雪落高枝映蕾菲
惊洁美
卓然岂摧眉
My translation：
Snow falling on high branches befits blooming flowers
I'm amazed at this clean beauty
So demonstrative as to debase myself?
The last sentence may be a challenge. 摧眉 literally means "make lower eyebrows". But figuratively it means "lose confidence; flatter (in the bad sense)".
This poem, technically ci rather, was probably composed by a person named 啼非 in 2004.
(The image of the fan below is from Mr. Vishal Upadhayay's Facebook posting.)
Another example mentioned is "bash". On the one hand, it has the meaning of to strike heavily, to criticize harshly (source), as in "Bashing Hillary? Don't go there, GOP". On the other hand, the word "bashful" means shy, timid (source). How could you justify these two opposite human behaviors with one single word (or word with a suffix)? This word, though, is different from "sanction", in that "bashful" actually has a completely different etymology and is related to the verb "abash", to make ashamed or embarrassed (source). In any dictionary, when two words have the same spelling but are descended from two etymological sources, they're usually listed as two headwords or entries. In case of "bashful", it's not the word "bash" with the suffix "-ful", but was formed by "abashed" + "-ful" and later lost the initial unstressed vowel (a process called aphesis). "bash" does have the same meaning as "abash" except that sense is now obsolete.
Well, some words that look like having different meanings but they don't, such as "flammable" and "inflammable". That's another topic, for now.
Secondly, I suppose human eyes focus on circular areas, instead of horizontal lines. That is, the very focal point is a round dot, the farther away from it, the less focus; eyes do not focus on one fixed-width line, the farther away above or below or to the left or right to it, the less focus. Chinese characters have the advantage of packing semantic information in a square block, compared to English which spreads the same information out horizontally, whose acquisition requires left-to-right scan by the eyes.
The Korean language is a unique case in that its letters are arranged both in a block and horizontally. It's a perfect compromise between English and Chinese. The eyes can gain some information focusing on one spot but usually must move horizontally to gain enough for a word. So the reading by the same person reading the same content will have the intermediate speed.
On the other hand, a March 24, 2015 article reports the research by Georgetown University scientists, After learning new words, brain sees them as pictures (probably based on this publication). Indeed, our brain does not process English text strictly linearly when our eyes horizontally scan the line into our brain. This means that the distinction between a language with largely block-based information (Chinese) and one with line-based information (English etc.) is not so dramatic. Nevertheless, I would be very delighted if we could find a person perfectly trilingual in English, Korean and Chinese, or at least perfectly bilingual in two of the three, to test his reading speed. Personally I'm not sure if I'm perfectly bilingual in English and Chinese. But I do feel that my reading speed in Chinese slightly better than in English. But I have not done a well-prepared test.[note2]
________________________
[note1] He's said to be a maximal trilingual, in the field of Second Language Acquisition.
[note2] Obviously the test must be given by another person. Since the person taking the test naturally reads the passage faster if he's already read the same content in any language, the passage actually cannot contain the same content translated into different languages in real implementation of this test. How the test can be given in the most appropriate way may be a technical challenge.
. The table of contents are as follows:
1 "主席" (Zhǔxí) was Chairman, is President
2 "Ni Hao Ma" (你好吗) is not a native Chinese greeting
3 Affective meaning of "中国" (China)
4 Chinese Character Usage Frequency
5 2015: The Year of "羊"
6 Why do Chinese choose uncommon English names?
7 Scholarly translation should be literal
8 "We should all be learning Chinese..." thus they say
9 "He" (他) and "she" (她) mix-up for Chinese students
10 "第几" has no English equivalent
11 New Chinese Acronyms
12 "Dragon" for "龙": a mistranslation?
13 Joke due to translation: "Oracle bone script" was registered as a software brand by Americans
14 Chinese religious language
15 "Modern" and "现代" or "近代"
16 Translation: a case study, "feminism" and "女权主义"
17 Translation of "computer", "calculator", and others
18 New Year's Wish: Less new usage of 被 (bei)
19 "谢谢叔叔!" (Thank you Uncle) said not to a family relative
20 "NBA" as an entry in Chinese dictionary
21 ESL methods: bilingual and immersion
22 Linguistic authority
23 Chinese "empty word" 虚词
24 虚词"虽然": empty word "although"
25 虚词"当然": empty word "of course"
26 虚词"很": empty word "very"
27 Interjection (叹词)
28 Why should the Chinese language not adopt a phonetic writing system?
29 Learning ... as a second language
30 Technical document needs literal translation
31 Levels of translation quality proposed by Yan Fu: A small example
32 Proper name translation: semantic or phonetic
33 Proper name translation: standardization
34 What language is popular?
35 Which English letter do Chinese pronounce wrong the most?
36 Language education to solve Chinese ethnic conflict
Any comments and reviews, good or bad, are highly appreciated. In case you ask, the landscape painting featured on the cover of the book is my hand-drawn replication of 山水图 (Picture of Mountains and Water) by 黄鼎 (Huang Ding, 1660-1730), an early Qing dynasty painter.
