Archive for May, 2006
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Building characters
Courtesy of Feng Gang’s Shadow, a Language Log post on Learning Chinese in America by Victor Mair. Language Log doesn’t allow comments, so let me comment here. I think this is utterly and truly wrongheaded. Partly, I suspect this is an example of the developmental fallacy, a variant of the naturalistic fallacy—i.e., what charactertizes child development should characterize instruction. Because Mandarin has only about 1200 syllables, including tones, there are very many homophonic characters. I can still recall misconceptions in my early learning due to this, for example, I thought my teacher said that the 毛(mao2, Hair, Mao Zedong) character was the same as that used for cat (猫 mao1), which isn’t even a homophone. I think that such misconceptions can be quite persistent.
If you only want a traveller’s understanding of Chinese, then sound-only methods such as the Pimsleur ones may make sense, but I think that if you’re ever going to learn characters, you should start very soon, at least in the second semester at the very, very latest.
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Calling Dr. Pangloss
Courtesy of Chris Correa, a worthy successor to the Lake Wobegon effect, developed by Kevin Carey: Chris Correa » Dr. Pangloss’s Standards in Education
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Anatomy of a breakdown
On our way out to our daughter’s graduation, we had some interesting automobile experiences. With Alice driving in the left lane of I-80 in Pennsylvania, the car suddenly lost power. She was able coast over to the right lane and get off on the shoulder, although there was enough traffic to make it a fairly scary experience. We tried various things and then called AAA for tow service. While we were waiting, the car suddenly came back to life, and we cancelled the service request.
We got off the highway at the next exit and asked at a gas station if any service area might be open (it was about 4:30 in the afternoon). The proprietor said that they’d all be closed, so we decided to get back on the highway and hope for the best. Read the rest of this entry »
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Sign of the times
Target : Come Back with a Warrant Doormat
courtesy of mesh.
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Useful list of Ann Arbor resources
Jackie Wright Real Estate Agent– Ann Arbor, Dexter, Chelsea Michigan Real Estate
MAINTENANCE/GENERAL
A2 All Trades (code work 994-8421
Dick Sloan 426-9455
Rochman Design/Build 761-6936
Ted’s Handyman 517-3579 or 475-1005
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Back in Champaign-Urbana
I’m back in Champaign-Urbana this weekend, for Xiaobin’s graduation. It’s great to see the Sims, and to meet Xiaobin’s aunt and cousin, who came for the graduation.
Champaign-Urbana seems about the same, and surprisingly comfortable and familiar. Same fights about the “Chief,” same sporting events (Uni High 5K, now merged with the “Twin City Twosome”, the News-Gazette Honor Roll track competition, etc.). I moved to the rhythms of this community for more than 14 years, have many dear friends here, ran around and through nearly every neighborhood in the town, and brought up my daughter in this community, so I guess it’s not surprising that there’s an ineradicable bond.
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edspresso.com: May 8-12: Tim Mooney vs. Chris Correa on the 65% Solution
edspresso.com: May 8-12: Tim Mooney vs. Chris Correa on the 65% Solution
Hmmh. What’s Chris gotten himself into? -
Did you ever wake up with the bullfrogs on your mind?
Today was my last full day in Berlin. I got up early and took a train from the Zoo station out to Golm in Potsdam and met with Reinhold Kliegl and his students, and gave a talk about Chinese reading. The campus is in the former East Germany, and the core of it was an old Stasi school. They have build a very impressive lab and are doing some really interesting work. There may be some possibilities for three-way collaborations looking at German, Chinese, and English reading, which could be interesting.
Did you ever wake up with the bullfrogs on your mind?
Then I took the train and subway back to Max Planck and met with Gerd Gigerenzer and his ABC group. A really fascinating group of people, who are doing very thoughtful work on decision-making and economic reasoning. Economists have grudgingly accepted psychologists into their domain of interest, although often by saying that when people make rational decisions it’s the domain of economics, and when they make irrational decisions, it’s the domain of psychologists. Gigerenzer’s work fundamentally challenges this, showing that often the simple heuristics non-experts use can be better than the “optimal” strategies of experts. For example, German college students do better than American college students at estimating the relative population of American cities, such as deciding whether San Antonio is bigger than San Diego. Their strategy is simple—they’ve heard of San Diego and not San Antonio, so it much be bigger. Similarly, novices pick stocks this way (buy the one you’ve heard of), and it turns out to be a pretty good strategy (unless you know too many companies).
Did you ever wake up with the bullfrogs on your mind?
After all this, I dropped my stuff off at the hotel and took the subway over to Potsdamer Platz. I walked through the new Holocaust memorial, which is exceedinly odd. The picture is taken from within the memorial, which consists of granite blocks (coffins?) of varying size in a grid in a rolling site. The picture shows the new American Embassy (the orange bits), which is going up right by the Brandenburg gate. Nice location.
That’s a sure sign baby, you’ve got bullfrogs on your mind.
I walked down to a restaurant, Linden Life, recommended by my colleague Jeff Mirel. I had a very nice dinner there, which included some amazingly good saurkraut (the only time I’ve had sauerkraut that isn’t too pickled and sour). While I ate, I read some of Victor Klemperer’s diary of the Nazi years—I will remember. After a while a blues band started playing, including a song I’d always song to my daughter when she was young and I needed to wake her up (The Bullfrog Blues).Then back home, and tomorrow I fly back home for real. A really fascinating trip, but so full of interesting experiences that there wasn’t much time to reflect on them here.
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My German problem
The picture is from a bank window, with a slogan that translates as “I live now” (or perhaps, “Live for today”), (also, “instant credit”), encouraging people to live beyond their means like Americans do.
In college, many many years ago, I took two years of German and learned a reasonable amount, I think. I never had the chance to come to Germany during those years. Now I have a reasonable vocabulary, I believe, but no fluency. I don’t know that I’ll ever have the chance to develop that kind of fluency, but it’s frustrating not to have it—to realize what someone said as I’m walking away, or just not be able to make conversation.