顿悟之前砍柴挑水，顿悟之后砍柴挑水——吴力。

Dùnwù zhī qián kǎnchái tiāo shuǐ,
Dùnwù zhī hòu kǎnchái tiāo shuǐ.
–Wú Lì

Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water;
After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.
–Wu Li

Note: Enlightenment does not relieve one of the details of daily life.

摸着石头过河——邓小平。

Mōzhe shítou guòhé.
–Dèng Xiǎopíng

Cross the river by feeling the stones.
–Deng Xiaoping

Note: We may not see exactly how to get there but we will pragmatically find our way; we will learn as we go.

一步一个脚印

yībù yīgè jiǎoyìn

one step, one footprint (idiom);
steady progress; reliable

Note: Perhaps my favorite idiom.

画龙点睛

huàlóngdiǎnjīng

to paint a dragon and dot in the eyes (idiom);
fig. to add the vital finishing touch;
the crucial point that brings the subject to life;
a few words to clinch the point

I finished Mandarin Tuesday III this past Spring. There’s a lot going on at work and I must admit, I didn’t put in the same level of effort as I showed in Mandarin I and II. I believe anyone who is learning a foreign langauge will concur, class is a bitch when you’ve not put in the requisite study time. Nevertheless, perseverance pays and I crawled my way to the end. I have “completed” the entirety of “Practical Chinese Reader Book 1″ but I still babble like an idiot when confronted with native Chinese speakers. So, what to do? Sign up for the next course! Pain? Haha! I laugh. I have known pain in my time. The mild embarrassment and frustration of language school is nothing. NOTHING! Bring it.

Every language starts you out with basic phrases, useful phrases like, “la tiza está en la caja.” Very useful, for instance, if you are in a bank La Paz. No one speaks English, so you empatically repeat “THE CHALK IS IN THE BOX” until an interpreter arrives. Then you can cash your traveller’s check.

At some point, it pays to move beyond these essential basic phrases and develop real communication skills.

Intermediate Chinese Conversation (registration opens Aug 17, 2009) moves from basic phrases to actual communication.

“This course is designed for students who can talk about daily life in Mandarin, know Chinese phonetic spelling (pinyin) well, and can read 200 or more Chinese characters. We will work on conversational skills in speaking Chinese. The course will focus on communication skills for travel, business, and everyday use.”

And, the class meets on Wednesday. The last three classes were on Tuesday. Wednesday is much better for me. Sometimes you get lucky.

Mandarin is fun. It’s hard but fun. I have the rest of my life to learn it.

And I shall.

一步一个脚印。

www.lostlaowai.com/survival-chinese

which lead me to poke around the site a bit. At the above URL, I noticed that some of the combining diacritical marks (tone marks) used in writing pinyin were not rendering properly. I had not seen this problem before. It didn’t make sense.

Things that don’t make sense bug me. And being something of a character geek, I couldn’t let it go. So I tried to reproduce the problem in a test example. I couldn’t. That’s when I discovered a quirky Mac OS X copy+paste issue. I sensed there was a problem but the truth was elusive. You can’t see that copy+paste changes the string characters unless you look at a binary dump of the file (which I did).

Okay, the mandarin word for ‘good’ is 好 and in pinyin is written ‘hǎo’. It’s possible to write the pinyin using codpoints from just the unicode Latin block.

Latin Extended-B (Latin)
latin small letter a with caron
Unicode  01CE
UTF-8    C7 8E

   h    ǎ    o
0068 01CE 006F

It’s also possible to write the pinyin using Combining Diacritical Marks.

Combining Diacritical Marks (Combining Marks)
combining caron
Unicode  030C
UTF-8    CC 8C

   h    a 030C    o
0068 0061 030C 006F

Note that the combining mark comes after the character it decorates. This is in contrast to Mac OS X’s U.S. Extended Keyboard input method which preceeds the character to decorate with a modifier letter. However, the modifier letter is not a combining mark. You cannot create a byte sequence that a browser renders as hǎo, it will come out as hˇao.

Spacing Modifier Letters (Modifier Letters)
caron
Unicode  02C7
UTF-8    C8 87

   h 02C7    a    o
0068 02C7 0061 006F

NOTE: the caron does not combine with the a; OS X does not
modify the 'a' to have a caron above.

OS X input method uses the modifier letter to lookup an equivalent codepoint in unicode’s latin block.

