#now i should study spanish and do some research for my thesis

[smallfrenchstudyblr]

ahh i should have clarified that i myself don't have a degree (yet). i'm not from an academically inclined background so when i didn't do well in my first two semesters of university (i failed some classes and only barely passed others), i got very discouraged and saw it as a sign that university is just not for someone like me. i then learned a trade and have been working in the field; but i'm interested in going to university as a mature student and i'm going to apply this year for a BA :)

still, precisely because i don't have a degree it really upsets me that someone who used the chatGPT shortcut is a teacher now. teaching high school students is an academic profession, and it doesn't sit right with me how common it is for teachers to say things like "i learned so much useless stuff in university; none of which i need as a teacher"; it's actually really frustrating. then why do you go to university/become a teacher? ??? ????? (i mean i know why, because it pays well here.)

in our country, MA/MSc degrees are required for a lot of positions, so grad school isn't quite as "you're here because you choose to be" but still.. his sentiment is basically, since he teaches high school students it should just be sufficient to be able to teach them, what’s the point of a thesis? like ok with that sort of logic i could have been a teacher with just a high school certifcate. i think tbh there is a wider discussion here about how people just don’t value knowledge too.

he also later said that he sometimes regrets not just paying someone to write it for him and save himself a lot of time and trouble 💀to me that is just the epitome of being so full of yourself. he has just decided that he has what it takes to be a teacher and making him write a thesis is a waste of time because of that. lmao??

also I would like to point out that this guy is not my friend, just someone i met through a mutual friend (and they’re not exactly friends either, they work together💀) i talked about this with my friend and she said that he isn't even the first person she knows who has casually admitted to using chatGPT like this. i guess they feel emboldened to casually admit to cheating because they know that their peers won't report them because that would then make them look like snitches

i'm sorry about venting like this to you; i just remembered that you spoke about the chatGPT problem before

Well first of all: fingers crossed for your BA applications !! Everyone got at their own pace, sometimes you need a few years to figure out how to best approach University!!

That is indeed upsetting that someone who does not value critical thinking and does not understand the point of research/research writing is teaching now. "I don't need it anyway/I did so much useless stuff at school/Uni" is such a dumb. dumb. Argument.

Like, I had to study German and Spanish and Latin and theology. I took the equivalent of AP biology and physics in school and learned how to use a soldering iron and identify rocks. I learned Roman Law, and company insolvency rules, and the procedure to contest a refusal to grant you a construction permit. During my PhD, I had to become proficient in advanced data-driven research methods and 2 different code languages. NONE OF THAT has anything to do with me job, whatsoever. I teach students about the International Court of Justice and some of them are Literature and History majors. I KNOW that their dazzling knowledge in embeddedness theories of international adjudication is NOT what will get them a job.

But it's not about the raw knowledge, it's about

1. Transferable skills: targeted reading, critical thinking, information gathering, writing for different audiences, time management, group work, self-reflection, project management, conflict resolution...

2. Learning how to learn: adapting to new situations, new rules and new logics; switching from one type of reasoning to another; picking up on new practices, new skills, as fast as possible, knowing how YOU best do that: on your own, with friends, listening, writing, visuals, with cues, independently, by teaching...

3. Putting your future work (and honestly, yourself as a person) in a broader context: knowing what the ICJ is to spot dumb and wrong info when you see it. Knowing that it MATTERS that we know different types of rocks, and therefore we should fund research on geology. Knowing quantitative research methods to know when they are used well and when it's bullshit. Knowing that Latin shaped some languages and not others, to understand the limits of translation itself. Knowing how 'generative' AIs work to understand that there is very little about them that is actually 'generative'.

I would evening argue that just being confronted with the sheer vastness of Things and Knowledge and Fields that are not yours has value in and of itself. It keeps you humble, aware that no matter how much you are knowledgeable on your one (1) thing, in the back of your mind, there is the knowledge that there is much, much knowledge you actually do not have and cannot claim to have. OR, in the wise words of Dan Olson on CryptoBros, to avoid being the kind of person that:

"assume that because they understand one complicated thing [...] all other complicated things must be lesser in complexity and naturally lower in the hierarchy of reality"

#this... was much longer than I intended it to be #no sorry for sending this in my askbox!

[tardis--dreams]

.

