My response to Mr. Kaufman

A new language is a new language

At times it seems that many well meaning language teachers seem determined to push their learners back into their native language. Here are two paragraphs from well meaning teachers on how to help their learners. I am opposed to these ideas since I believe that to learn a language you want to distance yourself from your own language as completely as possible. The only exception is the occasional dictionary or text translation into your own language. For the rest you need to let the brain get used to the new language naturally. The following two paragraphs do not represent natural language learning at least in my view. I welcome comments


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........the quickest route to understanding students' language problems and solving these problems is active error analysis. At this time I have speakers of four unrelated languages in my adult class. I ask them questions about their languages such as "What is the closest sound to this one in your language?" "How do you say this in your language?" etc. and we do quick comparisons. Putting the structures of English and L1 next to each other on the marker board is productive. This seems to help a lot and students generally find it interesting to see how different languages work. At the same time, I learn a lot about how different languages function to better help the students.

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What a fabulous idea! I never thought of having my adult learners write a
children's book based on their cultures. That is such a wonderful way to
show that you respect and honor their culture and heritage, and yet all the
while have them working on their target language skills.

Steve

Hi. I haven't commented here before. I may try to split this into what I see a couple issues. Let me know if I can clarify anything.

Re: age & classrooms in general: As an ESL teacher at a university, I am of the impression that students are mainly going to be successful if they have a strong interest in learning the language. I have many student who seem to have no desire to learn English at all. They spend all their time speaking their native language outside (and even inside class despite English only policy). There are large differences between students with motivation and those without. In my opinion, students with motivation will learn much more outside my class than inside. My responsibilities include working with both kinds of students, so capturing students interests can be a big problem.

Some of the things at work in students' seeming lack of motivation are affective filters (I don't remember if you ascribe much to Krashen). Activities to lower these filters can be good, including ones that include the first language. However, I, like you, also don't think first language activities are so great for adult learners. On the other hand, these can be especially helpful to children in ESL classrooms, and in this case more than any, I think it is appropriate for this "repect and honor" for their culture. I would suggest reading Igoa's The Inner World of an Immigrant Child if you want to explore the topic.

Re: error analysis: I do think that meaningful error analysis for teachers is a good thing. Notice the kinds of errors that a student makes can tell a teacher the types of grammar areas in which the student needs to improve. Solely marking up a students' output (as in giving a recast) can be vague as whether a teacher is correcting content or form.

Re: second quote: What is your issue with writing a children's book about their culture? It seems to be in the target language, which is what you promote.

My favorite comic strip

xkcd is usually good for a laugh:

上海話 － Shanghainese

I bought Dunwoody Press's Shanghai Dialect: An Introduction to Speaking the Contemporary Language ($59 + $12 audio) last week and it arrived in the mail today with the one cassette tape. Going to need to transfer it to the computer so I can listen to it on my iPod as I walk around. I think the university language center will be able to do that for me.

I briefly looked through the book and it's got 4 columns across two pages:

Authors transcription system - English - Shanghainese characters (Simplified) - IPA

The following page has a gloss for the meanings of words and few grammatical notes and supplementary vocabulary.

The units are made up of 2 dialogs and the topics of the units are listed below (with supplementary vocab topic in parenthesis):

Unit 01: Greetings (personal pronouns)
Unit 02: Asking someone's name (common surnames)
Unit 03: Talking about Language (countries and continents)
Unit 04: Talking about home (family)
Unit 05: Asking an address (in the house)
Unit 06: Asking about objects (weather)
Unit 07: Asking the date and the time (time)
Unit 08: Making a phone call (education)
Unit 09: In the shop 1 (fruits and vegetables)
Unit 10: In the shop 2 (clothes)
Unit 11: In the restaurant (eating)
Unit 12: Asking the way (the city)
Unit 13: On the bus (vehicles)
Unit 14: Having a haircut (shops)
Unit 15: Seeing a doctor (health)
Unit 16: At the laundry (colours)
Unit 17: At the foreign language bookshop (publishing)
Unit 18: In the post office (writing)
Unit 19: At the library (measure words)
Unit 20: At the photographer's (photography)
Unit 21: Touring (animals)
Unit 22: Watching television (Radio)
Unit 23: Seeing a Beijing Opera (sport)
Unit 24: Seeing a movie (Film)
Unit 25: Going away on a trip (more chinese provinces and cities)
Unit 26: Buying a train ticket (place words)
Unit 27: Talking about study (more adjectives)
Unit 28: Packing (society)
Unit 29: Seeing someone off at the airport (directional complements)

Word Index (in phonetic order 上海話 -> English

I will make more comments on the audio once I have a chance to listen to it.

