43 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2023
    1. we often went to a wonderful Chinese restaurant.

      !- comment ,: The ubiquitous Chinese restaurant! - part of the cultural heritage of v this b annotator!

    1. they claim they have solved the  problem of multinational taxation but it's it's   a bit ridiculous how little they have done the  minimum tax rate of 15 percent is ridiculously   small and also it's only sort of sharing sort of  rich countries are sharing between themselves you   00:33:10 know the tax base that is currently in tax haven  but countries in the south in the global south   basically don't get anything and i think that's an  that's an issue that's something an area in which   the pressure of the chinese counter model in  the future maybe will contribute to induce   rich countries to to to to to to to have a bit  more you know inclusive attitude towards the   00:33:37 the south also well if they don't do  it i mean you know if they don't do it   in effect china will finance the investment and  the infrastructure investment that is needed in   africa and in south asia and and that's that's  you know this is at some point you know fully uh   western countries will realize that they have to  change something otherwise they will just lose any   any influence and any capacity to influence the  world

      !- Thomas Piketty : Chinese counter model pressures western elites to change

      !- Western multinationals : comment - The elites will continue unabated until externally pressured by the Chinese counter model and others that erode the Global South's trust in the Global North elites - Colonialism has morphed into its new variant, post colonial, globalized capitalism - which is available to all elites, both in Global North or South to exploit and privatize in the same extractive, colonialist logic of the past

  2. Dec 2022
    1. Asian Memory Methods : Secret Memory Techniques, Kyoto 1771

      reply to LynneKelly at https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/asian-memory-methods-secret-memory-techniques-kyoto-1771/79217

      Thanks for this Lynne! I've ordered a copy.

      I've been working on-again, off-again at learning Japanese and spent quite a while looking at mnemonic techniques with respect to it and kanji in particular. I've done a reasonably thorough, though not exhaustive search on the topic with respect to titles in English.

      I had come across Rowley's book along with a few others, though generally they've only got a few hundred examples, usually meant for early learners. One of my favorite more comprehensive texts was:

      Henshall, Kenneth G. A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters. 1st ed, 7th Printing. Tokyo, Japan: Charles E. Tuttle Company, Inc., 1988.

      It is much more comprehensive and has some incredibly useful descriptions of kanji, how they relate to other kanji (pictographically), as well as additional subtle meanings and what I would almost call "mini-stories" about the words, origins and their development over time, which for me made them much easier to recall and use. These descriptions also included some scholarly mentions as well as interesting Japanese historical and cultural context that also slowly build up to something bigger over time. He cleverly links and interlinks various words together to build up meanings over time as well. In addition to this, he included specific mnemonic phrases to make the kanji easier to remember. (Many of these become cumulative and rely on knowledge of previous words and pictograms.) I'll note that later editions were somewhat similar, but the incredibly rich stories were significantly pared down or removed making them less valuable, at least to me. He covers 1,945 kanji including those up to the sixth grade and general use kanji which he individually numbers within the text (so one could also more easily create and cross link them within their own memory palace/journey/songline.) Given the relationship of Japanese with Chinese, perhaps similar texts may exist for Chinese?

      As an illustrative example of the work in the text, here's a link to a picture from a random page of the book: https://boffosocko.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/wp-1672269705369-scaled.jpg that may be helpful.

  3. Nov 2022
    1. The Chinese room argument holds that a digital computer executing a program cannot have a "mind," "understanding" or "consciousness,"[a] regardless of how intelligently or human-like the program may make the computer behave.

      Chinese room? AI

  4. Aug 2022
    1. Numerous other technologies to produce booming detonations to disorient and frighten enemies were described in ancient Chinese war manuals. These explosive devices employed gunpowder, invented in China around A.D. 850, reaching Europe about 1250.

      What does the history of shock and awe in history look like?