by Susan M. Gass (C) 2013, Taylor & Francis, 4th ed
It's a comprehensive literature review or overview of the academic research on second language acquisition, citing over 1000 references. Very complete, yet boring and verbose. The following are excerpts that I personally think are interesting. (Some text can be found at archive.org.)
p.11
The basic assumption in SLA research is that learners create a language system, known as an interlanguage (IL). This system is composed of numerous elements, not the least of which are elements from the NL and the TL.
Central to the concept of IL is the concept of fossilization, which generally refers to the cessation of learning. The Random House Dictionary... "to become permanently established in the interlanguage of a second language learner in a form that is deviant from the target-language norm and that continues to appear in performance regardless of further exposure to the target language."
p.56
English does not allow resumptive pronouns in relative clauses (I saw the woman who she is your son's teacher).
p.71
pronominal reflexes (or pronoun retention/resumptive pronoun), a phenomenon--common in many languages (including informal English)
p.90
Table 4.1 Hierarchy of Difficulty (Source: Adapted from Stockwell, Bowen & Martin, 1965)
| Category | Example |
| Differentiation | English L1, Italian L2: to know versus sapere/conoscere ←most difficult |
| New category | Japanese L1, English L2: article system |
| Absent category | English L1, Japanese L2: article system |
| Coalescing | Italian L1, English L2: the verb to know |
| Correspondence | English L1, Italian L2: plurality ←easiest; two forms are used in roughly the same way |
p.118
In general, children have better phonology, but older learners often achieve better L2 syntax
p.164
the notion of equipotentiality, expressed by Schachter (1988). She pointed out that children are capable of learning any language.
p.165
Lexical categories...: nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, and so forth. These are referred to as content words. Functional categories... (e.g., articles, possessives), or they may be categories consisting of grammatical morphemes (e.g., plurals, tense markers).
p.194
language learning is largely lexical learning (e.g., Chomsky, 1989) (Some notes on economy of derivation and representation. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, 10, 43-74)
p.210
Oral repetition correlated with general proficiency, but visual repetition (writing words over and over, memorizing the spelling letter by letter, writing new words and translation equivalents repeatedly) negatively predicted vocabulary size and general proficiency.
p.257
A comparable example took place at a G8 summit in Okinawa, Japan. Prior to the summit, Prime Minister Mori of Japan spent time brushing up on his English. Upon meeting President Clinton, he apparently became flustered and, instead of saying, How are you?, said instead: Who are you? President Clinton responded: I'm Hillary Clinton's husband. However, Prime Minister Mori, unaware that he had asked the wrong question, was anticipating a response something like I'm fine, and you? and responded I am too.
p.538
Thanks go to Caroline Latham for bringing this example to our attention.
p.266
Focused attention was most beneficial for syntax and least for the lexicon. In addition, there was a diminished effect for proficiency, with focused attention having a greater effect in early stages of learning.
p.435
The original formulation of CPH (Critical Period Hypothesis) came from Lennenberg (1967), who noted that "automatic acquisition from mere exposure to a given language seems to disappear [after puberty], and foreign languages have to be taught and learned through a conscious and labored effort. Foreign accents cannot be overcome easily after puberty"... The Sensitive Period Hypothesis predicts sensitivity, but not absolute drop-offs, such that a learning decline might be gradual.
p.438
Their (Bialystok and Hakuta (1994)) recalculations also revealed a deterioration in proficiency starting after age 20--well after the proposed biological changes suggested by the CPH.
p.439
Examples of easy structures are word order in simple sentences and pronoun gender; examples of difficult structures are articles and subcategorization features. Easy structures did not show age-related effects, whereas difficult structures did. He (DeKeyser (2000)) ties this to explicit and implicit learning, claiming that younger learners have intact the ability for implicit and explicit learning, whereas adults have lost their ability to learn implicitly.