Using OS X's US Extended Keyboard Input Method
opt-v + a

   h 02C7    a    o              h    ǎ    o
0068 02C7 0061 006F    ==>    0068 01CE 006F

Note: the caron combines with the a; OS X automatically
converts 02C7 + 0061 into 01CE.

To check the code points, I used this handy tool:

people.w3.org/rishida/scripts/uniview/conversion.php

1. open the OS X character pallete
2. Go to the URL above
3. place the cursor in the upper left box labeled Characters
4. type the letter h into the box
5. type the letter a into the box
6. from character pallete, insert character 030C into the box
7. type the letter o into the box
8. click the convert button just above the Characters box, the UTF-16 Code units box will have the sequence (in unicode code points) 0068 0061 030C 006F
9. select and copy (cmd+c) the contents of the Characters box
10. immediately paste contents back into the Characters box
11. click the convert button just above the Characters box, the UTF-16 Code units box now has the sequence 0068 01CE 006F

Aha! The copy and paste operation changed the string’s character code points! Imagine my surprise.

That mystery solved, I next dove into the lostlaowai source code. This was my first encounter with using character entity encoding of the combining diacritical marks. Rather than type the characters directly into the source code, like this

hǎo

lostlaowai encoded the non-ascii characters like this

hǎo

even though the page encoding was declared as UTF-8

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

Maybe it’s a joomla thing. lostlaowai uses joomla.

After a quick bout of deleting blocks of source code, I isolated the culprit!

<html>
<head>
  <meta
    http-equiv="content-type"
    content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
  <title>wonderful.html</title>
</head>
<body>

<pre>
   好極了！
1. ha&#780;o ji&#769;le!
2. hǎo jíle!
<span style="font-family: Verdana,
   Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
3. ha&#780;o ji&#769;le!
4. hǎo jíle!
</span><span style="font-family:
   Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
5. ha&#780;o ji&#769;le!
6. hǎo jíle!
</span></pre>
</body>
</html>

Source code: wonderful.html

Adding Verdana to the font family causes the problem. I searched to see if anyone else had seen this problem. Indeed. Wikipedia.org has en entry on a similar bug and fileformat.info lists the five marks supported by Verdana. That’s sad. Verdana only supports 5 of the 112 code points in unicode’s Combining Diacritical Marks block.

The Verdana typeface, released in 1996, was created for and is owned by Microsoft. If Microsoft hasn’t fixed Verdana after more than a decade, I’ll assume they never will and prudence suggests avoid it.

At least avoid using Verdana in writing pinyin using combining diacritical marks. If you must use Verdana, then use codepoints from unicode’s latin block. On the Mac, this is the default when typing these characters in directly using the U.S. Extended keyboard.

Character     ā    á    ǎ    à
Unicode    0101 00E1 01CE 00E0
------------------------------
Character     ē    é    ě    è
Unicode    0113 00E9 0118 00E8
------------------------------
Character     ī    í    ǐ    ì
Unicode    0128 00ED 01D0 00EC
------------------------------
Character     ō    ó    ǒ    ò
Unicode    014D 00F3 0102 00F2
------------------------------
Character     ū    ú    ǔ    ù
Unicode    0168 00FA 01D4 00F9
------------------------------
Character     ǖ    ǘ    ǖ    ǜ
Unicode    01D6 01D8 01D6 01DC

If you have to convert an existing web page (like the lostlaowai page mentioned above), you could take advantage of the copy+paste quirk in OS X. Simply open the web page, copy the pinyin and paste it into a text editor (e.g., back into the source). The original text is not rendered properly but that’s ok. The character codes are correct. When you paste it into the editor, OS X will convert the the char+mark into a single char from the latin code block.

Finally, the character ‘a’ in pinyin is sometimes written using using the unicode codepoint 0251 ‘ɑ’ which is still in the latin block but in the section called “IPA Extensions”. It has a different look from the standard ascii character ‘a’. There is no set codepoints that replace the accented characters in the chart above.

In comparison, learning German was a snap. And German is no snap. I can babble like an idiot in German but I’m understood. I’ve found Germans, Austrians and the Swiss quite accomodating of my linquistic struggles. Perhaps its because they already speak English and can decipher my grammatical gymnastics, translate my mangled vowels, forgive my nouns’ gender jumping. Perhaps English is a piece of common ground.

The highlight of my German-speaking adventures was at a hotel in Vienna. After speaking (strictly in German) for a few minutes, the bar tender asked if I was French. I may still have had an accent but it wasn’t an American accent. A HUGE day for me.

