Wednesday 28 January 2015

http://www.chinesegrammar.info/

Just stumbled upon this site. Pretty nice design, but a very useful resource to look up some common grammatical questions.

Sunday 25 January 2015

As the Sleeper Awakes

Been a bit lax on updating, going to get this moving a bit more with a small dump of beginner's resources for learning Chinese.

Most of the stuff here is pretty basic, though they're at least half-decent and mostly free. I give a short assessment of each site, and have tried to rank them in order of usefulness.

http://www.chineselearner.com/

This website, particularly the grammar section, is a very good free resource to consider before moving on to the others. It is relatively easy to find Chinese content - whether that is new words, new idioms, audio or video - but finding good explanations of grammar is somewhat more difficult, and will help you actually understand how these words and phrases fit together.

http://www.melnyks.com/

Melnyks has options to pay and make things a bit easier on yourself, but ultimately these lessons are free. There are audio lessons in kind of a podcast format, and supplementary written materials to go along with it. In terms of site design, it is probably the best of the bunch.

http://english.cntv.cn/learnchinese/

Primarily audio and video lessons, but quite extensive and gives more immersion in Chinese language. The site itself could use some work, it really likes opening new tabs and doesn't always have a very intuitive layout. It appears to be having issues with many of the audio files at the moment, likely due to domain issues with the hosting website. Given that this part of the website looks like it hasn't been updated since 2012, it is likely that they won't be returning and these resources will remain inaccessible.

That said, all of the video lessons are still available. The series 'Growing up with Chinese' has the production value one might expect, but is still a pretty useful and entertaining way to learn conversational Chinese.

http://www.learnchineseez.com/

An important note about this site is that it is best to switch the lessons to Pinyin, using the link near the top of the page. By default they use what they call EZ Pinyin, which is a dumbed down version that will only confuse you once you learn real Pinyin - which is something designed for foreigners to learn Chinese in the first place.

The overall aesthetic is pretty basic, but it's certainly not a terrible resource. They have some media links, and a great section on idioms/proverbs.


Lastly, here is a pretty amusing blunder.

http://learningchineseonline.net/ - looks nicer than most, though clicking Chinese Programs gets you sent to a dead link!

Sunday 11 January 2015

One

“How do I see digital tools and approaches affecting my current and future practice as a humanities student and scholar?”

This is somewhat of a difficult question, as I have so very little experience with the practices of humanities scholars before the digital age. For today's students in developed (and even most developing) countries, computers are essential to our research and I would guess that most students would be hard pressed to get much research done should they find these tools inaccessible.

Our research starts with a cursory search in Google or Primo, and we've sat through guest lectures on how to expand or narrow our search results to find a suitable breadth of scholarship. We've all been taught to take the unsourced John Q. Geocities "10 Things You Didn't Know about the French Revolution!" page with a grain of salt, yet to make good use out of resources available on university or government websites - such as census information. 

From there, we either access entirely digital journal articles and books, or we use the library's digital tracking system to check the current availability and location of "real" books in meatspace. If the above fails, we have the tools to request digital or physical volumes through Trellis, most of which can be done without ever speaking to another person. We don't even need to guess the arrival date, as we'll get an e-mail telling us when our requests have been fulfilled.

School and classroom administration are increasingly digital as well, as transcripts are only a login and a few menu clicks away, as are past grades, financial information, and the ability to add or drop courses as one desires. I've honestly no idea how students registered for courses before the internet, but I know well that rituals have already grown around the system in place now, where students hover over their keyboards like hungry scavengers, waiting for the exact moment course selection opens up for their window so that they might claim a spot in a popular or needed course. 


As far as the future is concerned, I have little doubt that we will see the digital aspect of academia expand greatly. Perhaps the most significant aspect is the trend towards entirely online courses, something which challenges many of the fundamental characteristics of academia in ways that could be seen as liberating, cheapening, somewhere between the two, or something else entirely.

My greatest hope, and goal, is to use digital tools and approaches to bring academia to a wider audience. I think tools such as blogs or podcasts are increasingly employed by more and more professionals (as well as amateurs) who want to share something without the constraints of academia. It's certainly worth considering that this accessibility comes with costs – not the least of which the lack of peer-review that needs to happen to upload a new podcast, or for a new blog post to publish.

I am not too sure what solutions could exist for something like that, though I suspect it wouldn't be as much an issue as it first seems. Unsourced news reports are far from unique to the internet, and people like Alex Jones will always find an audience of people who couldn't be bothered to seek out a second opinion. This may be a bit optimistic, but simply having these discussions in open digital spaces for anyone with interest to discover just might help to condition new generations born into the digital world to recognize that there are many difference voices speaking on a given issue, and that we can look at the evidence they give to measure their validity.

That, or the work of future professors becomes building powerpoints and answering angry e-mails.

A Sense of Purpose

For my first post I will offer up one possible theme to unite this blog, possibly carrying it forward through the semester. In a nutshell, my idea is to create a website that showcased the resources available should one want to learn a new language online. It would search out and organize various types of media that would either help one learn a new language, or to immerse themselves within one.

Given my experience over the past couple years learning Mandarin, I will focus on that particular language instead of flooding the blog with as many non-English sources that I can find. I will attempt to find audio, video, and text sources of all varieties to show the effect the digital world is having on opportunities to develop language skills.

Time and interest willing, I may begin a side project to translate Journey to the West (西遊記 ) and update the blog on a semi-regular basis with my progress on that project.