Monday, December 23, 2013

Too many contacts? Contact Remover Plus [review; non-China]

Smartphones are great. But one annoyance thereof, concomitant with the ability to centralize your contacts from many different sources (Facebook, Gmail, Skype, telephone contacts, etc.) is that you end up with a lot of duplicate contacts.

A great way to remove them is an app called Contact Remover Plus (only available on Android). Here's how it works:

1. First, the app loads all of your contacts (or those from a particular account if you prefer):


2. You tell it what criteria to use (phone number, email address, name, etc.), and it looks for any duplicates:


Wednesday, December 18, 2013

China's insanity [photos]

Although I miss Taiwan and want to go back as soon as possible, I'm returning to China next month. (I've been back in America for the holidays.) People have been asking me why I prefer to return to China and I've been having a hard time answering. I know that I find China more exciting than any other place I've ever been, but why?

I've finally settled on using the word "crazy" to describe China. By itself, though, this word doesn't convey enough. Here are some photos of a few of the crazy things I've seen in China.

The do-it-yourself garbage truck

The beautiful street with hundreds of lanterns and no people

Friday, November 29, 2013

Why you should use RAW photos [non-China]

I've been getting into photography in the past few months - buying a used DSLR, experimenting with different lenses, taking pictures in different settings, etc. Most recently I've been learning how to edit photos on a computer. I remember reading Ken Rockwell's rather persuasive post on why RAW photos are unnecessary and not bothering.

However, after watching this tutorial I decided to try using RAW + JPEG mode with my Canon 350D, and the results were pretty convincing. (I use the freeware Lightroom replacement program Photivo.) Here's what five different processings of the same RAW file - a simple photo of a pie - look like:



Wednesday, November 27, 2013

American food: a post-China perspective [non-China]

It's easy to make fun of American food. I mean, does America even have a cuisine - other than McDonalds and Burger King? Back in college my friend from China Mr. Ji would complain about the cafeteria food. There wasn't much I could say to his assertion that food in America just wasn't as good as Chinese food.

But in the time since I've come up with a couple of things that American cuisine can boast of having to itself. Consider the first thing I ate today after having gotten back to America, this bowl of broccoli and hummus:


Because the broccoli was already done, this took literally 1 minute to make (microwave and put the hummus on top). Even if it the broccoli hadn't been cooked already, steaming broccoli doesn't take much time or effort. So, in comparison with just about any Asian dish, this is still a ridiculously easy dish to make. Moreover, it tastes good, and is off-the-charts healthy.

Honestly, I'd put forward hummus as the essential American food item. It goes well with almost everything, is both healthy and convenient, and nowadays is easy to obtain in most places (at least in the Northeast). My two college roommates and I would go through hummus at an incredible rate, and it's amazing how many food groups it goes well with: vegetables, bread, dairy (cheese)... Obviously hummus is not what people think when they think of American cuisine, but I hope some day it will be.

This was an abnormally full fridge, but that
amount of hummus would be gone in 3 days

Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Studying Chinese at NTNU's MTC: a guide


I've been studying Chinese at National Taiwan Normal University (師大)'s MTC (Mandarin Training Center/國語中心) for the past three months. It's far from the best Chinese program I've ever done, but it can be hacked for a decent learning experience. Here are some suggestions.

*Switch classes at the beginning until you find one you like - and one that challenges you. I sat in on at least 5 and probably more like 7 or 8 classes in total, since I had initially been placed in far too easy of a level. The MTC moves really slow in the middle levels so you should be able to skip through some of those.
*Consider your classmates. If they're Japanese your class will be better at reading, and you will be expected to keep up. If European, better at speaking. Koreans are good at everything.
*The MTC offers classes for heritage speakers. If your speaking is significantly better than your reading or writing, get in one of those classes.
*Sign up for a supplementary culture class if you have the money. I enjoyed the cooking class, and although we sped through the recipes too fast for me to actually learn them, I think I've got a better sense for the basics of Asian cooking.
*Intensive vs. regular: I ended up being happy with the regular class experience since I had time as well as pressure to attend the supplementary classes. My favorite of these was the Chinese movies shown on Mondays. The intermediate conversation class and the Chinese story class are also good.
*Get to know your fellow students. I didn't do this enough and I regret it.
*Do a language exchange. Check the bulletin board on the 7th floor.

You can find "language exchanges" of all sorts here
*Consider a different program, either a smaller one or a more intensive one. If I had to do it over again, I would go to the comparatively priced (i.e. incredibly cheap by American standards at $1000/semester) program NTU/台大, where my roommate takes classes, and which is far smaller than the gigantic MTC. Not because their pedagogy is necessarily better but because I much prefer the smaller academic environment. The NTU kids all go out drinking together on the weekends, which I'm jealous off.
*I wasn't looking for a super-intensive class because I did the Princeton in Beijing program this summer and found that three months of backbreaking daily studying was long enough. But if you've got the motivation, and the money, the ICLP, which is also at NTU but run separately, is widely regarded as the Chinese course par excellence.

Wednesday, October 9, 2013

More thoughts on money and happiness [non-China]

There's an interesting post in The Atlantic about the fears and anxieties of the super-rich which adds some anecdotal weight to the argument I made in this post. I had made the analogy to a video game:
In a video game, when you're playing on easy, just beating the objectives soon becomes boring. You start asking yourself what the point of playing the game is...
The author of the Atlantic article puts it this way:
If anything, the rich stare into the abyss a bit more starkly than the rest of us. We can always indulge in the thought that a little more money would make our lives happier—and in many cases it’s true. But the truly wealthy know that appetites for material indulgence are rarely sated. No yacht is so super, nor any wine so expensive, that it can soothe the soul or guarantee one’s children won’t grow up to be creeps. When the rich man takes his last sip of Château d’Yquem 1959, he tips back the wineglass to find at its bottom an unforeseen melancholy. Like Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, he notes in horror, “I have drunk, and seen the spider.” It is as terrifying a realization in Saint-Tropez as it is anywhere else.

