Overhearing

So I have an embarrassing confession to make. Whenever I'm in a public space, and I hear someone speaking in another language, I stop talking and try to listen to whatever they're saying on the off chance it might be Chinese and I might be able to get some surreptitious listening comprehension practice in.

I first noticed this rather alarming habit of mine while visiting Chicago a few months back. My girlfriend and I were riding the train with a friend of ours on our way to a neato little Chinese restaurant. (I subsequently contracted some form of stomach flu from the shrimp, but that's beside the point.)

My girlfriend and friend were talking work and the future, but I could not be bothered to pay any attention to what they were saying. There was a couple across the aisle from us on the train, and I could swear that I heard the woman saying something in Chinese. So instead of listening to "our" conversation, I started focusing all of my attention on this poor couple, hoping they'd say something else and I'd perhaps understand a little. Sure enough, the woman started talking to the man and I was able to make out that the word 下雨 (rain)! Using my low-level Chinese, I was able to make out that she was concerned it was going to rain, but her husband wasn't worried. I was so proud of myself for invading their privacy, you can't imagine.

As soon as we reached our station and my group had moved nearly out of earshot of my target, I turned to my girlfriend and excitedly hissed "I understood a little of what they were saying! Something about it raining later on!"

Now that Oberlin College is back in session and there are a lot more native Chinese speakers around, I've noticed this behavior becoming more pronounced. I've literally kept pace behind a group of Chinese students, walking out of my way by a considerable distance, head down focusing hard trying to understand what they're saying.



Has anyone experienced this sort of behavior? And what do people think about the ethics of this language pilfering? On the one hand, I feel distinctly like a peeping tom, invading other people's conversations solely for my own benefit. What's worse, here in the Midwest, I wonder further whether the people I'm listening to are speaking Chinese intentionally to avoid being understood by most of their English speaking fellow students.

The flipside of this of this concern is that I think nothing of overhearing other people's conversations in English. Granted, I don't go out of my way to eavesdrop on English conversations. I wonder what Khatzumoto would say about this exploitation of my environment?

Rossann hits 3000 characters

Now rossann (Anne Ross) has also learned her 3000th character on Skritter, hot on the heels of thinkbuddha. Congratulations! She joined Skritter less than five months ago and has been chewing through the hanzi like they're a 20 lb. sack of fresh strawberries in danger of spoiling.

Very well done, rossann. As you're living in China, how do your Chinese friends react to your writing abilities?

George has started creating around 25 characters a day, so we can stay ahead of demand. We're at 4200 presently. But who will really need that many? Perhaps some of our beautiful Skritter users will--the ones who have become so addicted that they can't stop studying.

Japanese Textbooks

We have a new Japanese textbook up: Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese. This is the third book from Japan Times. Thanks to Maksym for doing the vast majority of the work; I finally got around to doing my little part so this could go live.

Coming up next we've got Tobira (the text used by Oberlin College third years) and Minna No Nihongo, a textbook that we hear is popular overseas. After having radicals talked about today, I'm also thinking a Japanese specific radicals list is in order.

Two Weeks of Class

Scott and I started class last week on Tuesday, so today marks the 2 week mark for us both. It's been very intense getting back into the swing of class every day for an hour, at least 1-2 hours of homework a day, and a lot of frustrating knowledge exhuming.

As I've mentioned before, at Oberlin we start out learning traditional Chinese characters and at the beginning of second year we choose whether to stick with trad or move to simp, with most students making the switch. They spent several days (not enough in my opinion!) getting us into the habit of recognizing the simplified characters. I posted a while back about my frustrations with this switch, the whole loss of cleanly defined radical components, the general lack of beauty with simplified script, etc. I have to say though, even after only two weeks, I'm already beginning to appreciate simplified. It's much, much easier on my hand and even with the loss of many clean and easy mnemonic devices, a 6 stroke character has been a lot easier to retain than a 14 stroke character. Here's one of the exercises they gave us to help transition, essentially it's a brief recap of the characters we learned last year that change the most from trad to simp. Our laoshi provides the simplified form and we had to write the trad:



Apart from learning the new characters, we've been closely learning the content in A New China, which has an introductory lesson about a foreign exchange student who is nervous about bringing an objectionable magazine through Beijing customs. I've been ruminating on the discussion some of you may have been following about the Tyranny of the Textbook.

