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Villandry en 84000 allumettes !

La reine, c'est moi

La Joconde déballée

Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard, Part 2

Alright, my last note attracted some dismissive comments from quite a few Chinese/Japanese-learning friends :) I feel like I need to be a bit more specific about a few keypoints.
(a) Language knowledge = character knowledge: Of course, I have lived long enough in China to realise this is not true for everyday communication with natives. As Xavier has pointed out, a relatively high level of communication can be achieved with just about 200 key sentences. My reasoning here is that I have personally reached some kind of plateau in my oral learning curve, and now I want to be able to understand more textual content. I want to be able to read blogs, tweets, forum posts and subtitles in Chinese. Thus the need to estimate what could be my goals and how realistic they are.
(b) It is possible to guess the meaning, and sometimes the pronunciation of a previously unknown character in a sentence: well, if you can do that, congratulations! I believe this character should belong to the corpus of known characters then, and that you should have a more accurate estimate of the number of characters that you truly know. Either you understand the meaning of a character in a given context, or you don't. How frequent are both cases? I believe the latter is way more likely. It would be interesting to think of a way to evaluate that.
(c) Twitter = biased source of textual content: Yes Thomas, in Twitter you need the context to be able to understand a given tweet (though that does not occur so frequently in my experience). That means the former curve is too optimistic and that you should drag it down to have a more accurate estimate of what you can read given the number of characters you know. This has nothing to do with the character frequency.
(d) Learning words with known characters is more efficient than learning new characters: Thomas, I am not sure the curve I have plotted can agree with that. What this curve says is that even though you might know all combinations for the 2000 most frequent characters, you still won't be able to read more than a tweet out of two.
I am surprised that people contest the implications of such an estimate, but not the experimental protocol itself (this behaviour is quite un-scientific). Nobody asked how I sampled the tweets or if the frequency table of Twitter characters is representative of textual content. There would be things to say here, but being more accurate here would again mean dragging the curve further down. This would not change the pessimistic conclusions I have already drawn.
Alright, I'll give you two good reasons for hope:
(1) The second derivative of the curve is positive from 0 to 2500 characters, where most students of Chinese are. This means the more you learn, the faster you learn.
(2) I am working on a revolutionary program to make your character learning more time- and effort-efficient :)

Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard, Part 1

Lately I have been working on some software for accelerating the learning curve of Chinese characters. When you learn Chinese (or Japanse, for that matter) your knowledge of the language roughly boils down to how many characters you know. The question is: how many characters should you know in order to be able to have a basic grip on the language? what about a more advanced one, like: reading a Chinese newspaper?
I have often heard people say that when you know about 2000 characters you can read around 80% of a newspaper. This is pure connerie, as we say in French. You know why? Because usually, the most interesting word in a sentence is also the most complex. Thus, with 2000 characters in your handbook you might very well be able to read four characters out of five, but then you will only understand about two or three sentences in the whole article, because you will always miss that particular intriging character that you have never seen anywhere.
To support this claim I have sampled a large amount of Chinese sentences on the web. More precisely, I have sampled 23851 sentences from Twitter, all in Chinese. I have extracted the chinese characters from these sentences and counted their number of occurrences. There are 5577 characters. in all. From these number of occurrences, I have obtained the relative frequency rank of each character.
For instance, here are the five most frequent and rarest characters I have found:

Rank	Character	Number of occurrences
1	的	30645
2	是	15229
3	我	12930
4	了	12774
5	不	12743
...	...	...
5573	琲	1
5574	驮	1
5575	鑲	1
5576	瞰	1
5577	曦	1

The question I was asking myself was: if I know about 1000 characters, what pecentage of Twitter content (i.e: real-life textual content) am I able to read? Sit down, and see: With 1000 characters, you can read about 10% of what you find on the web. Pretty lame, huh?

chinese_damn_hard.png

Home made happiness

Chateaux de la Loire - Villandry

Châteaux de la Loire - Premier rayon de soleil de l'année

Yuri says: Reach for the stars! (slut)

Rock and Roll In My Soul

Monkey Head

Statue de jeune homme

Making quick google requests from the command line

I just wrote a simple python script to make simple requests to Google from the command line. No special characters, no fancy search engine, just plain Google. But it seems to work.

#!/usr/bin/python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import os, sys
import webbrowser

query = ""
if len(sys.argv) > 1:
	query = sys.argv[1]
print "Querying google: " + query
query = query.replace(" ", "+")
webbrowser.open("http://www.google.com/search?name=f&hl=en&q=" + query)

Prag door knob

Prag Subway

Parlez-en

Dès que j'aurai fini de bosser sur mon manuscrit de thèse, je vais commencer à chercher à exposer certaines des photos que j'ai faites en Chine. J'ai créé une page pour me faire de la publicité : http://www.minutebutterfly.de/expo. Parlez-en à vos amis et aux gens autour de vous, faites tourner le lien ! Ce serait sympa.

After I'm done with my PhD manuscript, I would like to exhibit some of the photos I have made during my time in China. To this purpose, I have created a webpage that displays the pictures: http://www.minutebutterfly.de/expo. It would be great if you could pass the word around. Thanks!