#round of applause for me for making myself eat two slices of toast #because i was getting dizzy because i hadn't eaten all day #because I'm too fucking lazy to even make food #or eat for that matter #becaue ugh #effort #... #i even took out the trash earlier :o #what a day #now i should study spanish and do some research for my thesis #but well #why don't i just keep sitting here for three more hours and do nothing

[everybodyscupoftea]

chemistry

isaac lahey x reader

isaac needs help in chemistry and you need help in english - the beginning

this is for isaac anon and the few people that wanted this. i’m just dabbling here, so let me know if you guys want more! (i did quite a bit of Research for this and i have ideas)

also let me know, i left it vague, but if i expand i’m probably going to add in scott, stiles, allison, and lydia. would you guys like to keep it supernatural or do full au where they’re just normal college students?

You noticed the boy in your Intro to Academic Writing course, but you didn’t really focus on him, mostly due to freshman year stress, until he sat down next to you in General Chemistry. Stepping into the classroom you’d felt at ease, science was your jam, but the really cute boy put you back on edge. You felt hyperaware of him, his scent, kind of cinnamon-y, fall-esque.

He tapped his fingers on his notebook, and you couldn’t help but notice he wrote in green pen. You glanced every so often to see him doodling in the corner of the page instead of taking notes on the intro lesson on the scientific method that your professor was doing.

The boy rested his chin on his hand and his fingers went from tapping on the notebook to his jaw and you shook your head, trying to focus back on the professor who was talking about your lab groups.

“The people at your table are in your group. Lab is on Wednesday nights, I won’t be the instructor, you’ll have a TA, but you can email me or come to my office hours if you have any questions about what’s going on. I’ll see you all on Thursday.”

You started to pack your stuff and the boy turned to you with a crooked grin, “I’m Isaac.”

Shaking his hand, you introduced yourself and he stood, waiting for you to finish packing your stuff. You zipped your booksack, “You’re in my English class, right?” you asked, faking as if you didn’t notice him as soon as you stepped into the door.

He nodded, “Yeah, with Dr. Terranova.”

“He seems,” you trailed off, looking for the right word, “interesting.”

Isaac grinned, “You mean overwhelmingly picky for an English 101 professor?”

“That’s a great way to put it,” you told him, laughing.

The two of you walked out the door and down the hall together. Isaac shifted his booksack on his shoulders a little and asked, “Do you have any more classes today?”

“Calculus,” you told him and he grimaced.

“Fuck that.”

“You?”

He nodded, “Spanish.”

Unfortunately for you, the buildings were on opposite ends of campus, so you paused just outside the door to the chemistry building. Isaac paused too and smiled, “See you tomorrow night?”

“See you tomorrow, Isaac.”

-

Your lab group was made up of two boys and two girls. Isaac, Andrew, Abigail, and you. Out of the group, you were the only STEM major, and the only one who actually liked chemistry. Isaac patted your shoulder, “Well, that officially makes you team captain then.”

“Thank god,” Abigail added, “I’m an advertising major, my brain noped out of the sciences years ago.”

The other guy, Andrew, said, “I took Chem 2 in high school and didn’t pass the AP exam, chemistry and I have beef.”

You snorted and said, “Cool, well, I’ll try and lead us to the promised land.” They seemed to like that.

-

Your group was really smart, everyone was picking up the labs really easily and you were thrilled, especially when the teacher stood in front of the class after the first test review. She clapped her hands once, “Okay, the lab group with the highest combined test average gets five bonus points added to their test scores. This is me trying to get you guys familiar with study groups, especially if you’re going to be in STEM, which I know some of you are. Study groups got me through school.”

Unfortunately, everyone in your lab group already had stuff going on, so you couldn’t study with them. Fortunately, the test was on intro stuff like the scientific method, conversions, and balancing equations, and your group hadn’t had any issues in any of the lab work, so you weren’t worried.

But when you got the test back, you realized, maybe you should’ve been. Isaac got his handed back first and actually laughed when he looked at the grade. Before you could ask, the professor set yours down on the desk and you started flipping through it, frowning at the little points you’d had taken off for careless mistakes.

“Fuck,” you muttered, “should’ve gotten at least a 97.”

“Wow, can’t believe you fucked it up for the whole group,” Isaac sarcastically responded, nudging you with his elbow, before sliding his test on top of yours. He nudged you again, “As you can see, I’m carrying the team,” and he motioned toward the D written in bright red at the top of his paper.

