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Monthly Archives: November 2006

A character here, a character there…

Monday, November 27, 2006

Thanks for visiting.
欢迎关林来！When I came to China, I couldn’t read anything. I “sort of” knew about 15 characters but hadn’t practiced them much either. I knew “I”, “you”, “name”, “good”, etc.
Anyway, I looked at the signs on the businesses, and tried to just see the letters to try and spot repeating ones, etc. It [...]

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Passing the time with humor

Monday, November 27, 2006

One thing I do is read a joke website most days. It relaxes me, and reminds me of other people’s viewpoints. This one, titled You Know You’re A Teacher If…is pretty typical and interesting.
What sites, etc. do you look at for humor? (No email replies on this one please!)

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Automatic text to speech

Saturday, November 25, 2006

There’s an interesting thread on Chinese Forums about TTS (text to speech) engines for Chinese. Someone posted a link to a professional level engine demo site. They take up to 600 characters, which is quite a lot for Chinese! The voice quality is quite astounding (to me). I’d like to hear what others think [...]

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Qualifications for teaching English

Friday, November 24, 2006

If you search for “teach english as a foreign language” on Google, you come up with many sites that offer certification services. Some are much easier to do, but don’t have a good standing.
If you want a university level job, then you need to have good credentials. All public schools require at least a bachelors [...]

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Recreational Learning of Tibetan

Friday, November 24, 2006

Dear Stephan,
I can sympathize with the challenges. Since 1999, I have been dabbling in
recreational learning (or not learning) to read, write and say a somewhat
tonal language with an unfamiliar alphabet. It is hard.
Here are some learning tricks from my special ed teacher days -
1. Work with groups of 7-10 words at a time.
2. [...]

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