p.440
DeKeyser and Larson-Hall (2005)...:
Children necessarily learn implicitly; adults necessarily learn largely explicitly. As a result, adults show an initial advantage because of shortcuts provided by the explicit structure, but falter in those areas in which explicit learning is ineffective, that is, where rules are too complex or probabilistic in nature to be apprehended fully with explicit rules. Children, on the other hand, cannot use shortcuts to the representation of structure, but eventually reach full native speaker competence through long-term implicit learning from massive input. This long-term effect of age of onset is most obvious to the casual observer in pronunciation, but on closer inspection appears to be no less robust in the domain of grammar.
p.442
The primary difference between children and adults is in the mastery of phonology, which can hardly be due to input differences.
p.458
Studies indicate that motivational arousal is greatest for tasks that are assumed to be of moderate difficulty (see the discussion in Brehm and Self, 1989)
p.462
Anxiety is not always a negative factor in learning. ...: low levels help, whereas high levels hurt.
p.463
Hoffman (1986) notes that anxiety can direct attention away from meaning and toward pure form (acoustic properties, order of presentation, phonetic similarities).
p.470
strategy instruction was found to be substantially more effective when ... when the strategies targeted reading, speaking, and vocabulary, rather than writing, listening, and grammar.
p.473
Although adults show a faster speed of learning an L2, children seem to have an overall advantage in terms of ultimate attainment, at least for phonology and, possibly, syntax.
pp.480-1
Table 18.1 Definitions of Bilingualism
p.484
Cook (2005, Multi-competence: Black-hole or worm-hole?) argued that there are effects of multilingualism on how individuals process their NL, even individuals with a minimal knowledge of an L2.
p.488
in early L3 production, certain functions, such as prepositions, articles, and conjunctions, tend to come from the L2 and not the NL. This may occur even when the two languages are not phonetically similar.
p.489
Cenoz (2001)... cross-linguistic influence... linguistic distance is one factor. This was the case for all learners, regardless of language dominance... Age is another (factor), with older learners showing more cross-linguistic influence than younger children. There are language-related factors as well, with more transfer of content words than functional words.
One piece of evidence for this observation comes from its occurrence in a book written in the Eastern Jin Dynasty (317–420). Faxian (or Fa-Hien, Fa-hsien) (337–c. 422) "was a Chinese Buddhist monk who traveled by foot all the way from China to India, visiting many sacred Buddhist sites." His 《佛国记》 (Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms) (a.k.a 《法显传》, Biography of Faxian) states that "从是以南，名为中国。中国寒暑调和，无霜、雪。人民殷乐无户籍官法。" (The place from here toward the south is named the Middle Country. In the Middle Country, cold and heat are harmonized, and there's no frost or snow. The people are well-to-do and happy. Household registry or government laws do not exist.)
Why does Faxian's book serve as evidence for lack of the affective sense of "中国" in early China? The word "中国" first occurred in the earliest book in Chinese history, 《尚书》 (Book of Documents)[note], which was compiled by Confucius (551–479 BC) and read and memorized by every pupil that could afford minimum education in ancient China. Monk Faxian definitely knew most if not all words in the book. But he used the word "中国" to denote the central area of today's Indian subcontinent, to be precise, to translate the Sanskrit word "Madhya-Des", paraphrased as "central territory" or "central kingdom" or "midland country" by various scholars, which existed during the Gupta period (approximately 320 to 550 CE). It's hard-pressed to imagine that Faxian would have chosen "中国" if it had already had acquired a sense beyond its literal meaning. If "中国" had been used dearly as words such as "夏" or later in history "大唐", Faxian would have considered a different character combination to translate the Sanskrit word, or perhaps added a translator's note if "中国" had to be used.
More than a millennium later, 《四库全书总目》 (Annotated Catalog of the Complete Imperial Library, completed in 1798 by the Qing dynasty) criticized Faxian's word choice by saying that he "以天竺为中国，以中国为边地" ("considered India as the Middle Country and China as the frontier"; note the same word "中国" could mean both "Middle Country" and "China"). What we can read off of this critique is that the word "中国" had acquired its affective sense by the late 18th century. From now on, it's not to be used to mean just the middle part of some land, or any country in the middle of something larger. It uniquely refers to the Middle Country or the Middle Kingdom or China, with its rich culture and history. Yet two centuries later, it's our turn to criticize the editors of the imperial encyclopedia for their lack of the sense that one born later in history should only judge a historical figure from the historically contemporary perspective.
___________
[note] 《尚书·卷十四·梓材》: "皇天既付中国民，越厥疆土，于先王肆" (The heaven already obliged [the Zhou family] to govern the people in the Middle Country. If we extend and develop the territory, our ancestor's Dao will flourish.)
