Al Hoang

Prince Roy makes a suggestion on a
good Chinese-English Dictionary. He describes it very well here.

This volume is very useful to the student of Chinese because it is a complete verbatim translation of Xinhua’s 1992 edition of the dictionary, including all appendices. Not only do you learn the meaning of a word, but you also learn Chinese dictionary terms

I think I am going to look for this dictionary. One of the thing any
intermediate language learner or above starts wanting to learn is how to
use a target language dictionary to look up unfamiliar terms. Quite often
it leads to more questions on the definition but it is good to see how
a dictionary aimed at native speakers tends to define terms.

Check out the September 20, 2003 entry yourself

Check it out

Thanks Dan Wei!

Been sifting through some more Asian blogs again. How come I can’t find anyone
blogging their experiences learning Vietnamese? I guess I’ll start sooner
or later to blog those experiences. Anyways, I present to you the
concept known as the
The Asian Glance-Over. I never really thought about this but I realize
I do it a lot (well in the U.S.) until I came to Japan. Here I get to
do the opposite and do The NON-Asian Glance-Over.

Here’s an excerpt:

The Asian Glance-Over. I somehow always thought it might be an exclusively Asian-American thing. Since we’re used to not seeing many Asians. But when I went to MU, even when I walked past Asians that were clearly exchange students, they’d give me the Glance-Over, too. I was shocked. Shocked! Offended even! Thru my mind, I was saying to myself, “You got the nerve to come to my country and give me the Glance-Over? Aw, heeeell no.”

Read it yourself.
Thanks to Eddie for
pointing out one of those Asian (American) habits that I do but
never think about.

As a native speaker of English it’s hard to have an impression on
the sound of English. It’s so natural to my ears that I just consider
it normal, unlike let’s say…. swahili. I would definitely be
able to characterize swahili’s sounds as a foreigner.

So what do other people say about English? Some people on LiveJournal
asked around and here are some impressions. (add your own if you’re not a
native speaker!)

English sounds like…
Your impression of English…

Seems a well-respected hacker (at least in my book) by the name of
Peter Deutsch is going
to create an interpreter for Python. (Seems to mainly target Visual Works
as the backend). If you don’t know how Peter Deutsch, oh.. he had some
hand in building this. The
fact he’s jumped into the fray for Python
makes me think the Python
community might get a big boost soon.

Thanks to Ted Leung for pointing it out

Freedom to Tinker has a post
on Online Principles. While it is interesting to see people throw up
proposals for what people should do. I’m skeptical. However, there
was an excellent comment from Hal regarding the online world. I am
quoting it below since it is so good it can stand on its own. I really
agree with the poster’s thoughts on cyberspace which I’ve spent a long
time hanging around on.

Read the discussion
that started this all.

The phrase, “Odd numbers are prime” is quite amusing if we look at it from
a viewpoint of polysemy. The following link shows some other ways to look
at it from a linguist standpoint.

A Linguist’s look at odds are prime

LA Weekly has a great article on IMDB and
the story of how it got started.

IMDB is a subsidiary of the empire
known as Amazon.com but is allowed to run independently. One would
like to think that IMDB sprang from
nowhere however it took 5 years before they started going commercial.
That’s 5 years doing this project on top of whatever else they were
doing.

Now if they could only get some more Asian correspondants to cover
Asian movies in more detail.

Read the LA Times article yourself

Thanks to Gen for the link

Language Log
talks about the usage of ask as a noun. I didn’t realize that ask
could be used as a noun myself. It feels weird to hear it but supposedly
Kerry used it in a speech during a campaign in Missouri.

Here’s the excerpt:

I’m asking you to trust our nation, our history, the world, your families, in my hands. And I understand that it’s a big ask. And it’s a tough judgment you have to make.

Go read the Language Log Post yourself for why this might be just a
case of variation and not incorrect usage

After being in Japan for close to a year now. I haven’t stopped
my movie watching habits although the choice of movies is a bit
different. There are some days I wish I could get the latest
movies back in the U.S. but that is what patience is for.

One thing I have found rather disappointing about Japanese
DVDs is many of them LACK subtitles. And I don’t mean
English subtitles for the Japanese-impaired foreigner. I mean
Japanese subtitles. At first, I didn’t think much about this
but for movies I find that reading subtitles a good way to
double check that I’m hearing what I think I’m hearing and
pick up some new vocabulary on the way.

However, many Japanese movie DVDs do NOT come with subtitles.
I find this very disappointing considering that most Japanese
DVDs cost easily 3000Y and above which is close to twice the
price of an average DVD in the U.S. Perhaps, Japan
doesn’t see the need to have subtitles on their movies but
I have to wonder why the price so much more. What are
they doing with all that money?