Your mouth dropped open and you picked the test up, flipping through to see what he’d missed. Eyebrows furrowed, you looked over at him, “You should tell her you accidentally skipped the back page.”

“Oh, it wasn’t an accident, I just didn’t know how to do it.”

“Well,” you stuttered, “it was the same stuff we did in the last lab activity.”

Isaac nodded, “Yes it is, and I didn’t understand it then either.”

“I thought,” you paused, mind racing, “I thought we all did?”

He grinned at you, “Some of us aren’t science brains, my friend.”

“What are you?” you asked as the class started to pack up.

With a soft smile, he threw his booksack over his shoulder, “I’m a literature major.”

-

You didn’t mean to think about it as much as you did, but when 2 a.m. rolled around and you were at your most impulsive you couldn’t stop yourself from sending out a text.

Hey, do you maybe want to meet up and study sometime?

After hitting send you could’ve slammed your head into a wall. You locked your phone and put your head in your hands, “God damnit.” And then your phone dinged.

I’d love that, love to have a STEM genius in my corner.

Your cheeks heated as you read it and your mind raced with your heart. It was beating harder and part of you couldn’t even believe he’d said yes. Taking a breath to steady yourself, you responded.

Idk about genius but I’m not half bad at chem

He responded, even faster than the first time and you grinned, unable to stop it from overtaking your face.

I may not know much about the scientific method or whatever, but all evidence suggests otherwise, genius

-

The next test wasn’t for a few weeks, but Isaac wanted to start studying earlier. He suggested meeting at a coffee shop called The Beanery. Coffee shops weren’t really your jam, you liked the silence of the fourth floor of the library. Go early, get a table, put in head phones, and go to work. But, you were open to try Isaac’s suggestion.

It was brightly lit when you walked in, and he was already there, at a table in the corner, laptop out. Books were spread across the tabletop, and he already had two empty mugs on the table in front of him, leg bouncing as he aimlessly chewed on a pen.

Shaking yourself out of staring, you walked to the counter to order. Isaac smiled up at you when you made it to the table with your coffee.

“Welcome,” he told you, moving some of his books out of the way. Sitting up straighter, Isaac glanced around, “What do you think about this place?”

“It’s nice, definitely a change of pace from my norm.”

“Where’s that then?”

“Library, fourth floor.”

“Quiet up there, huh?”

“Yeah, but I listen to some music for background.”

“I like coffee shops,” Isaac said, closing his laptop, “the vibes are nice and my clothes always smell like coffee afterward which is a fun bonus.”

At his comment, you looked down at his clothes. You were a little surprised to see that he was dressed just like during the week: jeans, a nicer t-shirt, and a cardigan. You’d wondered, deep down, if he dressed nicer for class, but it didn’t seem the case. Isaac cleared his throat and your eyes snapped to his face, ears burning when you saw him staring at you in amusement.

Coughing quietly, you reached for your booksack, “So, chemistry. Do you understand what we’ve been going over?”

“I know they’re called Bohr models but I don’t know anything else about them.”

“Right, so,” you paused a minute, trying to figure out where to start, “it’s a way to draw an atom and it’s kind of like a planet.”

Isaac leaned forward through your explanation, resting most of his weight on his elbows, and tapped the green pen against his lower lip. Every so often he’d ask a question, shift a little and write something down in his notebook by whatever he’d scribbled in class. His questions were shockingly insightful, and you eagerly answered them all.

By the time you’d gotten through the basics of thermodynamics, he’d added a whole page of notes, and you could tell he was starting to lose interest. Shutting your notebook, you told him, earnestly, “I hope this helped a little.”

“I promise,” he looked you straight in the eye, “it makes sense. This all looked like a foreign language before we met up.”

“Good,” you nodded, “this is my jam.”

“Keep on spreading it,” he joked and you couldn’t help but laugh.

“Well,” you admitted, “you may not be good at chem but you’d kick my ass into next week in English.”

“How’s your paper going?” Isaac asked, leaning back and crossing his arms, looking genuinely interested.

“It’s…going.”

He snorted, “That doesn’t sound promising.”

“Yeah neither does my thesis.”

“Do you have your laptop?”

“Yeah.”

“Let me have a look,” he suggested.

Pulling up the word doc, you passed your laptop over, staring down at your hands, twiddling your thumbs, a little nervously, as he read through your rough draft.

“What did Dr. Terranova have to say in your conference?” he asked, pushing your laptop away.