Taiwan releases an online Taiwanese dictionary

As taken from Pinyin News:

Taiwan’s Ministry of Education has put online its new Taiwanese (Hoklo) dictionary, the Táiwān Mǐnnányǔ chángyòngcí cídiǎn (giving the Mandarin name) (臺灣閩南語常用詞辭典). The preliminary version, which is to be amended in six months, contains 16,000 entries.

The dictionary can be accessed Here

enjoy!

Khashkhar pictures

Here are some pictures from my Kashgar (khashkhar) trip last summer.

Bloggerooni

I've really fallen out of the blogging spirit lately. I finally switched over my domain to this blog, so it's accessible by kealist.com . I will try to write some interesting things from time to time, and be more active overall

Photography for connecting the world

For those of you who have never watched any of the vids at TED.com, I would recommend that you do so. I've been looking to start to make photography part of my daily routine so I can improve my composition skills.

It begins again

I am starting this new blog, and it will hopefully be some fun. I will see if I can import entries from my old blog or not.

blessings

So, it's been a while since I've updated. Spent the last week at Bear Trap Ranch near Colorado Springs. It actually felt like the first vacation I've really had for around a year and a half. The trip to China didn't really feel like a vacation last summer because it was so exhausting. But I just had fun. Felt some Joy, that I haven't felt for a long time. I also got to meet some really great people, by whom I am very blessed. It feels kind of lonely to go back to living in my apartment by myself after being in tight quarters with people for a week. That should be changing as I start to move this week. Had fun hiking every day and also rappelling. Lead a family group bible study, and it was good. I hope that I did an okay job with it. But I've made a lot of new friends and I am especially glad for one. I miss them all.

Had band practice last night which was fun. Soon we will get a demo down so we can play some shows.

Need to stay organized with 中文, so I can have fun :)

Here is one of my favorite poems:

Gary Soto - "Oranges"

The first time I walked
With a girl, I was twelve,
Cold, and weighted down
With two oranges in my jacket.
December. Frost cracking
Beneath my steps, my breath
Before me, then gone,
As I walked toward
Her house, the one whose
Porch light burned yellow
Night and day, in any weather.
A dog barked at me, until
She came out pulling
At her gloves, face bright
With rouge. I smiled,
Touched her shoulder, and led
Her down the street, across
A used car lot and a line
Of newly planted trees,
Until we were breathing
Before a drugstore. We
Entered, the tiny bell
Bringing a saleslady
Down a narrow aisle of goods.
I turned to the candies
Tiered like bleachers,
And asked what she wanted -
Light in her eyes, a smile
Starting at the corners
Of her mouth. I fingered
A nickle in my pocket,
And when she lifted a chocolate
That cost a dime,
I didn't say anything.
I took the nickle from
My pocket, then an orange,
And set them quietly on
The counter. When I looked up,
The lady's eyes met mine,
And held them, knowing
Very well what it was all
About.

Outside,
A few cars hissing past,
Fog hanging like old
Coats between the trees.
I took my girl's hand
In mine for two blocks,
Then released it to let
Her unwrap the chocolate.
I peeled my orange
That was so bright against
The gray of December
That, from some distance,
Someone might have thought
I was making a fire in my hands.

beauty

Today there is a poem for the beautiful one.

Early in the Morning

While the long grain is softening
in the water, gurgling
over a low stove flame, before
the salted Winter Vegetable is sliced
for breakfast, before the birds,
my mother glides an ivory comb
through her hair, heavy
and black as calligrapher's ink.

She sits at the foot of the bed.
My father watches, listens for
the music of comb
against hair.

My mother combs,
pulls her hair back
tight, rolls it
around two fingers, pins it
in a bun to the back of her head.
For half a hundred years she has done this.
My father likes to see it like this.
He says it is kempt.

