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yuan | 13 years ago | on: Tomorrow Theme

You might try naming your functions in Chinese. There's evidence showing that people take advantage of the face recognition machinery of their brains to read Chinese[1].

Coincidentally, native speakers of tonal languages (Chinese being one of them) also seem to have a higher chance of being pitch-perfect [2].

[1] Man-Ying Wang, Bo-Cheng Kuo, Shih-Kuen Cheng (2011). "Chinese characters elicit face-like N170 inversion effects". Brain and Cognition 77 (2011) 419–431.

[2] Deutsch, D., Henthorn, T., Marvin, E., & Xu H-S (2006). "Absolute pitch among American and Chinese conservatory students: Prevalence differences, and evidence for a speech-related critical period". Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 119 (2): 719–722.

yuan | 14 years ago | on: Learn Emacs: Keyboard Macros

Or just learn a little bit of Elisp, and do this:

    M-: (loop for i from ?a 
              for j below 12 
              do (insert (format "#define %c %d\n" i j)))

yuan | 15 years ago | on: Chinese: Simplified, Traditional, Mandarin or Cantonese (The Simple Answer)

Contrary to what the simplified/traditional categorisation might suggest, there is nothing non-traditional about the simplification scheme. Most, if not all, of the simplified characters are taken from existing forms, such as those used in cursive script(草书, aka grass script, cao style) and variants used in certain eras/regions which happen to be simpler in forms. There had being painstaking and rigorous process to validate established usage before any character was approved for inclusion, in order to ensure the coherency and continuity of the whole writing system. During the cultural revolution, there was an effort for further simplification, and in the revolutionary zest, the process was not so rigorous and many poorly designed and indeed ugly forms were invented and included. Thankfully, these late additions were later repealed and are no longer in use.

There was (or still is, politically motivated, I think) opposition to the simplification in Taiwan, but fortunately pragmaticism prevails and nowadays, even the current President Ma Ying-jeou advocates "识繁写简" (recognize complex, write simplified), because the practicality of the simplified version is undeniable.

yuan | 15 years ago | on: LaTeX coffee stains

I resent your speciesism insinuating that simply because you are born human, you are somehow superior to machines.

yuan | 15 years ago | on: China Passes Japan as Second-Largest Economy

> You lack some perspective and tact, you silly goose. It's not very surprising you and your friends think your native language is easier and that you prefer your own writing system. Way to navel-gaze, hello?

Learn to read first before worrying about tact and perspective. Boyter said, "The Chinese realize their language is a pain in the butt to learn and that the writing system is terrible in comparison to any alphabet system." As a Chinese speaker living among many Chinese speakers and having some proficiency in certain alphabet system, I think I have a say on such thing. Perhaps my sampling size is insignificant, it's still better than a complete baseless lie.

> [Personal anecdotal narrative elided.]

Talking about the lack of perspective, why don't you tell us what is your native language? It won't be news to us if a speaker of a Indo-European language finds another Indo-European language easier to learn than a Sino-Tibetan language.

There has been too much hot air, lets introduce some substance and data: how hard is it to attain literacy in a language?

Take a look at India, a country of similar size, population and economic status to China. According to UN Developement Programme Report 2009(pg. 172-173)[1], India's literacy rate is estimated to be at 66%, while China is at 93.3%.

If GDP percapita is any indication to access to education, Brazil and Mexico have significantly higher GDP/capita than China, but China's literacy is actually slightly better.

You may attribute it to cultural difference or whatever, still, it'd be less of a complete lie to say Chinese is not harder to learn than these other languages than otherwise.

[1] http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/HDR_2009_EN_Complete.pdf

To the rest: sorry for the language and this offtopic debate, but I would not stand by idly seeing people slandering the language I love. I said what I have to say and I will stop now.

yuan | 15 years ago | on: China Passes Japan as Second-Largest Economy

> I seem to remember that the common Chinese idiom for a tough to learn language is 跟天书一样. "Hard as the heavenly script". If you really refer to your own language as yardstick for complexity, his post has a point.

What is the point? I use my own language as a reference point because it's the language I know best. And I hope others would do the same: comment on things you know best and stop spreading lies, myths, pointless memes about things you know little.

When we say "天书", we usually refer to "无字天书" (the divine book without letter); i.e., a blank book for those of us without magical power. Again, I don't see relevancy here. We don't need magical power to learn Chinese.

yuan | 15 years ago | on: China Passes Japan as Second-Largest Economy

No. The Chinese realize their language is a pain in the butt to learn and that the writing system is terrible in comparison to any alphabet system.

As a native speaker of Mandarin Chinese, I think you are full of shit. No native Chinese speaker I know thinks English is easier to learn than Chinese. And I prefer the Chinese writing system myself if I have a choice.

It's true that many people are learning English, because today Chinese are producing and selling. When the day comes when Chinese become buyers and the rest of the world are trying to get sales from Chinese, they will start learning Chinese.

yuan | 16 years ago | on: 'They say Chinese is difficult - European languages are more difficult'

> ...since seeing the character doesn't provide any help in actually saying the word.

Nonsense. There are about 200 or so[1] chinese radicals, and all chinese characters are either radicals themselves, or composed of two or more radicals. For example, the chinese character for ticks, 蜱, is composed of 虫(bug, the meaning part) and 卑(lowly, the sound part), both very common characters that any chinese literate should know; the character can be described simply as 虫左卑右 (bug on the left, humble on the right).

> Chinese dictionaries don't generally (in my experience) provide pronunciation.

Your experience is not typical. Any decent Chinese dictionary should provide pronunciation, either in pinyin or zhuyin. Or you can simply look it up online[2].

> Chinese is really several completely different spoken languages (Mandarin, Shanghainese, Cantonese, etc.), all mutually unintelligible but sharing the same writing.

Another complete nonsense. I only speak Mandarin, and can communicate with people who only speak Cantonese if we both speak (really) slowly. Normally I would not know how to say something in Cantonese, but when I hear it, I can recognize it. I have never tried this with "Shanghainese", but the same goes for Minnan (spoken in some southern provinces and Taiwan).

It seems some people are keen to diminish the role of Mandarin in China and exaggerate the differences among Chinese dialects, perhaps wishing a fragmented linguistic landscape would lead to a fragmented and weaken Chinese nation. But Mandarin is what is taught in schools, used on tv, movies, etc, and all younger generations speak it. I don't think that's going to change soon.

[1] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Index:Chinese_radical

[2] http://www.google.com/dictionary?aq=f&langpair=en|zh-CN&...

yuan | 16 years ago | on: Why Chinese Is So Damned Hard

Pardon my cynicism, but, those who haven't learnt Chinese well tend to exaggerate its difficulty as a pretext to their failure, and those who have do the same to accentuate their achievement. If you are weighing whether to learn Chinese and deterred by its supposed difficulty, I hope you'd take that into account.

yuan | 16 years ago | on: The Story of Google's Closure: Advanced JavaScript Tools

I don't remember seeing any "dynamic typing extremists" who would argue that static typing is totally worthless, just that it has cost (e.g., it's an additional concern for the programmers) too in addition to the benefits it provides, and there are often times and cases where the cost dwarves the benefits. I do see static typing advocates who would argue that static typing should be everywhere, at all time, and non-optional.

To the extent that a single case can prove anything, what is being done here in fact strengthens the case for dynamic typing, for it shows that a dynamic language can reap the benefits of static analysis too, WHEN it is beneficial.

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