today's topic

is traditional characters.

As you may know, Taiwan uses Traditional characters where as Mainland China switched to Simplified sometime after the Communist revolution. What many people may not realize is that the Nationalist (pre-Communist) government also planned to overhaul the country's writing system, even considering replacing it with a romanized alphabet (!!!!!!!) but trashed the idea. Anyway, since the plan got interrupted, the KMT brought Traditional Chinese to Taiwan, outlawing the speaking / writing of indigenous languages, and now today everything here is in Traditional characters.

Dirty history aside, I think traditional characters (fantizi) are awesome.

Whereas many pro-fantizi arguments include "fantizi preserves the original radicals and thus the meaning of the characters," which is true, I don't think that this is an advantage in itself. Anybody who's studied Chinese characters will know that the radicals of an unknown character are almost useless in divining its meaning. A prime example: 杯 (bei1, cup) which is composed of the wood radical and the character for "no." None of this points to "cup," except maybe as alluded to in a 115 dialogue, (horribly scraped up from memory)
A: What about bei1? It's got wood and no.
B: There's no wood in a cup, so it must be so!
A: Now I understand! Learning radicals really is the best way to study characters!

One of the methods of simplifying characters involves cutting out a lot of radicals and replacing them with phonetic components, which, if not helping you guess the meaning of a character, at least help you guess its pronounciation. However, I feel that this leads to a great many near-identical characters. Fantizi, by preserving more original radicals, leaves more things to memorize but less chances to mix things up. I think I can demonstrate better with an example:

Here are three fantizi: chong1 沖 ... zhong1 鐘 ... and zhong3 種
Here are the equivalent jiantizi: 沖 ... 钟 ... 种

note that jiantizi uses 中 as the phonetic radical in each case, whereas fantizi has 3 separate ones (that all have the same phonetic content). Yes, it's more to memorize, but I feel like there's less stuff to get confused, in a language that features these gems: 于干千午牛 (the first two being jiantizi).

On top of that, there's always the good argument that fantizi are just prettier to look at. There are a few exceptions, including the recurrent 麼 / 么 (me5, a common particle in question words) which looks like a scrunched-up face, but for the most part there's some really sweet-looking characters (or more precisely, radicals) that jiantizi users are completely missing.
Among them:
-the bones radical "gu3" 骨 of　身體　（ 身体） (shen1 ti3, health) fame;
-the tiger radical "hu1" 虍 as seen in such awesome words such as 戲劇 (戏剧) (xi4 ju4, drama);
-the dragon radical "long2" 龍 (龙) which needs no explanation.

Yes, fantizi take longer to write. But let's not kid ourselves: writing chinese in any fashion isn't time-efficient. What we all end up doing is scrawling characters down, ignoring stroke order and sharpened corners (occasionally my 口s end up just being 1-stroke zeroes), the result of which is both take about an equivalent time to write and are equally as messy. However, given the time to carefully write out a character, the fantizi writer will emerge with a more beautiful product.

Finally, I feel that more complicated characters are easier to remember how to write. Truly the worst ones are those middle-of-the-road characters like 舒服 which I might have forgotten after 20+ attempts at "learning it for good." But I've always found that the scariest, most murderous characters are the ones that I can reliably pop out, much like maybe the only word I remember from Spanish is "triturador de desperdicios" (garbage disposal). Case in point: 繡.

I will be honest and say that learning fantizi probably composed the majority of my desire to come to Taiwan and study Chinese. Last night I conversed with a Light Fellow from Beijing over AIM, using jiantizi, and in order to converse I had to write certain characters into the online Chinese dictionary and copy out their simplified version. It really showed me how many characters are gutted and transformed into factory-produced looking things. I don't want to come across like a pretentious artiste ... I do plan on learning the simplified versions of my vocabulary, and for jotting down stuff really quickly, using 几 rather than 幾 is a blessing. But for any of my personal correspondence and stuff like that, I'll be using Fantizi. If nothing else, it's a way of keeping Chinese history alive.

more pictures

Buying things in Taiwan. The department stores are really sweet!

hey, just updating quickly to say that the day following that post was really good in terms of chinese and everything. also, my arm feels a little better, although it still really sucks not being able to use it on its own. the tests and everything went surprisingly well, and i went to a sweet night market with cai xiaojie in some far-off place, it was a nice time. i also got to see some of taichung's scenic spots, which are really just parts of the road on a big hill that houses most of the factories. still though, it's nice. today i slept way late and then took another nap, i surprisingly don't have that much to do this weekend so I'm going to relax a little bit. cool, i'll post again soon.

bleh

hey, posting instead of doing my work. today was a pretty bad day in the world of zhongwen and also my physical health. I've been having sleeping problems, mostly involving me not being able to fall asleep at night even though it's ridiculously late. I tried to go to bed at 1;30 last night and stayed up until 2:30. what's more, waking up at 8:00 should have still given me a decent amount of sleep, but i was a zombie today in school and i have no idea why. When I was going to bed at 3:30 - 4:30 before, I'd be tired but I could function. Today I woke up and my mind was screaming in english, which has happened but never this badly. all day today I was in english mode and I felt like Chinese was truly a "foreign language." This is as opposed to before where I could treat the two equally, notably once when I was trying to explain an english phrase, in english, to Cai Xiaojie (at her request) and kept throwing Chinese words in accidentally.
Anyway, so today I was basically in a daze and frustrated about my language proficiency; I forgot "chang chang" ("often") which is I think one of the first 30 characters I learned, ever? I could still speak Chinese ok but when I was thinking to myself my brain was clearly using english. This sucked.
Then, a girl who i'm not interested in asked me to go to the movies and I said yes because I didn't know what else to say. that's going to be awkward because i pretty much don't want to do anything. which is strange considering I'm interested in some of the other people here, but whatever. love works in mysterious ways, eh?
Then, I went to Muay Thai and I dislocated my shoulder. that sucked also.
Right now it's 11:35 and I have 2 sets of characters to learn and a big dialogue to memorize. I've already started on the dialogue so it won't be as bad as last time, but the characters will probably be a mess.
Well, here's hoping tomorrow is better.
Here are some pictures to make you feel happy after reading this train wreck of a post:

note, that is not really ecstasy.