You sighed, “He was less than complimentary.”

Isaac laughed, “It’s not that bad, but it could use some polishing. I can help of course.”

Relief washed over you and you felt a weight off your shoulders, “That would be incredible actually.”

“There, now we’re even. You tutor me in chemistry and I’ll make sure you pass English, starting with this rough, and emphasis on rough, draft.”

Reaching across the table, you shoved at his hand, “Be gentle.”

“I’m going to get another chai,” he said, standing to stretch a bit, “and you pick out what sentence exactly you think is your thesis. We’ll start there.”

Biting your lip to conceal a grin, you nodded, waking your laptop back up.

#isaac lahey #isaac lahey x reader #isaac lahey fanfiction #teen wolf #teen wolf fanfiction #college isaac

[dear--charlie]

Dear Charlie,

It’s been a while. I know. I’m sorry. I hope you are okay, that you are healthy and that your loved ones are okay too.

I was feeling better, genuinely. Even with a global pandemic and despite the fact that I have not hugged my girlfriend in a year, I feel better. Happier, somehow. I think it’s because I told my parents about A. They took it pretty well considering the fact that I kept it from them for more than two years and that my dad is quite homophobic - turns out he is not when it’s about his own flesh and blood. I don’t know if I told you that I told them. But here you go.

Did I tell you that I started dance classes again? Well due to Covid they stopped again, like in march. I miss it. They usually keep me sane. Now, since yesterday, I feel like I am going crazy. I finished my last exam but I still have to work on my thesis. Mind you, I even applied for an Erasmus Mundus, Glasgow, Aarhus and Barcelona, maybe even Vancouver are the cities I would live in for six months each more or less. It sounds really interesting but it’s so expensive. In some weeks they tell me if I’m admitted to the scholarship. If I don’t get that scholarship, paying might get tricky. I am looking for apartments right now and I found one I really like. It’s around 50cm2, has a kitchen/living room, a bathroom, a room and a tiny room. It looks amazing but it’s expensive. Then again, it’s cheaper than anything else I saw. It’s 400 000€, when all the others started at 600 000€. Housing situation in Luxembourg is hell. It’s so expensive. The apartments I went to take a look at aren’t even in a central region. They are all on the countryside and so so so expensive. Did you know that for an apartment that size in the capital you nearly pay a million? In other countries you get an entire house for that prize, but hey… that’s life I guess. Well, when I saw this particular apartment, I fell in love. And if everything goes right, I will buy it and borrow money at the bank, hello depts for 15 years, but hey I’m only 22. I saw the apartment and I imagined A living there with me. We have talked about names for children and Samira or Alia are the ones we stuck with. What do you think of those? I know they aren’t typical names and if I’m not wrong they have arabic and/or hindu origines, but we fell in love with them. We’d like to adopt a girl, but there are many procedures until that can happen. She will probably move in with me as soon as we both finish our studies. We want to marry. Who would have thought that? It makes me genuinely happy and the distance has made us stick together even more.

I also finished my internship with the extra third graders. It was exhausting but I miss the kiddos. They turned out to be great as soon as I found out how to handle each of them and their extra behaviour. Some of them told me they wanted me to be their teacher till the end of the year. I nearly cried when I heard that, but hey, I held back the tears.

Not-Rose and I are sometimes talking, I am on friendly terms with Sally again, and I just completely dropped the 9. Lena is distant (yea, we share that name, I’m not talking about my secret alter ego) and never wants to do anything. I told Laura and Daniel about A too. They took it well. And Lisa is like always. They are my friends I guess. But I don’t think we will stay in touch after uni. We just don’t have many things in common and some of their thoughts and ideas are… quite challenging for me. I don’t want to say they are utterly stupid, but they kind of are dunderheads. I love them though, I just don’t feel like we have a lot in common. I hope the Glasgow will accept me… because that Masters degree would give me a chance to work in a higher field, maybe even research, so that I can bring about the change I strive for. Sometimes I do feel weird for telling you all of this. I’m sorry for oversharing (if it’s bothering anybody).

Oh, also, I cleaned my emails (went from 6000 to 120, huge, huh?) and I stumbled upon some form my Spanish teacher (2014-2017) The way I wrote made me cringe, but her messages were kind. I think she is one of the people who made me change for the better. A is too. And me changing my way of thinking and being more open. It think it has helped me improve a lot. I reached out to a therapist for my dermatillomania and have an appointment in march. It’s public therapy and they have long waiting periods, but at least I reached out. Right?

I wrote the TOEFL again and the DELE C1, I hope to get my results soon. The DELE is taking 3 months already, and TOEFL should arrive in about 5 days. I think I did good. I hope well enough to be admitted at a university in Madrid if they don’t take me for the Erasmus Mundus programme.

You know what? Writing to you always makes me feel serene. I’m calm right now. Freya Ridings’ Lost Without You is my company and I am okay. Yesterday I wasn’t. A’s mom might have cancer… and it might be spreading. She was destroyed and I wanted to help but I don’t even know when the next flight are going to Spain from here… I mean, there are flights, but what if no plane flies back and I am stuck there with uni starting again here… I cried. Because of her and her mother and because some days ago she asked me to read to her out of my “Essays” (aka the crap I have been writing on my phone since 2015, which mostly is utterly depressing and consists of the things I don’t really tell people. That, and some letters to you, that is. And she asked me to read the bad parts about her to her… so I did. And oh I hated myself for those words. She is okay with them, says they make her learn what to do and how to improve, but I felt like a huge a**hole because those things were not fair towards her. I was so deep into my own misery that I didn’t realize how bad I was treating my girlfriend, even though it was only on the screen and my head. That’s too much. After reading some to her, she had to leave, and I read through the entire 268 pages again and deleted every single bad thing I ever wrote about her. That didn’t make the bad feeling go away though.

I’m sorry for having written so much. It’s just been a while. I truly hope you and everybody reading through my thoughts is okay (and hey, thanks for having read until here, I know it was a lot this time).

Be safe,

Love always,

Lena.

P.S. Listen to Daughter (“Tomorrow”, “Youth”, or whatever really. The band is great and has been my company for a loooong while now)

(22.01.2021, 11:09h)

#dear charlie #Lena.

[randomnumbers751650]

Long, unedited text in which I rant about comparative mythology, Joseph Campbell and his monomyth,

Back in 2012 I wanted to improve my fiction writing (and writing in general, because in spite of nuances, themes and audience, writing a fiction and a nonfiction piece shouldn’t be that different) and thus I picked a few writing manuals. Many of them cited the Hero’s Journey, and how important it became for writers – after all Star Wars used and it worked. I believe most of the people reading this like Star Wars, or at least has neutral feelings about it, but one thing that cannot be denied is that became a juggernaut of popular culture.

So I bought a copy of the Portuguese translation of The Hero of a Thousand Faces and I fell in love with the style. Campbell had a great way with words and the translation was top notch. For those unaware, The Hero of a Thousand Faces proposes that there is a universal pattern in humanity’s mythologies that involves a person (usually a man) that went out into a journey far away from his home, faced many obstacles, both external and internal, and returned triumphant with a prize, the Grail or the Elixir of Life, back to his home. Campbell’s strength is that he managed to systematize so many different sources into a single cohesive narrative.

At the time I was impressed and decided to study more and write in an interdisciplinary research with economics – by writing an article on how the entrepreneur replaces the mythical hero in today’s capitalism. I had to stop the project in order to focus on more urgent matters (my thesis), but now that I finished I can finally return to this pet project of mine.

If you might have seen previous posts, I ended up having a dismal view of economics. It’s a morally and spiritually failed “science” (I have in my drafts a post on arts and I’m going to rant another day about it). Reading all these books on comparative mythology is so fun because it allows me for a moment to forget I have a degree in economics.

Until I started to realize there was something wrong.

My research had indicated that Campbell and others (such as Mircea Eliade and Carl Gust Jung, who had been on of Campbell’s main influences) weren’t very well respected in academia. At first I thought “fine”, because I’m used to interact with economists who can be considered “heterodox” and I have academic literature that I could use to make my point, besides the fact my colleagues were interested in what I was doing.

The problem is that this massive narrative of the Hero’s Journey/monomyth is an attempt to generalize pretty wide categories, like mythology, into one single model of explanation, it worked because it became a prescription, giving the writer a tool to create a story in a factory-like pace. It has checkboxes that can be filled, professional writers have made it widely available.