Continuing along with my linguistic geekery (which will probably not get
me very far if I don’t concentrate on getting a decent foundation down).
I present to you the…

The Hmong Language FAQ

Many thanks to David Mortensen for putting up such a FAQ for everyone on the Internet to browse at their own leisure.

On Japanese TV there are a few foreign faces that show up quite often.
From what I’ve seen they are pretty much fluent in Japanese (ah a great
goal to move towards). One such personality an American by the name of
Patrick Harlan. It seems he was raised in Colorado and went to the
Harvard
Divinity School before setting sails towards Japan.

Right now he shows up on one of NHK’s
English shows and also does stand
up comedy (I believe it’s called manzai if I’m not mistaken) with a Japanese
comedian. A lot of this manzai comedy relies on wordplay and puns.
I’m still not that strong on my vocabulary in Japanese so most
of the wordplay puns are lost on me unfortunately. But it’s something
to work towards. I know most foreigners learning Japanese strug off Japanese
humor as boring but for me it’s something to strive towards. Understanding
what a culture considers funny is one of those humps any advanced foreign
language learner should try to achieve. Even if you don’t find it funny
at least you can appreciate what the joke is based on.

Here’s the interview
(warning it’s in Japanese)

Salon has an article on children interpreters. Seems this phenomenon is
a very tricky thing to handle properly. An interpreter holds quite
a bit of responsibility in relaying information between two parties.
A child, while loyal to their family, is still a child. At least that is
what the Salon author thinks. So depending on the upbringing and ethics
of the child they could wield this power to really help or really take
advantage.

What do I think? I’m not sure. The U.S. has so many immigrants from
many places that the number of languages is huge. (300 according to the
article). The simple answer is provide translations for everyone. But
ever try managing 300 languages at once? That is a lot of translations!
This leaves room for the English-only groups of the
U.S. to strut their stuff *sigh*. Personally, I think it would be great if
more of these native speakers could be channeled into bilingual language
learning programs for the community (especially schools) but it’s a tricky
process.

I do feel bad for the parents and think the child as an interpreter is a
great boon. Personally, I would not like to rely on my children to
do things that I would consider skills that an adult would need to manage
in a society. For example, if you placed an American in China that
had no family ties with China at all and no Chinese abilities at all
my expectation would be for the Americna to try to pick up as much Chinese
as one could possibly manage since well… the language of life there
is Chinese. To be able to function properly in the society you have
to really be able to use Chinese. This example could be applied to
more than just an American in China. But I think that explains my
viewpoint on it.

My observation on linguistic fluency of the US (barring big cities where the
rules are a bit different) is that usually
multilingual folks get most of their multilingualism through their family.
And in the break-neck paced society that the U.S. you either speak
like a native or you’re mostly useless. This puts those people with
some sort of ethnic ties to a particular language at a huge advantage
in multi-lingual roles versus someone else who has been studying the
language as an adult. The adult learner needs to expend A LOT of effort
to get anywhere near that fluent level to be able to compete in the market
place. This probably is one small contributing factor to why Americans
don’t flex much multilingual skills at all outside of the ones who have
some sort of family upbringing or are just language geeks and are willing
to put up with this disadvantage and try to overcome it as quickly as possible.

Read the Salon article

Saw this on Live Journal.

Our family is from San Diego, so we’re all familiar with the correct Spanish pronunciation, especially when reading a menu. We were eating at a Mexican restaurant when my 12-year-old son proudly sounded out all the listings on the children’s menu, stumbling over just one.
“Mom, what’s hey-yo?”

Click here
to read the punchline

I’m always curious about the Asian-american experience (being one myself).
I stumbled across two different websites of Vietnamese-Americans that
have viewed a different websites of Vietnamese-Americans that have
put their experiences on the web. I found both interesting to read.
It’s also great that the web has become an excellent source of information
for finding information like this. Traditionally you either had to spend
lots and lots of time in an academic library digging up some rather dry
reading on multiculturalism issues or scan through the bookstore and get the
latest “My Experience” book.

One of them seems to have experienced more outright racism in his
experiences in the U.S. Although the U.S. has made a bit of progress
in trying to deal with multi-culturalism it is interesting to read other
people’s stories to keep in mind that acceptance among many different
types of people takes a long time. C.N. Le (call him Dr. now he just got
his PhD w00t!) also set up a website called
Asian Nation which looks like an invaluable resource for topics on
Asian-americans for the curious.

Check out Tuan Tran’s website
Check out Cuong Nguyen Le’s website
Check out Asian Nation