But I know
it is because of the way
my mother's hair falls
when he pulls the pins out.
Easily, like the curtains
when they untie them in the evening.

I am still trying to figure things out, but I could not do with without friends to support and criticize me where I am failing. The Living God will bring what he has started to completion. I am sick of sin and tired of it's enslaving nature. May He lift up all those who are stuck under those who are in power. May those in power be faithful with what they have been given. Not to use and exploit the poor and needy but to serve them as a true leader would do. Even more, may I be faithful with what I have been given, for I have not been. As a son of God, I accept God's grace for the wrongs I have done, and I have the Holy Spirit acting in power in my life. There is no longer any room for sin inside my heart, take away these bonds and replace them with love.

I can't change my own heart!

It's too wonderful for me

So, I am going to make an effort to make my blog slightly less boring in terms of it only being about studying. The last half a year or so has been a little crazy, and at times I've been in a kind of funk, but I've been doing really quite well lately. This week, my mind has been focused more on important things, such as God and friends and life and discipline rather than laziness and lust and boredom.

I am excited about things that are going on here.

Church is interesting, we had our service in a bar/club this Sunday, and I would hope that we may be able to move there permanently. We are outgrowing the arts center with more than 200 people. Such a change from maybe 50 people two years ago. There are so many more people I don't know. A few of us have talked about how to encourage diversity. I try to bring some international folks, but I think because of people's busyness that it's just as hard as Americans to get involved on a deeper level. But it's exciting.

Conversation / bible group with Z has been great this semester. It's good to get to know folks and to talk to them about deeper spiritual things. It has been encouraging to approach scripture and see kind of how strange it is and wrestle around with it.

Looks like I'm headed back to China for the summer. Hopefully things will all come together for it, visa and all.

I've thought a lot about singleness and the future. The potential of a relationship is pretty exciting, but time will tell. I think I must continue to be patient for now and see how life progresses post this summer.

Will I ever finish my degree? I'm not so sure at this point. Maybe it would do me good to get some teaching experience before I do, so I could actually work on a thesis that would be good. I've personally been experimenting with language learning methods the last half a year, and I have learned a lot. I am finally performing my experiment of reading through Anna Karenina in Mandarin, and it's been surprisingly helpful. We'll see once I've put in 40 hours or more.

Technorati Profile

Searching

So over the last few months, I have been trying to do research and also to find some certain items that seem rare (read: Mandarin audiobooks; Chinese-English bilingual texts). I've struggled with the crap that Google has picked up over time as SEO folks have figured out how to exploit it. An acquaintance sent me a link to Searchlores.org which has proved itself to be a very useful information database on how to find information on the internet. There are tons of documents there, but I will point out a few of the more general interest ones.

• Tips - General short term search strategies for finding something quickly.



• Long Term Searching - Ideas for research over a longer period of time.



• How to find books and texts - I've found this very useful for reading and looking at books online. Amazon & google are making this so much easier these days.
  
  
• Exploiting the shallow deep web - This article discusses non-indexed (by search engines) databases of information.

I think this search engine is very peculiar: Kartoo. I would recommend that you check it out sometime.

News

So recent news:

I am hoping for the FLAS to get back to China this summer. We will see in the next week or two if that pulls through. If not, I may work for the summer, then try to head out somewhere to study either Mandarin or Japanese. As long as I can pull myself together financially.


This semester has been good. Slowly learning about the Quechua language we are documenting in field methods. I am focusing on causatives and topic/ focus in the language. It seems like there are a lot of similar structures to Uyghur. I dropped my sitting in on the Japanese class because I think I can progress further on my own. It was a good boost to get me back to where I was before.

I feel that Uyghur is getting better. I have been making a lot of improvement, but all the time, I just run into the wall of how much vocabulary I don't know! Frustrating, but hopefully it will get better over time. Listening to Uyghur about 20 minutes a day helps a lot.

I am starting to listen read the bible in mandarin to finally do my experiment to see if this works. I won't be able to devote 8 hours a day to it, but if I can do one or two, I should make some progress. If I can find some other bilingual mandarin books with the audiobooks, that would be great. It's just too hard. I've been searching so long. Maybe by the time I'm done "reading the bible in chinese" I can find some other bilingual books that are matching audio.

