Shanghai Bob

I’m flying to Manila tomorrow to visit Manny for a week (and missing four days of class). The following two weeks give us time to prepare for and take the mid-term exams. So I’m half done with this semester.

I just finished reviewing all the characters we have learned so far in jMemorize, and noticed that they total exactly 500 (after removing duplicates). Since I’ve been in class for 6.5 weeks, and am studying 5 days/week, that means I am learning a little over 15 words/day on average. After another month I’ll be able to read and write more Chinese characters than Japanese characters, so that’s progress, but 15 words/day doesn’t seem like a lot.

Today for the first time I understood part of a third-party conversation. I walked in to the barber shop to get my hair cut, and one of the staff members said to another in Chinese: “Foreigners have big heads [外国人的头很大].”

Some of the Japanese students arranged a cherry blossom picnic in the Botanical Gardens. One of the students also had a birthday, so we got him a cake.

The cherry blossoms were pretty spectacular. You can see them here with acrobats:

There were several interesting characters hanging around to scavenge our cans and bottles (and sometimes take ones that weren’t empty):

I think most people who are studying Japanese or Chinese are already familiar with Heisig’s system for memorizing characters. We got to the chapter in Boya Chinese where Dàwèi goes to the store to buy alcohol, and the Chinese word for beer seemed to lend itself especially well to this system.

The second character means “alcohol” and I already know it from Japanese. The first character is composed of a mouth 口, a drop ‘, a rice field 田 with an abnormally crooked centerline, and the number ten 十. It took just a second to come up with, “If I open my mouth and take one drop of beer, I will plow a crooked furrow ten times”.

The reading, speaking, and listening courses at Jiao Tong all have their own textbooks. The word total for all three is over 2400, but the set intersection is just 1163. I compiled the word lists using CC-CEDICT and loaded them into jMemorize to run flashcards every morning and night for half an hour. I’m in the (otherwise) segregated “Asian” class at Jiao Tong, and this is helping me keep up with the Japanese and Korean students who already know how to read and write fluently.

I study using the English definition as my prompt. I write out the pīnyīn and hànzì, then check what I’ve written against the result. This way I test character recognition, pronunciation, tones and meaning in a single run. A thirty minutes session is way more tiring than going to the gym.

I ended up using jMemorize for three reasons: importing my own word lists is relatively easy, I like the progress feedback you get when you promote or fail a word, and I like the built-in keyboard shortcuts for cycling through the cards.

Other useful flashcard systems I looked at include the Anki and ZDT. I also tried Flash My Brain, but the import function deletes all the UTF-8 Chinese characters in my word lists, so it was useless for me.

While I was looking around, I found Skritter, a new site with a very cool interface to help test that you actually know how to write the words you are reviewing. It even pronounces the words for you after you get them right. The only problem for me is that it tests from pīnyīn rather than from English, and that it doesn’t have the word sets for my books (yet).

These sculptures just appeared in the courtyard of the mall I walk through to get to the subway. Children playing checkers, a woman on a cell phone, a boy playing with a paper airplane (I thought it was too corny, but I saw a Chinese girl lean up against this one and give it a kiss), a guy kissing a girl on a bike (you’d think that would be too risque for China), and this one of a guy pretending to play the saxophone:

How do I know he’s just pretending? The hands are switched and the sax is on the wrong side of his body. It’s like the sculptor was working from a mirror image.

This blog now shows up as the first result if you do a Google search for “Shanghai Bob” (with or without a space). Last summer it was somewhere on page three, when I was in Germany it was in the top ten, and now finally number one. See the “web” category of posts for the history of its progress. I’m thinking I should contact the Shanghai Bob Valve Company (which I displaced from the top spot), and offer them my services as a marketing consultant.

I drew this diagram to help with studying Chinese directions. By the time I was done with it, I didn’t need to study them anymore, so I may spend more time in front of the computer. Outside is 外 = wài, the same character as in Japanese. It’s used in both languages for foreigner: 外国人 = wàiguórén/gai(koku)jin.

We went to a Sichuan restaurant last night. The first menu page showed a picture of moist, shiny chicken in a clear sauce. English name: Saliva Chicken. The characters read mouth water chicken, which I find less objectionable, but it turns out that Saliva Chicken is the standard name for this dish. They also offered Acid Kidney Beans and Quick Stir-fried Grandma.