Learning Chinese

It's been 10 years since I posted to this blog. Rather than close it, I've decided to start posting about my language learning experience, with the occasional review of a game or book.

Chinese isn't my second language. I learned French from childhood in bilingual programmes and took Russian in high school and at university. I used to speak some Italian and can understand some Spanish, but Chinese is very different from the predominantly European languages I've studied.

I started learning Chinese at the end of 2018 so it has been about 2 and a half years since I started. I had tried to learn Chinese in 2012, before a business trip to Taiwan. I used Mango Languages through my library and really didn't learn anything other than 你好 (hello), 很高興認識你 (very pleased to meet you), 謝謝 (thank you), and the numbers from 1-10. Just before I left, I bought a tiny book with the unimpressive name "I Can Read That" (full title is I Can Read That: A Traveler's Introduction to Chinese Characters) by Julie Sussman. "I Can Read That" didn't teach me to speak Chinese on the plane, but I did learn to read somewhere between 40-50 characters on the flight, which impressed my hosts. Though the book concentrates on simplified Chinese characters, the traditional versions are listed in an appendix which was extremely useful for Taiwan.

I spent the next few years thinking Chinese was just too hard for me since the oral method (no characters) didn't work for me, but when another opportunity to visit Taiwan and work with scholars from Taiwan came up, I decided to give learning Chinese another try.

Six years later, there were many more options for learning Chinese on your own. I started with Duolingo and added Memrise and Living Language later. I also downloaded a wide selection of other Chinese learnings apps of varied utility and started buying graded readers and bilingual readers. Later I added Youtube videos for Chinese learners and music videos to improve my listening skills. A year ago, I started practicing speaking with tutors since I had concentrated on learning to read up to that point.

In future posts I will talk about some of the tools, books, etc. I have used so far. I will be concentrating on electronic resources such as apps and books since it is still much harder to find graded readers as ebooks.

CAIS/ACSI 2011

This year CAIS was in Fredericton with Congress 2011. I like having CAIS as part of the Congress, even though I haven't actually been to any other association's sessions in a few years.

Congress was jointly sponsored by the University of New Brunswick and St. Thomas University, both in the same area. I stayed at the St. Thomas residences, which were actually off campus, but there was a walking path to campus.

I presented a poster in CAIS' inaugural poster session on the subject of tagging and controlled vocabularies. Here's a link to the poster abstract: http://www.cais-acsi.ca/proceedings/2011/24_Kipp.pdf

Here are some photos from Congress: a view of campus, the NB Provincial Archives and the Harriet Irving Library where most of the CAIS sessions were held. The photo doesn't really do justice to the campus which is quite hilly.

CAIS and ASIST 2010

This year I attended two conferences: CAIS/ACSI (Canadian Association for Information Science) Conference and ASIST (American Society for Information Science and Technology) Annual General Meeting.

CAIS was in Montreal this year, at Concordia. I had been to conferences at McGill and Montreal before, but had never been to Concordia. I also never realised Concordia was so close to McGill.

At CAIS, I presented a short paper:

Kipp, Margaret E.I. 2010. Patterns and Inconsistencies in Collaborative Tagging Systems: An Examination of Tagging Practices Over a Four Year Period. Proceedings of the 38th Canadian Association for Information Science, Montreal, QC, June 5-7, 2010. http://cais-acsi.ca/proceedings/2010/CAIS042_Kipp_final.pdf

Here are a few pictures from Montreal (cathedral, rental bike system).





ASIST was in Pittsburgh this year. I had never been to Pittsburgh before, except when transferring between flights, so the city was new to me. The hotel was right near the river.

The conference had a different structure this year which I both liked and disliked. I ended up liking the poster session because more people attended it (last year I was in the poster session on the last day which many people were forced to miss in order to make their flights) but did not like the organisation of the conference. Having the workshops midweek meant I was unable to attend since I am teaching face-to-face classes this term.

I presented 3 posters at ASIST including two posters co-authored with doctoral students.

Here is a list of the posters:

Kipp, Margaret E.I. and Joo, Soohyung. 2010. Application of Structural Equation Modelling in Exploring Tag Patterns: A Pilot Study. Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. [Best Poster Award ASIST 2010]

Lu, Kun and Kipp, Margaret E.I. 2010. Can Collaborative Tagging Improve Retrieval Effectiveness? -- An Experimental Study. Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.

Kipp, Margaret E.I. 2010. Convergence and divergence in tagging systems: An examination of tagging practices over a four year period. Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. http://eprints.rclis.org/19244/

The first poster in the list won the ASIST 2010 Best Poster Award.

Here are a few pictures from Pittsburgh:

ASIST 2009

This year ASIST was in Vancouver. Vancouver is of course busy preparing for the 2010 Winter Olympics so many olympic things are spread around the city. I walked around and looked at the many new eagle statues and the olympic rings in the harbour.





I presented two posters at the conference. The first was at the SIG-CR workshop pre-conference session and the second was in the 3rd poster session of the main conference. Considering it was the last day of the conference in the afternoon there were a fair number of people who came to view the posters.

Exploring Measures of Inter-Tagger Consistency. SIG-CR Workshop Poster, Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. http://eprints.rclis.org/17218/

Searching with Tags: Do Tags Help Users Find Things? Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. http://eprints.rclis.org/17348/

And of course the view on the flight out is good too...

Canoeing on the Ottawa River

Thesis: Defended

On July 20th I defended my thesis titled "Information Organisation Practices on the Web: Tagging and the Social Organisation of Information"



I wrote the entire thesis in OpenOffice on a Linux based computer and used Calc and OpenStat to do most of the calculations. I also used CiteULike to record my references. If nothing else, this certainly proves that OpenOffice is a full blown office suite.

The thesis is based on a series of conference and journal papers, so perhaps 50 or 60% of the material has already been published or presented at conferences. I thought the method worked well for an emerging phenomenon.

Baby Rabbit in the Grass