Going into it, I couldn't help but wonder, are the words I'm learning (mostly airport and travel related in this lesson) really generally applicable? Are they modern? Are they colloquial? And perhaps most importantly, are they helping me to gain overall skill in the language? The answer that I arrived for most of the questions was "no." However, I came upon contradictory evidence yesterday morning.

Nick and I generally wake up early and go to the gym. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays are cardio days, weights on Tuesdays and Thursdays. So yesterday at 7:07AM Nick knocked on my door and mumbled "桥山, you waking up for the gym?" (桥山 is my 中文名字.) Half awake, I responded "我忘了 set my alarm!" Only later did I realize how cool that exchange was. I was definitely not fully awake when I responded, and I definitely Chinglished out on the sentence structure, but the fact that I had internalized even basic vocabulary made me feel great. I couldn't help feeling proud as I huffed and puffed my way to the gym.

So I suppose while I can't necessarily see how learning vocabulary like 准时, 飞机, and 机场 is a huge help when I can't even say "restroom" or "toilet," the immersion has been very valuable. As John over at Global Maverick pointed out, the value of any learning regime can be massively increased by varying your learning material, and I definitely agree. But for someone with limited time and resources, and a well-run Chinese program nearby, I'll opt for the textbook-based tyranny. The only reason I was able to speak broken Mandarin without having woken up makes me think that even if the content of our textbook is dated, stilted, and non-colloquial, it's helping me a lot dunk my brain (albeit while it yells and screams) into the proverbial pool of Chinese learning. And to be fair, although the majority of class dialogue has revolved around the lesson vocabulary, Oberlin's 老师 are very good and don't rely on rote exercises, so there's definitely some content variability in my learning.

I do hope the learning gets easier as I become more accustomed to the rigor of the class, but the jolt from summer complacency seems to be working wonders on my language skills.

Thinkbuddha hits 3000 characters

Today user thinkbuddha has learned his 3000th character on Skritter. Congratulations, sir! thinkbuddha (Will Buckingham) is the first user to break the big three kay, although another user has been stealthily creeping up behind him and is now at 2950.

thinkbuddha, that's quite an accomplishment. Way to go, man. I hope you'll be writing your next novel in Chinese? How does it feel to walk through life with so many 汉字 at your fingertips?

In other news, I'm lagging the pack at 1999 characters as of this morning. 1999 is a good amount, but I could definitely use 1001 more.

I'm looking forward to the planned leaderboards for all this stuff.

Try, Try Again

It's that time again. Time for a new version of the vocabulary pages! The heart of it is the new vocabulary navigation page. With this new design we're trying to make it easier to find the sort of vocabulary tool or list you're looking for, especially for newcomers. Thanks to George for making the shiny buttons and designing it.

The ChinesePod and Custom Lists pages haven't changed, but a new Textbooks page has been added. From here, you can activate and deactivate your textbook lists. If this is a success we'll try integrating it into the other two. This makes it so you don't have to go to the list level to decide what you want to start or stop adding from.

And speaking of the list page, that also has been redone. We decided we were trying to cram too much non-essential stuff into view upon entry, so we created a new 'section' level page, effectively taking the browse tab out of the list page and putting it in its own page, and moved all the advanced functions into an advanced tab and a drop down actions button on the upper right. This way, the only actions that can be taken immediately upon entering the page are activating the list and choosing which section to start with. One of the things we moved into the advanced tab was the cram mode, and by the way, I made it so you can make cram lists from any combination of sections, rather than just one. Threw some fun JQuery animations in there too. Enjoy!

You know what else has been reorganized? The vocabulary options page, the preferences page, and the login page. These are now one preferences page. That's a whole heck of a lot better I think.

Well that's about everything that I've been doing for the past week. I hope we've fixed some of the usability problems, especially the list page, which has been dogging us since we began. We'll most likely be tweaking what we've made, and there may be some lingering bugs since I did so much shuffling around. Please let us know what you think is better/worse about the new organization!

In other development news, Nick has gone back into a sort of programming frenzy that hasn't been seen since the migration days back at the beginning of the year. He's been steadily reorganizing the flash code from top to bottom, which is a huge task. When he's done, he should have a much better time extending and improving the flash side of things. Oh and reading and definition practice. He's working on those too. Can't wait!