User Comments - barto

barto

Posted on: Guided Plan Gets Better! Plus: Poetry is Pending

January 18, 2009 at 2:40 PM

Hey Pete,

thanks for the reply. I can see where you're coming from, and really, I suppose, our two ways of thinking aren't mutually exclusive.

When you put it the way you did, it does sound somewhat different from the normal approach; I'm more and more interested in seeing the first part of the series.

(and despite licha's comment, I am hoping to participate here positively :) )

Posted on: Guided Plan Gets Better! Plus: Poetry is Pending

January 18, 2009 at 12:43 PM

While I'm tentatively open to the idea of a poetry section, I do have significant reservations. Why? The vast majority of people in China, even college educated ones, are not qualified in any way to talk about Chinese poetry. Taiwan, which has a much higher level of classical education (50% vs. 25%), I can say with some certainty that the best students at the best university in Taiwan have no clue. They can certainly understand, and have usually memorized, some of the poetry from the canonized literature, but as to being able to actually decipher a poem, moving from work to work and growing in the ability to understand them...it's not common. One of the big reasons is the educational system for classical works used in China and Taiwan, and I can only hope you’re not going to be using the following model:

1) introduce the poem 2) provide a textual gloss in baihua 3) explain the vocabulary used 4) ask the student to look over it until, upon encountering the poem again, they are able to explain it in their own words or recite it.

As an educational model, this is a terrible, terrible idea, and it doesn't work for classical Chinese. I am interested in seeing how Chinesepod is going to overcome this particular hurdle.

Furthermore, classical Chinese poetry has many, many hurdles for the average reader. And I don't necessarily mean hurdles in understanding the plain meaning of the text itself, because that's generally adequately explainable from the gloss. No, the question is learning how to appreciate the poem. Frankly, the way most westerners, and even many Chinese these days, approach Chinese poetry is inadequate. It is not enough to say, "My, my! This poem by Li Bai or Dufu has such lovely imagery! Let me understand and appreciate it." What do I mean exactly? There are several components to this problem:

The first is that, one of the most basic ways of evaluating 詩 is to look at its rhythmic structure. Li Bai's poetry is so awesome, so interesting, because he's doing such strange and unimaginable things to the structure of the poem, that it was, frankly, mind-blowing to those of his own time! But to understand that, we need to talk about the perfect structure and pristine austerity of Wang Wei, don't we? Otherwise, we'll never understand just why Li Bai is great. How can we appreciate what Li Bai is doing with his take on 樂府 poetry, if we don't even know what a 樂府 poem is? Likewise, we can't understand Dufu, without realizing the fact he's talking about subjects that had NEVER been discussed using that format before, not in that way, are just an amazing use of the form which enlivened the genre for decades. His talking about his love for his family, his trials, his travails, is, to be completely colloquial, hardcore radical. It's not just because it sounds nice! But even with this kind of knowledge, everything they talk about in their poems relies upon knowledge of The Canon of Poetry...Appreciation and understanding of the texts can only come from contact with a large amount of source material and a learned guide. Which isn't to say, it's impossible, but rather to say, it's quite difficult.

And even then, how does one explain the 入聲 issue in a satisfactory manner? The value of many poems lies in their structure, but this structure is not always obvious due to the fact that modern Chinese does not have the mptk ending 入聲. Chinese poetry doesn't just sound better in Taiwanese or Cantonese...metrically speaking, it makes sense ONLY in these non-standard dialects. It's a difficult issue, even for Chinese learners, but it lies at the heart of the thing.

Additionally, wenyan is not Chinese, at least not as most of the learners of Chinese pod would understand it. It is not putonghua, it is not mutually intelligible, and it is a language filled with a huge number of false friend cognates. The grammar is different, the vocabulary is different: it is a different language. Now, as I mentioned above, one of the most damaging and silly things done in the Chinese and Taiwanese educational systems is to pretend this distinction does not exist and to teach it via gloss and ignore the fundamental issues of grammar, rhetoric, and rhythm at work in wenyan poetry/prose (the distinction between prose and poetry is not a clear one in wenyan)。The only way to profitably learn wenyan, and to at the same time improve one's modern Chinese ability, is to start from the basics of its grammar. Classical Chinese is defined by five major grammatical relations, the topic-comment structure, and the meaning of words being determined by their position in the sentence. Finding out how this works takes time and effort, but in the end, you'll get somewhere; solely learning through glosses will get you a headache. But poetry makes the issue so much more complicated, because Chinese poets LOVE to twist the rules of grammar and the usage of words in order to create a unique effect in their works. The appreciation of this is, of course, incumbent on the ability to recognize what is normal, and what is not.

Of course, it's also possible I'm overreacting, and what this poetry class is going to be is just a few couplets and a lot of English explanation, but I still feel that these problems do exist and do bear thinking about. Of course, it's also quite possible that Chinesepod has this all thought through and is ready to provide a new and exciting way to learn about Chinese poetry.

I'm waiting to be pleasantly surprised! (And I do mean all of this in good faith/humor, and not in a mean way. I just have a lot of passion about wenyan education in the educational system, and I think a lot of the issues at work there are somewhat similiar. I wish you the best of luck, Pete!)

Posted on: 盛唐风气

January 5, 2009 at 3:51 AM

後宮佳麗三千人三千寵愛在一身!

不過，我還是比較喜歡李白的這首詩！

三百六十日，日日醉如泥。雖為李白婦，何異太常妻～

哈哈哈

Posted on: Insurance Insanity

January 1, 2009 at 12:09 PM

Just an off the cuff suggestion, but you might try learning the vocabulary in the PDF first, as well as reviewing the dialogue a few times. Then try to pick up the new words as they discuss them. This is beneficial because it simulates the way you'll encounter the words in real life, ie, randomly and not in the place you'll necessarily expect.

Upper intermediate is already slow to the point of tedium at points :) I think the addition of any kind of markers would be extremely annoying.

Posted on: Insurance Insanity

January 1, 2009 at 9:01 AM

住在臺灣很幸福，大家都有醫療保險。我這個人根本不能買保險（除非是學校，公司幫我投保）因爲我是甲亢患者！在美國我被拒保不少次。更糟糕的是，甲亢常會帶來別的問題，忒是青光眼。。。我這麽幸運也得到了它，所以只好天天點藥水。這我也可以接受，（總歸比失明好得很呢！）只不過是美國的藥品公司很貪心，一瓶葯水就是80塊美金左右！我真的想問那群邪惡的公司經理，爲什麽在臺灣如果你沒有保險卡的話同一种葯只要300塊台幣？（大約9塊美金）真是害人不淺！

那就是説，政府不應該讓市場左右葯價！