中文

Few things irk me more than when some random Chinese person assumes that Standard Mandarin Chinese is the only Chinese language that exists or matters. Like when I mess up speaking it and they go "Tut tut, ABC kid losing their heritage!" Or when they find out that I (who studied it for years in university) can speak it at all and my brother cannot, and they go, "I knew you were the older child, because you can still speak Chinese!" Fuck you, bitch, Putonghua ain't my people's language. Do you speak Cantonese? No? Why do you suck?????

Christmas spirit

I live very near a minor Christmas attraction. I just discovered used coffee/hot chocolate cups in my mailbox. Assholes.

Correcting corrections

I participate in a site called lang-8. It is a community-based language learning site. You put in your native language and the language(s) you are learning, and then you write journal entries on whatever you want in your foreign language, which will then be corrected by native speakers of that language. You, of course, will able to correct entries written in your own language as well. It's not required but it's common courtesy.

Certainly, because it is community-based, the quality of your corrections will vary. This is okay, because many times you will get more than one person correcting, and in any case, the point is to connect with native speakers in a way that is much more difficult to do in real life. In fact, just writing your entries regularly is probably good practice.

What gets me frustrated, though, is when I see English sentences that are perfectly correct get marked wrong and "fixed" incorrectly, with an incorrect explanation. There is no ambiguity--it is just wrong.

When you are learning a language, the native speaker is like a king. The native speaker lives in the language, able to churn out sentences like breathing without ever once sparing a thought to particles or tense. He understands cultural context and modern usage and slang and can explain this to you better and more fluidly than a textbook can. This is the person you want to be, so when he tells your that your sentence is wrong--and this is why--you believe him. I mean, unless you have rock solid confidence, in which case--maybe you are native-like now.

Usually, this mistaken native speaker (who I will just call the "wrong person" now for brevity) is sincere and probably already knows what grammar is actually correct, but he was a little careless and just zipped through those sentences with that native speaker confidence.

Now, I am not perfect, nor am I an English expert. I like to think myself somewhat above average in my English skills because I love reading and writing, I always did well in my English classes, I lapped up both prescriptive and descriptive grammar and genuinely enjoy learning about it, and I took several linguistic classes which taught me to look at language structure more technically. I have been wrong on lang-8 before--on a word I thought I was familiar with but really wasn't ("instep")--and I corrected myself on it.

So, when I correct these mistaken corrections, I know that the wrong person might get defensive. I used to start off with things like "I don't mean to be a jerk, but..." and maybe end with a "Sorry!" and an emoticon like this: ( ；´Д｀)

I decided recently that I didn't need disclaimers and apologies like that. I'm not sorry about it; I don't want the learner to be confused. I want them to know that they are on the right track and they've been right all along. To head off an empty argument and to make sure I'm not doing the same thing, I do some research first--you know, making sure I know damn well what I'm talking about, collecting resource links and examples, using crystal clear language.

What I write is meant to be addressed to the wrong person. Most of the time he understands and agrees, because after all, we are all here to help each other learn in a friendly environment anyway. Then the learner will see this reply and understand, too.

Today, I did the same thing, and instead, the wrong person implied that I was trying to impress the learner, that I was confusing her with my grammatical terms, and that he was helping her take "baby steps." This made me so, so angry. Yes, okay, what I wrote was not easy for a non-advanced ESL speaker to understand; perhaps I should've have explicitly addressed it to him (the wrong person) from the start. However, your correction was not necessary and if you had just thought about it more in the first place and left it off no one would've been confused at all. Backwards steps are not baby steps.

I just get really worked up about it because I feel it's really unfair to the language learner. I know what it feels like to get conflicting information and it just really impairs the process. Perhaps, in the long run, it'll be but a drop in an ocean, but, I don't know, it still bothers me.

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong--just do it with good proof and I will take it gracefully on the chin!

I will never buy songs from iTunes again

I'll still take the free ones, but I just decided that enough is enough, and I am not putting anymore m4ps into my hard drive again.

Because I deeply dislike Apple and iTunes, and m4ps in general. I used to be so good. I bought every single one of my songs, if I could find it on iTunes. I must've paid hundreds of dollars for them, all the while being an anomaly--because who in my age group really buys their songs, anyway?

But, no. Not anymore.

1. The m4p format. I have an iPod now (it was a gift), but I used to have a Zen. You can't put m4ps into anything but an iPod. To get my songs into my Zen, I burnt them onto a CD and then reripped all the songs as mp3s. Man, I can't believe I did all that.
2. The authorization. Only five machines? I paid $0.99 for this song. There is the technicality people mention that I didn't actually "buy" the song, since I am limited as to what I can do with it. This is true.
3. Authorization. There are times when my computer just unauthorizes itself, and when I try putting in my email and password, they tell me that, sorry, our server is down. Try again later. Let me listen to the music THAT I BOUGHT, assholes.
4. Authorization. What is the point of sharing my library on the local network when other people can't even listen to my music?

It's not even amazing quality or anything. It's expensive and stupid. From now on, I'm getting all my songs through a better source--I'm going to find a better legal source for individual songs (like mp3fiesta or whatever; my choices are far from limited), and I'm going to buy more CDs, and I'm going to pirate them. Yeah. That's what I said.

Well, shit

I just got my ass kicked in Calculus discussion.

It's my earliest class at 8:10 am, so I woke up at 7:00, got dressed, grabbed my backpack and a granola bar, and headed off to find the classroom. I got there early, so I sat on some steps nearby while I waited, falling half asleep and simultaneously enjoying the morning air before the day got ridiculously hot.

So at 7:56, I walk into the classroom, hoping for and expecting clarification on the previous two lectures, which I mostly understood but wanted reinforcement for because the professor was--how do say it--he sucked, basically. I dug through my bag for a while, looking for my favorite pencil and eraser, which weren't there. In fact, I had neither pencils nor erasers.

And BAM I get hit with a diagnostic test.

Never saw it coming.

I walked back to my dorms dejected and still reeling, wondering if it was really okay to integrate separate parts of a function when they were being added together, and if the TA would laugh at me when he saw that I couldn't even differentiate tangent.

Mood: Irritable

Fucking college.

I didn't take AP English, with all the analyzing and historical background-learning and techniques just to tell you the name of the stupid lawyer on page one. Applied Intermediate Composition? Please. This is 9th grade: what is a symbol? You and your stupid college-level education, your stupid "this isn't high school anymore" spiel. Bleh.

And you know what else bothers me here? There is a communal bathroom in the hall. One of the biggest pet peeves of mine (I decided this after a week of listening to it while I was trying to mind my own business) is when people use WAY TOO MUCH PAPER TOWEL. They just push the damn lever so fast and so many times, until the stream of paper coming out of the dispenser is nearly touching the ground. YOU DON'T NEED THAT MUCH. It's irresponsible and wasteful. This is why the paper towels run out all the time, idiot.

....Okay, yeah, angry rants aren't quite as eloquently written as non-angry ones.