4 ms·
This is an old article, because he says he's only been studying Chinese for six years and I remember Doug Hofstadter talking about him, as a Chinese expert, in
by Vivtek 16y ago
This is an old article, because he says he's only been studying Chinese for six years and I remember Doug Hofstadter talking about him, as a Chinese expert, in the 90's.
In fact, Moser gained some renown as being good enough at Chinese (after writing this article, obviously - but not too long, as the date that appears on it is 1991 and I heard about this in about 1996 or so) that he appeared on a Chinese game show involving language mastery, apparently something along the lines of a linguistic Jeopardy.
So clearly, Chinese is in fact damned hard, but not impossible for an obsessed genius.
I wonder if anything has been done about the dictionary situation.
- robobenjie 16y agoAs a study abroad student in Japan I was encouraged to buy an electric dictionary that came with a stylus. You write the character you see and it gives the definition. (unfortunately these are designed for Japanese people so it doesn't get the character if you write it with the wrong stroke order, and it brings you to a page of japanese text explaining all about the character and its uses in different contexts, but still, pretty useful)
- Figs 16y agoWe have the internet, Unicode, and powerful computers now, so I suspect the dictionary situation is quite different from 1991. I don't know much about Chinese in particular -- my foreign language was Japanese -- but I have recently looked up kanji using a variety of search engines, including tools that allow you to draw characters. (For example: http://kanji.sljfaq.org/draw.html http://kanji.sljfaq.org/draw.html) If you have the kanji as text, it's not much more difficult to look up an unfamiliar word in Japanese than it is in English, although it may still be difficult to figure out the exact sense if the writing isn't literal. For example, suppose you're trying to read something on the Japanese Wikipedia. I'm horribly out of practice, but I can still go and take something like "第六回執筆コンテストの入選記事が決定しました。結果発表をご覧下さい。" (found on the front page of ja.wikipedia.org) and reason that it means something along the lines of "The best articles of the sixth writing competition have been chosen. Please look at the results." just by copying the parts I'm unfamiliar with into a kanji search engine like Jlex (http://jlex.org/ http://jlex.org/) a bit at a time until I get something reasonable back.
- Estragon 16y agoI suspect the dictionary situation is quite different from 1991. The firefox extension peraperakun is damn handy. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3349/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3349/