2 terrorists killed, 15 arrested in raid

Todays news from Xinjiang, as reported in the China Daily:

Two members of a terrorist gang were killed and 15 others were arrested during a raid last month by police in Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, the Beijing-based Global Times reported Monday.

It is the largest terrorist group to be broken by police for over a year, the paper said.

Five policemen were injured during the raid on Jan 27 when three homemade grenades were thrown at them, the newspaper reported. The terrorists had been undertaking training exercises and assembling explosives at a rented house in the city, it said.

Guns, homemade explosives and training materials were discovered in the house following the raid. Police said they also found evidence linking the gang to terrorist groups abroad.

The arrested members have all pleaded guilty to the charges, the newspaper reported.

The raid was the latest in a series of efforts by the local government to crack down on violent activities by Uygur separatists who have carried out several terrorist acts since the 1990s.

In January last year, police killed 18 terrorists in a gun battle in Xinjiang. One officer was also killed and another wounded in the raid in the mountains of the Pamirs plateau in the southern region.

Thank you!

Thank you everyone who has been supportive over the last few days after my grandfather passed away (and months before). There will not be a funeral, per his request, but a kind of party. We will probably have that over the period of spring break, when people are able to come in again. It's been kind of sad, but it is good to be able to spend time with my family.

Languages spoken over time in Xinjiang

I am doing some research on the groups and languages spoken in the Xinjiang and surrounding areas over the course of history, so I was just going to make some notes here. This is part of my desire to have a complete language summary of what is necessary to be able to read any documents pertaining to the history. Which is most likely ridiculous, but I am curious. Most of this is compiled from Starr's book on Xinjiang. With some random wikipedia schenanigins in there too (yay for questionable reliability, but I have not the time to do much research quite yet).

Prehistory

Old guys - early 2nd millennium BCE "Beauty of Loulan" found in Qewrighul. It is suggested that they spoke a form of Indo-European language.

Saka (塞) - Nomadic Indo-European people group with Iranian type language. Sites in Xinjiang found from around 650 BCE in Tashkughan, Ili, Toksun.

Yuezhi (月氏 also 月支) - Indo-Europeans who most likely spoke Tokharian. Formed the Kushan empire.

The Classical Period

Xiongnu (匈奴) - A confederation of Altaic tribes. Spoke a Yeniseian or Turkic language. Only 20 words inscribed on objects and one sentence transliterated into Chinese (yuck!) are known.

Han Dynasty (漢朝) - had some limited control in the Tarim basin area battling it out with the Xiongnu. Spoke some funny old chinese most likely.

Yuzhi (月氏 also 月支) - same as above.

Wusun (烏孫) - living in Zhungaria with Xiongnu; nomads. Maybe Turkic / Iranian / Tocharian language.

The Middle Period

first part is "Poorly documented" -- Starr

Ruanruan (柔然) - mongolian empire. Mid 4th century to late 6th century.

Northern Wei Dynasty (北魏) - were at least attacking the Ruanruan, but didn't have control of parts of Xinjiang

Hephathalites - remnants of Xiongnu & Persians in the area

Kok Turks - Mid 6th century. Overthrew Ruanruan. Divided into western (Zhungaria, Tarim) and eastern knanates. Eastern was involved with Sui and Tang dynasties

Tang dynasty - Spoke turkic in preference to Chinese, ruled indirectly over Xinjiang by creating an alliance with Western khanates. The Tang dynasty began the Turkicization of southern Xinjiang.

Tibetan empire

Uyghurs and the Karakhanids

Uyghurs Were part of the Turk empire. Established in 744; Destroyed in 840 by the Kyrgyz. Not muslims. Bogu, their khan, converted to Manichaeanism and later they embraced Buddhism and tolerated Christianity, and opposed Islam. Maintained ties with Soghdia, India, and China.

Photography on Linux

In a spirit of becoming more legal, I am moving my windows desktop over to linux. My one concern is photography software, and this post will be where I note all the programs I can find that may be useful.

F-Spot - "F-Spot is a full-featured personal photo management application for the GNOME desktop"

RAW Studio - "Rawstudio is an open-source program to read and manipulate RAW images from most digital cameras."

Lightcrafts - Relighting images.

Comparisons - Linux RAW software

Qtpsfgui - HDR software

Wiki of tools -