  5. Mar 2022
    1. unterscheidung zwischen syntax und semantik syntax ist dasjenige was mit regeln und symbolen zu tun hat das ist sozusagen der symbolische war der symbolische ansatz von künstlich den games logische 00:14:29 schlüsse das ist die syntax regeln und bedeutungslose symbol davon unterscheidet soll die semantik also im bereich des bedeutsamen oder auch wie er 00:14:41 dann analysieren sagt dass mentalen und er vertritt die these dass wir von der syntax von operationen logischen art mit symbolen nie auch wenn sie noch so komplex sein sollten zudem an tischen 00:14:55 behalten gelangen können das heißt dadurch dass computer nur symbolisch operieren nach gewissen regeln können sie die bedeutung erlangen tja das ist eine starke these und hier unten haben

      Syntax - Struktur vs. Semantik - über die Struktur hinausgehendes (Emergenz?) Computer können Syntax kopieren und ggf. perfektionieren, sie simulieren nach Searle jedoch nur die Semantik. Interessanter Anschlusspunkt für Zimmerli und seinen Gedanken zu Syntax, Binarität usw.

  6. Dec 2021
  7. Nov 2021
    1. http://countryoftheblind.blogspot.com/2011/10/product-review-remembering-traditional.html

      Review of Remembering Traditional Hanzi, by James W. Heisig and Timothy W. Richardson which is related to Heisig's similar Japanese book.

      While Heisig's book in Japanese is interesting, it's interesting and feels less useful than a similar and more contextualized book by Kenneth Henshall.

    1. [Mingquan] Wang has compiled a list of resources to assist teachers with [Chinese] radicals, and hopes that the work of Li and Huang, along with other curriculum developers, teachers, and specialists will further map radicals so that specialized courses can become more widespread, and students can be inducted into the fascinating world of radicals earlier in their studies.

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Heather Clydesdale </span> in Radicals Reveal the Order of Chinese Characters | Asia Society (<time class='dt-published'>11/22/2021 08:37:23</time>)</cite></small>

      I'd love to have similar sources in Japanese.

    1. https://asiasociety.org/china-learning-initiatives/radicals-reveal-order-chinese-characters

      Article about the importance of radicals in Chinese (and by extension Japanese) with hopes that pedagogy will change to make the teaching and remembering of kanji easier.

    2. Huang, who has a background in paleography, warns that many characters do not function as a “signific,” a linguistic term indicating a relationship to the word’s meaning. Additionally, the meanings of numerous characters changed over time, or they were “loaned” to other words with separate meanings. Even though more than 86 percent of characters have radicals that also function as significs, Huang encourages teachers to understand some of the exceptions, saying, “It is all right for Chinese teachers not to lecture on these, but they have to know them because students may ask.”

      More than 86% of characters in Chinese function as significs, a linguistic term indicating an association to the word's meaning. Sometimes these meanings can change with time and drift from original meanings.

      The drift can be interesting and important from the perspective of historical linguistics as well as to give clues to changes in culture.

      An example in English might be the use in computer user interfaces that include telephone handset images or old 3.5" floppy disk images used to respectively indicate "call" or "save" despite the fact that these items have either changed shape or are no longer commonly used.

    3. Huang, speaking in Chinese, agrees that radicals can facilitate the mastery of characters while also building cultural understanding, yet he also encourages teachers to become versed in common inconsistencies.

      Learning radicals in languages like Chinese and the related Japanese can not only help vocabulary and literacy, but build cultural understanding of the language and culture.

    4. Mingquan Wang, senior lecturer and language coordinator of the Chinese program at Tufts University, insists that radicals should be a part of the curriculum for teaching Chinese as a foreign language. “The question is,” he says, “how that should be done.” In spring of 2013, Wang sent an online questionnaire to 60 institutions, including colleges and K–12 schools. Of the 42 that responded, 100 percent agreed that teachers of Chinese language should cover radicals, yet few use a separate book or dedicate a course to radicals, and most simply discuss radicals as they encounter them in textbooks.

      This has been roughly my experience with Japanese, but I've yet to see an incredibly good method for doing this in a structured way.

    1. Over the years in academic settings I've picked up pieces of Spanish, French, Latin and a few odd and ends of other languages.

      Six years ago we put our daughter into a dual immersion Japanese program (in the United States) and it has changed some of my view of how we teach and learn languages, a process which is also affected by my slowly picking up conversational Welsh using the method at https://www.saysomethingin.com/ over the past year and change, a hobby which I wish I had more targeted time for.