In addition to the article itself, "reticentb"'s comment is worth reading.

Edit: On the other hand, some kinds of experiences, such as described in this story, may be worse than anything I'll ever to go through.

Edit 2: An interesting suggestion from a fellow blogger is to use goal-setting to make life harder. To me it seems that this should work: if I had a lot of money I would continue to spend most of my time learning Chinese, merely using my financial resources for transportation and other things.

Edit 3: A powerful look at what it's like to be poor.

First thoughts on Taiwan

After a month in Taiwan, here are some of my initial thoughts. Although it would probably be better to appreciate the country on its own, I find myself evaluating my experience here mostly in comparison with my time in China. So here are some of the pluses and minuses of life in Taipei, as compared to Beijing.

Plus: Environment. The first time I had a real "I'm not in China anymore" moment was going biking at Taipei's riverside bike trail, which snakes throughout the city.


Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Do Chinese characters hold more meaning than Western phonetic alphabets?


Do Chinese characters hold more meaning than Western phonetic alphabets?

I just had an interesting argument about this with my friend (and roommate) Chris. Chris argued that, whereas Chinese characters indicate meaning, English words merely indicate pronunciation. Based mostly on having read The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, I said that this was a myth.

We ended up looking up two more-or-less random words to compare the two languages. For Chinese we used "福”, fú (pronounced "foo"), the second character of "幸福", happiness, which by itself means something like "fortunate". In English we used "assiduous", a word neither of us knew, taken from a list of SAT words.

A few Chinese characters

Here are my arguments for why the Chinese character is no more inherently meaningful than the English word:

*In both languages, the etymology of the word, and hence the meaning, is not obvious. "福" comes either from a pictographic compound of a jar 畐 of wine on the altar 礻, where each of the two pieces contributes to the meaning, or from a pictophonetic compound of 礻 (spirit) + 畐 fu, where one part contributes the meaning and the other part the sound. In either case, although one can see how the two parts 礻 and 畐 combine to make the full character, the meaning of the character is not something one could guess simply from looking at its parts - although there is some relation. Meanwhile, "assiduous", interestingly, comes ultimately from the Latin roots "ad" + "sedere". The former root means "to", while the latter means "sit" (as in "sedentary"); hence the word's root meaning is "to sit down", and thus to be continuously occupied at one's work. Just like in Chinese, the modern meaning is not something you would necessarily guess from the parts; but once you know the logic of its composition, the word's etymology makes a lot of sense!

*Chris, however, maintained that 福's meaning is more obvious, because it is based on a radical, 礻(shì, "sure"), which forms the left hand side of the character. However, I think the same can be said of "assiduous". It is a compound word composed of a prefix ad and a root sedere. It's true that this composition is not obvious to us in English, but neither is it so obvious in Chinese! It's only because Chris and I have been studying Chinese for so long1, and because we both have do so by learning the etymologies of characters, that it seems obvious to us. If I were to teach someone English from scratch, I might do so by starting with Latin and Greek roots, and hopefully get them to the point where the "ad" in "assiduous" would be equally obvious to them!

The lucky character is often seen on red squares like this one2
*Chis also argued that the basic components of a Chinese character, the 部首 or radicals (in this case, 礻, 一,口,and 田), have their own meaning, whereas in English the basic components are letters, which have no inherent meaning. But I think the better analogy is between letters and the strokes of a Chinese character. To look up or to write a character, you have to write each piece with a certain number of strokes, and then put the pieces together. Similarly, in English you have to write each part and then put the parts together. Just like one stroke of a Chinese character has no meaning, neither does one letter of an English word.

*But what about the switch from "ad" to "as"? Doesn't English obscure the nature of its roots? But in fact the same thing has happened with the Chinese character. The 礻radical is not written the same way as the full form, 示,and only after learning that the two are the same can one make the connection! Chinese, like English, requires study to understand word composition.

In sum, I think in both of these example cases the meaning of the word can be taken from the way it was written, but only with some research. I'm willing to grant Chris that deducing the meaning may be easier in Chinese, on the whole; but I would be interested to see how people who studied English with my etymologyical method would fare on English words. Regardless, my main point is that despite the strangeness of its appearance, the Chinese writing system may differ from that of other languages only in degree and not in kind. Which is not to say that those differences aren't mindblowingly fascinating or that they don't make Chinese the most intellectually exciting subject I've ever encountered!



1 Chris has actually only been studying for a year or so, which is really impressive.
2 Image credit: 阿德 on Flickr

Friday, August 16, 2013

The worst bag of chips I have ever eaten

Lay's potato chips (乐事) have some pretty excellent flavors in China, including shrimp:

And cucumber, which beats anything I've had in America:

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Sichuan and Yunnan: China's paradise [photos]

Southwestern China is a natural paradise. Even looking out the windows of a train travelling through Sichuan province, I was amazed at the constant beauty of the scenery. 

Rice fields 

Saturday, May 25, 2013

Chinglish: Some unbelievable examples

Of all the reasons to visit China, coming across examples of hilariously mangled English words is not the first one I would give. Nevertheless, examples like the ones that follow are undeniably hilarious when one comes across them in the shopping market:


Or on the bus:


Or in the street:


Sometimes bad English leads to inadvertent honesty: