Still living...

I've been away a while, I know. Some updates:

The Harbaugh Deck Project has kind of fallen apart. We got about 1/3 of the way through, but life does get in the way. It's something I'd like to finish one day, but it isn't a priority right now.

Here's the priority: Taiwan. We've pretty much decided on Taipei for our destination for next year. I'll be there for maybe a year studying Chinese while my wife teaches English to support us (good of her, isn't it?). I'm hoping to study at Shida (國立台灣師範大學, or National Taiwan Normal University) or in the regular program at Taida (國立台灣大學, National Taiwan University). I'd love to be able to study in the ICLP program at Taida, since the professors I've spoken to recommend it almost unanimously, but it's a bit rich for my blood. I have a few (very few) contacts within Taiwan, and one friend of a former professor of mine (who is also a professor, of Chinese History no less) who I'm sure I could meet up with. Forumosa has been a very helpful resource, and I'm sure I'll get more active there the closer I get to next summer.

I'm working hard on my reading ability right now. I'll find a conversation partner or tutor closer to when we move, but I know the real improvement in speaking will come from living there. I've also recently begun to study Classical Chinese more seriously. I'm hoping to be able to dabble a bit in some original texts in my study of Chinese history. I found a pretty decent-looking public domain Classical Chinese textbook here. It has something like 83 lessons, starting with very simple phrases like 父言子曰，毋爲小人。 (A father said to his son, "Don't be a mean man.") The book was published in 1912, and focuses on the (then) current form of 文言, but there does seem to be some use of passages from the classics (Mencius, if I remember correctly). Each lesson has several (twenty-ish) sentences, followed by translations. Vocabulary is included, in (of course) Wade-Giles transcription. Due to this format, it is ideal for sentence mining, so I'm entering all the sentences into Anki. I like it so far.

Oh yes, speaking of Chinese history, I'd like to point out a site that I'm sure most are familiar with: the China History Forum. They have an interesting concept there: you can't make more than 30 posts until you pass an exam covering some Chinese history basics. It's open book and not timed, but at least you can expect most people there to have some understanding of the subject matter.

In other news (really, really awesome other news), Pleco is coming out with an OCR module for their iPhone software. You can basically point your camera at some text in a book and it will recognize and define the words. It looks amazing:

Pleco Chinese Dictionary Camera Recognizer Demo

Holy crap, eh? Also, they'll be releasing their first Classical Chinese dictionary for Pleco (古漢語大辭典), probably next summer. Great stuff. Mike Love said that the OCR module will hopefully be released this September.

OK, so there's the news-snippets-style update of what I've been up to. I probably won't update as often as I once did since I'm trying to devote more of my time to studying (I'm also learning to read French and Latin, which is going fairly well), but I'll pop back in every once in a while.