      Children learn language through a process of contextual use and osmosis which is much more difficult for adults. I've found that the slowly guided method used by SSiW is fairly close to this method, but is much more targeted. They'll say a few words in the target language and give their English equivalents, then they'll provide phrases and eventually sentences in English and give you a few seconds to form them into the target language with the expectation that you try to say at least something, or pause the program to do your best. It's okay if you mess up even repeatedly, they'll say the correct phrase/sentence two times after which you'll repeat it again thus giving you three tries at it. They'll also repeat bits from one lesson to the next, so you'll eventually get it, the key is not to worry too much about perfection.

      Things slowly build using this method, but in even about 10 thirty minute lessons, you'll have a pretty strong grasp of fluent conversational Welsh equivalent to a year or two of college level coursework. Your work on this is best supplemented with interacting with native speakers and/or watching television or reading in the target language as much as you're able to.

      For those who haven't experienced it before I'd recommend trying out the method at https://www.saysomethingin.com/welsh/course1/intro to hear it firsthand.

      The experience will give your brain a heavy work out and you'll feel mentally tired after thirty minutes of work, but it does seem to be incredibly effective. A side benefit is that over time you'll also build up a "gut feeling" about what to say and how without realizing it. This is something that's incredibly hard to get in most university-based or book-based language courses.

      This method will give you quicker grammar acquisition and you'll speak more like a native, but your vocabulary acquisition will tend to be slower and you don't get any writing or spelling practice. This can be offset with targeted memory techniques and spaced repetition/flashcards or apps like Duolingo that may help supplement one's work.

      I like some of the suggestions made in Lynne's post as I've been pecking away at bits of Japanese over time myself. There's definitely an interesting structure to what's going on, especially with respect to the kana and there are many similarities to what is happening in Japanese to the Chinese that she's studying. I'm also approaching it from a more traditional university/book-based perspective, but if folks have seen or heard of a SSiW repetition method, I'd love to hear about it.

      Hopefully helpful by comparison, I'll mention a few resources I've found for Japanese that I've researched on setting out a similar path that Lynne seems to be moving.

      Japanese has two different, but related alphabets and using an app like Duolingo with regular practice over less than a week will give one enough experience that trying to use traditional memory techniques may end up wasting more time than saving, especially if one expects to be practicing regularly in both the near and the long term. If you're learning without the expectation of actively speaking, writing, or practicing the language from time to time, then wholesale mnemotechniques may be the easier path, but who really wants to learn a language like this?

      The tougher portion of Japanese may come in memorizing the thousands of kanji which can have subtly different meanings. It helps to know that there are a limited set of specific radicals with a reasonably delineable structure of increasing complexity of strokes and stroke order.

      The best visualization I've found for this fact is the Complete Listing of the 214 Radicals and Major Variations from An Introduction to Japanese Kanji Calligraphy by Kunii Takezaki (Tuttle, 2005) which I copy below:

      A chart of Japanese radicals in columns by number, character, and radical name & variations with a legend for reading the chart

      (Feel free to right click and view the image in another tab or download it and view it full size to see more detail.)

      I've not seen such a chart in any of the dozens of other books I've come across. The numbered structure of increasing complexity of strokes here would certainly suggest an easier to build memory palace or songline.

      I love this particular text as it provides an excellent overview of what is structurally happening in Japanese with lots of tidbits that are otherwise much harder won in reading other books.

      There are many kanji books with various forms of what I would call very low level mnemonic aids. I've not found one written or structured by what I would consider a professional mnemonist. One of the best structured ones I've seen is A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters by Kenneth G. Henshall (Tuttle, 1988). It's got some great introductory material and then a numbered list of kanji which would suggest the creation of a quite long memory palace/journey/songline.

      Each numbered Kanji has most of the relevant data and readings, but provides some description about how the kanji relates or links to other words of similar shapes/meanings and provides a mnemonic hint to make placing it in one's palace a bit easier. Below is an example of the sixth which will give an idea as to the overall structure.

      I haven't gotten very far into it yet, but I'd found an online app called WaniKani for Japanese that has some mnemonic suggestions and built-in spaced repetition that looks incredibly promising for taking small radicals and building them up into more easily remembered complex kanji.

      I suspect that there are likely similar sources for these couple of books and apps for Chinese that may help provide a logical overall structuring which will make it easier to apply or adapt one's favorite mnemotechniques to make the bulk vocabulary memorization easier.

