrome, I’m guessing the way it rendered text wasn’t using a standard Windows API they hooked into. Anyway, a chap called cschiller13579 has created one simply called Zhongwen and it works pretty much exactly as you want it to. Thank Christ for that!
In case you run into the same problem I did, it has to be enabled by selecting an icon on the top right of the browser. This turned out to be actually invisible for me, although when it’s on you can see “on”. Also it doesn’t seem possible to enable it from a Chrome window without navigation (like if you take your gmail and create application shortcuts for example), but if you enable it in one Chrome instance then it seems all subsequently newly created Chrome windows will have it enabled by default. It’s a app on the scene but by golly it’s been sorely missed!
P.S. In other news Pleco on the iPhone now beta testing flash-card support is seriously amazing. More later.
I think I may have turned a corner. Terrible Thursday turned out to be a fantastic day. Starting off with a return of my first assignment, minor as it was, scoring 4.5 out of 5, which was the highest in our tutorial group. This was a minor piece but it feels symbolic, certainly posting about it on Facebook and the resulting encouraging comments was very nice. I felt as well prepared as I could have been, having engaged in herculean study over the weekend and my spare day. It felt pretty satisfying to hand in a Lit & Perf assignment on Othello which I think is pretty damn good, and the monster 300 character homework for Chinese.
So the Chinese… Terrible Thursday has the hardest class with the dreaded listening comprehension class with the stern task master Mrs Gou. It seems I’m still utterly crap at it despite listening to the recordings from previous lessons over and over again, transcribing them. That was kind of disappointing, I hoped to do better but I studied my hanzi 10 times longer than I did listening comprehension, largely because I know I’m getting marked on it and because I had a major piece of homework. Re-listening to listening comprehension tests is a bit like podcasts, when you’ve worked out what something means it’s pretty easy to follow when you hear it again. I think this helps with phrases, I pulled off an impressive save purely on something that was in a Chinese Pod podcast once.
I did so well at writing this week, and still so bad at listening comprehension, that I think I’m going to switch the priority for the upcoming week. Strangely phrases I can bust out with fluency are actually things from podcasts too, they seem to have had this profound impact on me which I didn’t even register before.
I really hope that the R&D guys at Google China get to stay on regardless of what happens with the current spat. They have today released a new version of their great Pinyin IME for Android, this one improves the keyboard layout greatly, improves prediction and will now properly sync your custom dictionary with the PC-based desktop client. That’s completely awesome! Interestingly it also adds the stroke-input system (by keys) which is something of rather more interest to native speakers I expect.
I still long for Android to grow some mechanism to switch IMEs quickly rather than the protracted long-press pop-up box, or for the Google China guys to add English word prediction from the regular Android keyboard in which case I wouldn’t even need to switch (presently if you switch it to English you don’t get prediction which makes it slower for typing English).
It’s kind of curious that it’s grown a massive array of built in smileys too. Which is a little annoying because I quite liked the way the simple regular smiley was just a simple button on the front page rather than needing to go to the smiley page… Still, this seems to be a theme in Chinese software. Spend any time in any Chinese chat room and you’ll see a massive variety of smiley graphics and custom images, often a lot more than any actual Chinese.
I’ve been cramming like I’ve never crammed before. About ten hours of study a day right through the weekend and Monday. It’s working pretty nicely in terms of hanzi, my handwriting is coming along a lot better. I am still kind of shellshocked with the sheer level of work needed. It literally took me all that time just to complete the book exercises and a 300 character homework. I feel pretty happy I’ve cranked through but I really can’t help but wonder if the other students would throw away their weekend in this way.
There’s now been a shift towards assessment across all of my subjects. I’ve either handed in minor assignments or, in the case of Chinese, grading of class tests has begun. A substantial piece of assessed work is due in a week for Literature and Performance, which consists of a closed reading of a passage of Shakespeare – I’m doing it on Othello. The paradox is that I’m enjoying all of my subjects except for the subject I actually went to back to uni to study.
To say that about Chinese isn’t an easy thing to admit to but it’s true. Class engagement is low, the pressure is extremely high and it’s such a lot of work that it’s impacting other subjects like Lit & Perf which involves a shitload of reading. It’s not all bad, I’m being completely owned in the practical classes but I’m actually starting to understand the listening comprehension and it looks as if I’ve managed to convince them to provide the listening materials so I can practice that. The theory/vocab classes are quite pleasant but by the weekend all I can remember is the holocaust of the practicals. I’m writing this on Saturday morning staring down the barrel of needing to study very hard all weekend to the point that I’m actually resenting needing to take a break to go to a Massive Attack concert tonight. This wasn’t what I had in mind returning to university.
