A friend pointed me to a discussion on Quora about why foreigners in China don’t like 大山 (dàshān), [I was going to describe who that is, but if you don’t know who that is, go read something else].  I clicked on a link to Mark Rowswell’s (the guy who “plays” 大山) activity page and started reading some of the things he had to say, being very interested since he was saying them as Mark Rowswell, and not under the highly-censored-by-the-Chinese-media character of 大山.

I was shocked by how much one of his answers read like a perfect Chinese undergraduate English major’s writing assignment. Continue…

I was on nciku recently for the first time in a while. They’ve got a somewhat new system up to help people choose English names. Certainly better than the books most academies have on hand for such a purpose. Maybe, however, not as good as people choosing their own from a somewhat limited mental lexicon. I’m talking about you, Seven, Eleven, Coffee, Twelve, Overlord, Hitler.

According to the site, my name is Finnegan. I’m totally fine with that.

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I’ve written about colour a bunch before. really. a bunch. But I’ve recently come upon an interesting argument. If it were just one person who I’d heard it from, I’d not be bothered, but since it’s come up on three separate occasions in the past month, I feel it’s at least worth addressing.

It’s essentially this:

[Language X] is inherently more difficult to learn, all other things being equal, because of the number of colour words it has.

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While looking up some obscure thing from Zhuangzi 庄子 this week, I fired up Pleco on my iPod and stumbled across something I liked, though I may be the only one.

燕 yàn means swallow, as in the bird.
嚥 yàn, also written 咽, means swallow, as in what I’m doing with a cold bottle of maibock as I write this.

That’s freaking amazing! Or maybe just slightly amazing. Two homophones in English are also homophonous in Mandarin, internal to each language. How often does that happen? Maybe often and I’ve just never noticed. So I thought I’d post it here and see if anyone had other examples of this sort of thing.

It reminds me of another interesting but obviously different thing that happens sometimes, which is two words that sound the same in two languages, mean the same thing, but have no etymological connection. For example the word “and” in Arabic is written وَ while Korean has a word meaning “and” written 와. Both are pronounced “wa”. There’s some better example between Japanese and English that I’ve encountered before but I can’t recall what it was. Suggestions of that sort are also welcome.

This is a billboard in the subway station in Shanghai. This was taken at 徐家汇, line 9.

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In a certain way it’s difficult to use the “wrong” method in second language acquisition (SLA). I’ve seen very motivated students succeed with methods that some would say are the worst that SLA has to offer.

With this in mind, consider the language-teaching pamphlet or newsletter: plagiarize bits and pieces to show some of the target language; do a few translations; dig into a word or two — all without knowing anything about your learner’s level, motivations, goals, etc. It’s the blunderbuss approach to second language acquisition. It might not be my first choice in methodology, but, per the “no-method-guarantees-failure” logic, I won’t try to say that it has no value to anyone anywhere.

Still, when your pamphlet’s method is term-for-term translation and you screw up the translation, it might be fair to say that your value starts to approach zero.

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