Random observations make a posting

[mangosteen]

Meta: Part of posting more is taking things that I'd normally put on Facebook, give them a little bit more development, and then posting them here. I can't promise profundity, but journals never do.

Part of my job is reviewing/editing design documents. I'm currently proofreading a design document written by someone whose first language is Mandarin.  26 pages of adding definite articles and noun/verb agreement.

This is not unexpected. It's an interesting exercise in “These are exactly the things that I’d expect to be hard for native Mandarin speakers.” To wit, Mandarin has no verb conjugation, no declensions, no word gender, and no plurals. To balance that out, word order is exceedingly strict, and you have particles everywhere, among other things.

What this all means is that there are typically many missing instances of 'the' and 'a/an', along with 'is' where 'are' should be, and vice versa.

Observation: I took a semester of Mandarin ~12 years ago, and I surprise myself with how consistently I've reserved part of my brain for keeping that knowledge active since then. My written notes have random Chinese characters in them as a form of shorthand, e.g. “电” for "electricity and/or electrical", and so on. Not complaining... just rather fascinated at how well this stuck.

Comments

[dsrtao]

I'm beginning to think that exploring language is the ur-hacker activity.

[metahacker]

I took a few weeks of Mandarin back...when...and am trying to push through Duolingo's course on it. Yeah, that's hard. (Though, at least in the simple sentences, eminently logical; I imagine it'll get maddeningly inconsistent when adding all those extra words to shade meanings...)

[lillilah]

I remember when you took Mandarin. I'm envious that your memory is that good. While Mandarin is my second favorite language (after Russian and definitely ahead of French and other languages I've studied), I remember little of it. Unfortunately. Since many of our friend here aren't native English speakers, I have a lot of experience with how hard articles are, plus the 'th' sound. I've done a good job teaching people how to say a short 'a', though. I just have them scrunch up their noses and make the most vulgar, nasal sounding short 'a' possible. It helps them remember.

[drwex]

That's very interesting in that my company has embarked on a massive e-learning initiative and pretty much anyone and everyone has been sucked into it (a la the Borg). I've been doing audio work for them and prior to recording I spend a fair number of hours rendering the scripts (often written by people who are non-native English speakers) into readable English.

The disturbing part is that I'm neither the first nor the second line of review on these scripts. That they pass through with such awfulness in them is a terrifying thought.