      The last thing I'll mention I've found, that's good for practicing writing by hand as well as spaced repetition is a Kanji notebook frequently used by native Japanese speaking children as they're learning the levels of kanji in each grade. It's non-obvious to the English speaker, and took me a bit to puzzle out and track down a commercially printed one, even with a child in a classroom that was using a handmade version. The notebook (left to right and top to bottom) has sections for writing a big example of the learned kanji; spaces for the "Kun" and "On" readings; spaces for the number of strokes and the radical pieces; a section for writing out the stroke order as it builds up gradually; practice boxes for repeated practice of writing the whole kanji; examples of how to use the kanji in context; and finally space for the student to compose their own practice sentences using the new kanji.

      Regular use and practice with these can be quite helpful for moving toward mastery.

      I also can't emphasize enough that regularly and actively watching, listening, reading, and speaking in the target language with materials that one finds interesting is incredibly valuable. As an example, one of the first things I did for Welsh was to find a streaming television and radio that I want to to watch/listen to on a regular basis has been helpful. Regular motivation and encouragement is key.

      I won't go into them in depth and will leave them to speak for themselves, but two of the more intriguing videos I've watched on language acquisition which resonate with some of my experiences are:

  8. Oct 2021
  9. Jun 2021
    1. 中文读者可以在完成了本文学习后,参考这篇文章了解。文章对本文的源码分析做了一些补充。

  10. Apr 2021
  11. Mar 2021
  12. Feb 2021
  13. Jan 2021
    1. https://outline.com/tan7Ej

      Why Do People love Kungfustory?

      It’s well-established among the original novel/translating community that Kungfustory.com is the best.

      Kungfustory.com is just a place where Kungfustory can be hosted. It’s very user-friendly for readers, with a superb app that functions very well and reliably on phones. It’s easy to compile a list of reads, to know when those reads have been recently updated, and to follow along your favorite story.

      Select any genre you like: romance, stories with reborn heroes, magical realism, eastern fantasy the world of wuxia, horror stories, romantic love novels, fanfiction, sci-fi.

      New chapters added daily, Never be bored with new addictive plots and new worlds.

      https://www.kungfustory.com/

    1. Why Do People love Kungfustory?

      It’s well-established among the original novel/translating community that Kungfustory.com is the best.

      Kungfustory.com is just a place where Kungfustory can be hosted. It’s very user-friendly for readers, with a superb app that functions very well and reliably on phones. It’s easy to compile a list of reads, to know when those reads have been recently updated, and to follow along your favorite story.

      Select any genre you like: romance, stories with reborn heroes, magical realism, eastern fantasy the world of wuxia, horror stories, romantic love novels, fanfiction, sci-fi.

      New chapters added daily, Never be bored with new addictive plots and new worlds.

      https://www.kungfustory.com/

  14. Oct 2020
  15. Sep 2020
    1. The  Chinese garden underwent a  significant period of development during the Six Dynasties. In addition to the continuation of the imperial park, the private garden (in the form of either a retreat in a sizable country estate or a scholar’s small garden attached to a residence) and the garden that was part of a Buddhist or a Daoist temple also greatly flourished in this period.  The scholar’s garden,  which developed from the  Eastern  Jin period onward, was particularly significant as its aesthetics influenced both the imperial and the temple gardens. The art of garden design and construction became increasingly sophisticated. And the functions of the garden went through some significant changes as well.  The  Six  Dynasties period was indeed important in the history of the  Chinese garden because it witnessed a number of developments that remained conventional throughout the subsequent imperial dynasties. Let us now turn to the most important developments in the garden during the Six Dynasties that bear special relevance to the topic of this chapter.

      Contextualize

      The Chinese view of nature and its aesthetics have been influenced by a culture of distinctive spiritual and philosophical currents such as Daoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. The traditional Chinese landscape and the conceptions of the garden are a compilation of successive dynasties, social models, architecture, and techniques with also an understanding of the beauty of nature and the ability to symbolize it.

      The triad of human beings, earth, and heaven is part of nature. A continuous cosmos of universal, dynamic, self-creative, spontaneous, and unpredictable order, The Dao. The basic and most pure expression of a patterned and harmonious act of nature.

      In The Six Dynasties period, the motivations of garden creation were drawn by a spirit of evocation, the search, and capture of “essence” and “spirit resonance” of nature. Where the function of gardens pursues an aesthetic of contemplation and enjoyment, where people gather together in a representational scenario of nature.