With Chinese, I have yet to gain purchase on terra firma. It often seems as if I were lost at sea, bobbing around like a fishing cork in the middle of the Pacific.

I have a plan.

I draw my inspiration from the essay by Konstantin Ryabitsev, How I learned French in One Year.

He is spot on about the flash cards. Flash cards are vastly underrated. Drill with them until they are grimey with fingerprints. He created his own “flip-card strategy”. I experiment with different approaches. None of them are a waste of time.

When learning the characters, you must also learn the tone that goes with the character and learn the radicals. Drill, drill, drill.

I served in the United States Infantry (1978-1982). We were issued vehicle and aircraft identification cards. Basically, they were flash cards with a silhouette of a truck, tank, helicopter… on one side and info on the other. We were tested periodically. Flash cards work really, really well.

I also use the Yellow Bridge dictionary. It accepts characters, pinyin or english for translation. You can enter the character using the keyboard or ‘draw’ the character with the mouse. I use this in conjunction with Google’s online translator.

My plan is to

(i) continue taking classes at Stanford Univeristy’s Continuing Studies. Taking a class give me a schedule to push me along. And I like school.

(ii) listen to chinese lessons on my iPod. I find it hard to run while listening to chinese but walking is fairly easy.

(iii) flash card drills

(iv) watch DVDs with both Chinese and English with subtitles (no luck so far finding them)

(v) use my account on palabea to practice my writing (like modern day penpals).

I’ve completed a couple of learning annex classes, worked with a tutor and just finished the first introductory course at Stanford. The coming year is my big push to climb out of the sea, up on the beaches and onto dry ground.

The biggest challenge to learning a language is boredom, embarassment, apathy, frustration, resignation. These are the enemies that lurk in the dark corners of the mind. These are the enemies that assault one’s resolve.

What makes me think that I can learn Chinese?

In the words of Winston Churchill, “Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never–in nothing, great or small, large or petty–never give in, except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”

It’s a matter of declaration and conviction. I will speak, read and write Chinese.

Beginning Chinese II

“This course is the second of a three-quarter sequence of beginning Mandarin Chinese. It is designed for students with little knowledge of Chinese. With an emphasis on conversation, the course will focus on the acquisition of basic communication skills for travel, business, and everyday use.”

Stanford Continuing Studies
Tuesdays, January 13 – March 17, 7-9 pm

I’m building a study group to meet once a week out of class. All students in either the Monday or Tuesday class are welcomed to join. (Which suggests we won’t meet on either Monday or Tuesday)

Introductory Chinese Language and Culture

“With an emphasis on conversation and an introduction to reading and writing Chinese characters, it focuses on the acquisition of basic communication skills for travel, business, and everyday use.”

Stanford Continuing Studies
Tuesdays, Sept 23 – Dec 2, 7-9 pm

I take Mandarin classes at the Language Studies Institute. While studying Mandarin is fun, I wouldn’t say it’s easy.

I’ve opted for the conversational track. We aren’t learning the characters; we use pinyin (romanized tranliterations) and focus on speaking. I bought the CDs recently which correspond to my textbook and ripped them to iTunes. Once a week in class isn’t ideal; listening to the CDs really helps.

Once iTunes had the tracks, it looked up the album, artist, and track names (i.e., metadata). What a mess. Every CD had it’s own mistakes. I set about to correct the metadata. Like I said, we don’t study the characters. Here’s what I came up with through brute force. It may or may not make sense to a native speaker but I’m smugly pleased with myself. For now.

Name: Lesson n

Where ‘n’ is the book chapter/lesson number.

Artist: 語学 (北京語)

Artist is set to the book author.

Literally, it means “Language Study (Beijing Dialect). It may seem weird but this was in the original metadata. I went with it. Notice that the first and last character are the same but different meaning. An example of how characters change their nuance depending on context. Context is important.

Album: 新实用汉语课本 (第一册)

Notice the word for textbook, 课本, has two characters. 课 (kè) means class as in ‘I take a class in school’ while 本 (běn) is the general word for book. Kèběn is a ‘class book’ or, simply, a textbook. Can you puzzle out shíyòng and hànyǔ?

I interpret 第一册 as meaning ‘the first one’, as in ‘Textbook 1′.

If anyone wants to join the class, contact the school. I’m in the 1PM class. Love to see you there! – 紅豹/redleopard

Language Studies Institute
350 Cambridge Avenue, Suite 100
Palo Alto, CA 94306
(650) 321-1867
inquiry@languagego.com
http://www.languagego.com/