[nabs-l] Taking a Course in Chinese

[Ben J Bloomgren]

Hello, Hannah,

This is gonna get a bit involved, but hang in there with me. Do you have native speakers of Mandarin or Cantonese Chinese around you with whom you can practice regularly? Are you studying Mandarin or Cantonese? That is very important, since those two languages are completely unintelligible! Without knowing that, I'll assume that you're taking a class in Chinese calligraphy, which would be strictly focused on Traditional Chinese characters. As you know, traditional characters are more complicated than simplified characters, which were created by the PRC Communist party to promote literacy in the 1970's.

There are more than fifty thousand characters, which are used to represent words or ideas. Modern computers are very apt to represent them, but it's not easy. I, individually, prefer to use either a mac with voiceover and a braille display or Windows with NVDA and a Braille display. In Voiceover, both the Mandarin and Cantonese voices, as well as the Taiwanese voice will actually accurately deal with candidate lists, which are lists of characters offered in response to user input. For example, if you type bei, it may pop up and say "bei de Beijing," which is saying "Bei as in Beijing, the capital of China. It's absolutely wonderful. The pronunciation of the words themselves and their tones is impeccable. I'd have to get native speaker input, but from what I hear it's tremendous.

Sorry for the lengthy descriptions, but I have to give you all that so that you don't arrive in ignorance.

Sincerely,

Ben J Bloomgren

skype and twitter: blindbirder
On Aug 27, 2012, at 9:48 PM, "Hannah Chadwick" <sparklylicious at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello everyone,
> I've been on the list for quite a while now, but haven't introduced myself
> to those of you who joined in the last year or so. my name is Hannah
> Chadwick, and I'm attending UC Davis this fall. I'm planning on double
> majoring in international relations and linguistics with a minor in
> journalism. I love learning new languages, and will be taking a Chinese
> class. I took Spanish for 2 years in high school and I was able to use my
> BrailleNote for that, but I'm not sure that doing my Chinese work on the
> Apex will be the best idea since the alphabet will be completely different.
> Has anyone taken a Chinese course before? If so, what did you do in terms of
> writing the Chinese alphabet? Are there software out to that would read the
> language?
> Best, Hannah 
> 
> 
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