      Zhou (1999) talks about the Chinese thinking of "nature and principle of man and things" and how the conception of a unitary cosmos and the understanding of selves and parts acting by patterns is the strongest driving force that shaped the Chinese tradition in terms of ethics, politics, religion but also architecture and landscape form. What shaped the Chinese landscape was the integration of the object's understanding in terms of opposition, integration, harmony, and relationships.

      Zhou, Weiquan (1999). Chinese classical landscape history. Beijing. Qing-Hua University Publishing.

  16. Jul 2020
    1. The middle character, Ze, is a generational name, and is common to all his siblings (such as his brothers and sister, 毛泽民 (Mao Ze Min), 毛泽覃 (Mao Ze Tan), and 毛泽紅 (Mao Ze Hong)).

      interesting, did not know that. How are these generational characters determined?

  17. Mar 2020
    1. In an article on Pinyin around this time, the Chicago Tribune said that while it would be adopting the system for most Chinese words, some names had "become so ingrained in our usage that we can't get used to new ones."
  18. Nov 2019
    1. nized in gradations of inferiority and superiority. This hierarchic princi-ple in turn was the basis for a stress on duties rather than rights, on theevident assumption that if everyone did his duty everyone would getwhat he deserved. Thus, the filial son obedient to his parent would baskin the parent’s approval. With all duties performed, society would be inorder to everyone’s benefit.

      The hierarchic principle again

    2. For example, take the character for east , which in the Beijingdialect has the sound “dong” (pronounced “doong,” as in Mao Ze-dong’s name). Since a Chinese character is read aloud as a single syllableand since spoken Chinese is also rather short of sounds (there are onlyabout four hundred different syllables in the whole language), it hasbeen plagued with homophones, words that sound like other words, like“soul” and “sole” or “all” and “awl” in English. It happened that thespoken word meaning “freeze” had the sound “dong.” So did a spokenword meaning a roof beam. When the Chinese went to write down thecharacter for freeze, they took the character for east and put beside itthe symbol of ice , which makes the character (“dong,” to freeze).To write down the word sounding “dong” which meant roof beam, theywrote the character east and put before it the symbol for wood mak-ing (“dong,” a roof beam).These are simple examples. Indeed, any part of the Chinese languageis simple in itself. It becomes difficult because there is so much of it to beremembered, so many meanings and allusions. When the lexicographersof later times wanted to arrange thousands of Chinese characters in adictionary, for instance, the best they could do in the absence of an al-phabet was to work out a list of 214 classifiers or “radicals,” one ofwhich was sure to be in each character in the language. These 214classifiers, for dictionary purposes, correspond to the 26 letters of our al-phabet, but are more ambiguous and less efficient. Shang writing was al-ready using “radicals” like wood, mouth, heart, hand, that indicatedcategories of meaning. From the start the governmental power of theChinese writing system was at the ruler’s disposal. Writing seems to haveemerged more in the service of lineage organization and governmentthan in the service of trade.
  19. Jan 2019
  20. Sep 2018
    1. Abstractijur_891 957..973Informal housing and industrial developments in the so-called urban villages have beenkey features of the recent Chinese urbanization. In this article we will examine thedevelopment of urban villages in one of the most dynamic Chinese cities — Shenzhen.The article first reviews the urbanization and migration process in the region and theemergence of urban villages. It then examines informal housing, commercial andindustrial developments in these villages. We analyse the politics of village urbanizationand highlight the important relationship between migration and informal villagedevelopment. We emphasize the contribution made by urban villages in providingaffordable housing and jobs for the low-income population during the rapidurbanization and urge cautious consideration with regard to hasty and large-scaleredevelopment of these villages. We conclude that the development of urban villages isa very important part of the urbanization process.
  21. Aug 2018
    1. The Saint Sofia project, a huge, high-tech entertainment, retail, hotel and office complex funded by Chinese money, is expected to be built near Bulgaria’s capital over a three-year period.
  22. Nov 2017
  23. Sep 2017
    1. ‘Celestial Empire’.

      Wikipedia contributors, "Celestial Empire," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Celestial_Empire&oldid=775632771 (accessed September 7, 2017).

  24. Nov 2014
    1. this looks like the right way to learn chinese. i should really try it..