one of my textbooks

my birthday cake!

i'm back

hey everyone, sorry it's been a long time since the last post. here are some pictures, and i might write some words too.

okay, well things have been pretty busy here between schoolwork and hanging out with my friend cai xiaojie (formerly known as cai laoshi). a typical day consists of me waking up, going to my 9am class which is really hard, then sleeping until 11, then doing some review and running out to get lunch at the cafeteria, then I have my 1v1 class and then 2 hours of an easier group class. then, I usually hang around the huayuzhongxin doing homework and chilling with the teachers / other students. Recently i've been going to the OIEP (tunghai's IEFP) to chill with cai xiaojie, it's quiet there and no english is spoken, and she's willing to help me out with stuff if I need help.
Then I go home and be bored for a while, and end up doing my character memorization around 10pm. By nature of this task it is boring and I usually mess around on the internet because I'm a horrible time scheduler, then I go to bed really late. Occasionally at night I'll hang out with students / xiaojie in which case I get back really late. Some interesting nights have been had, notably involving the lack of an open container policy .. or any policies .. in public parks. For the most part, I've gotten my work done well and I'm getting 9.0 or above on my quizzes. (One exception was when we needed to memorize an entire chapter text and read it - no prompt - which was a mess.)
Anyway, recently we took a field trip to 日月潭 (Sun Moon Lake) and the 九族文化村 (Formosan Aborigine Cultural Village), which are famous spots in Taiwan. I was actually unimpressed with both - Riyuetan was cool but the mountains around it, not the lake, were the most pretty, and the bus ride over actually featured the best scenery (mountain passes, etc). The FACV was actually an amusement park, I don't know if there's much more to be said about that; it had a whole section in the back demonstrating aborigine culture but it was pretty wierd. Lots of plastic models sitting around earthen jars. One good thing was that the "UFO Abduction" ride was basically a big thing that lifted you really high and you could get a sweet view of the mountains. Then it dropped, which was actually really fun.
Here's some pictures! Click for larger.


opposite Sun Moon Lake there was some temple. Just about anyone reading this off of the Google Reader feed will already be sick of pictures from a million Beijing blogs about the ming tombs and whatever (I am), so I tried to take some interesting pictures of things I thought interesting about the temple, rather than the little dudes on rooftop edges. There was certainly an egregious anachronism with old culture hastily modernized, with paint unrealistic in its brash colors and stores seamlessly integrated into the temple.


I don't really have many pictures from traipsing town with cai xiaojie, but here's one interesting one. There's a huge department store in the middle of a night market district, and every floor has a different bathroom theme. Here's a men's bathroom that I found inviting:


One interesting thing I find here is that my own attitude towards my progress in Chinese fluctuates wildly. Right now I'm really feeling like my Chinese sucks, but a few days ago I was really in the pocket and speaking fluently. It's wierd; whenever I involve my brain in a musical activity, my Chinese weakens.. a lot. For example, I went to that saxophone factory, played a lot, and afterwards I found myself barely able to form sentences. Good that my (current) major is music cognition.. it'd be interesting to study something in that vein - whether music activates parts of the brain that are only associated with native language and not ones learned later in life.
Also, I'm learning quite a lot of characters a day, and I'm not having a problem memorizing them, but at the pace of my class (1 lesson each day) I don't really get to use the words ever after the test. For example, I find it unlikely that I will be using 雜糧 (miscellaneous grains) much after the lesson about the Welcoming Students Barbecue. However, I especially remember that word now, whereas every day I forget how to say "sun." (tai yang, damn it)

pictures, finally

a small bit of taichung, facing east. it's actually a huge city, not what you'd expect from the non-major city of a country the size of new jersey. it just keeps on going and going; the nightclub district (ahem) is about 20 minutes driving.. through clear traffic.
a better view, you can see the mountain range in the back. quite beautiful, if hot & humid.
why tunghai daxue rules. here's tunghai lake, which is just randomly between a dorm and the experimental farm. nice, eh?

people chilling in the hua yu zhong xin in between classes.
i like the atmosphere, it's really chilled out. this picture is taken from a couch directly in front of the administrative office, and it's all good. the girl is carrying a mug from the kitchen, everything's on limits for students. including the chinese yoyo in the cabinet!

the hua yu zhong xin, meiyou people

here's me at a muay thai/san da (taiwanese kickboxing) gym. it was fun! I'm getting my ass kicked in this picture.

sweet food cooked right in front of us!
taiwan's known for having awesome food and i agree.

a busy street at night

me, next in a storied line of quality saxophone players.

taken at a nearby saxophone factory; a town near here produces a large portion of the world's saxophones

the inside of a semi-fake night market. quite nice

a shopfront on the walk home from school

a strange ad

whoa

ok, the new class i'm in is really hard and a lot of work. i really need to get off the computer and start my work earlier.. i meant to be in bed five hours ago. it's cause everyone (in my morning class at least) is WAY ahead of me and so I need to preview the next day's material in addition to doing the homework. if I had 1-2 free days to catch up (catch ahead) I could do ok but this week looks like a long haul. ok, if i ever get time (won't be tonight or tomorrow night) i'll finally put up some pictures and maybe video if i can get it to work. alright, peace out everyone.
ps. kelly answer my email!