But I started to realize his entire understanding of mythology is problematic. First the basics: Campbell ignores when myths don’t fit his scheme. This is fruit of his Jungian influences, who claim that humanity has a collective unconsciousness, that manifest through masks and archetypes. This is the essence of the Persona games (and to a smaller extent of the Fate games) – “I am the Shadow the true self”. So any deviation from the monomyth can be justified by being a faulty translation of the collective unconsciousness.

This is the kind of thing that Karl Popper warned about, when he proposed the “falseability” hypothesis, to demarcate scientific knowledge. The collective unconsciousness isn’t a scientific proposition because it can be falsified. It cannot be observed and it cannot be refuted, because someone who subscribe to this doctrine will always have an explanation to explain why it wasn’t observed. In spite of falseability isn’t favored by philosophers of science anymore, it remains an important piece of the history of philosophy and he aimed his attack on psychoanalysis of Freud and Jung – and, while they helped psychology in the beginning, they’re like what Pythagoras is to math. They were both surpassed by modern science and they are studied more as pieces of history than serious theorists.

But this isn’t the worst. All the three main authors on myths were quite conservatives in the sense of almost being fascists – sometimes dropping the ‘almost’. Some members of the alt-right even look up to them as some sort of “academic’ justification. Not to mention anti-Semitic. Jung had disagreement with Freud and Freud noticed his anti-Semitism. Eliade was a proud supporter of the Iron Guard, a Romanian fascist organization that organized pogroms and wanted to topple the Romanian government. Later Eliade became an ambassador at Salazar’s Fascist Portugal, writing it was a government guided by the love of God. Campbell, with his hero worship, was dangerously close to the ur-fascism described by Umberto Eco (please read here, you won’t regret https://www.pegc.us/archive/Articles/eco_ur-fascism.pdf).

“If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled as New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine and Stonehenge – that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism.”

Campbell did that a lot. He considered the Bible gospels and Gnostic gospels to be on the same level. Any serious student, that is not operating under New Age beliefs and other frivolous theories like the one that says Jesus went to India, will know there’s a difference between them (even Eliade was sure to stress the difference).

But Campbell cared nothing for it. He disliked the “semitic” religions for corrupting the mythic imagination (which is the source of his anti-Semitism), especially Judaism. When I showed him describing the Japanese tea ceremony to a friend who’s minoring in Japanese studies, she wrote “I’m impressed, he’s somehow managed to out-purple prose the original Japanese”. So, it’s also full of orientalism, treating the East as the mystical Other, something for “daring” Westerners to discover and distillate.

What disturbed…no, “disturbed” isn’t the word that I need in the moment, but what made me feel uncomfortable is that, in spite of all his talk of spirituality, the impression I had of Power of Myth is that I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone more materialist than him. Not even Karl Marx, founder of the Historical Materialism, was as materialist as Campbell.

At one point in the book, he was asked if he believed in anything and he gave a dismissive reply and said “I want to get experiences.” A man who studied all the myths of the world available, apparently didn’t believe in anything. Is that what spiritual maturity is? A continuous flux of experiences? Being taken by some sort of shamanistic wind like a floating plastic bag?

In nowhere in the interview he talked about virtues. In rebellion with his Catholic childhood, he said that we should go to the confessionary and say “God, I’ve been such a good boy”. Any cursory reading of the Gospel would say otherwise. Wasn’t this exactly Pharisee’s prayer in Luke 18:9-14? While the wasn’t the publican, who went with humility and asked for forgiveness, the one who walked out with an experience? And not only in Christianity, since in Tibetan Buddhism, a tulpa is something you have to kill, not foster like an imaginary friend like in some internet circles, contamined with this obsession with experiences.

The way I came to see Joseph Campbell as a man who was so stuck in his own world that nothing could move him out of it. All he wanted to do was this big experience, but in the end it’s as wide as the ocean, but shallow as a puddle. Even when Campbell speaks about having a “cosmic consciousness”, all that New Age jargon, claiming it’s about people discovering they’re not the center of the universe, it’s still so…self-servicing. It addresses a crowd so obsessed with experiences, but wants nothing to do with anything that requires compromise. He quotes the Hindu concept of maya, that life is an illusion, but I wonder how right he is about it.

I want to share this critique, by a researcher in comic studies: “We do not remember The Night Gwen Stacy Died because Gwen’s death reminds us of our own mortality, ‘the destiny of Everyman’, but because the story exposes the fragility of Spider-Man reader’s fantasies. Even icons can die.”

The exposition of the fragility of myths, especially the Hero’s Journey, never happens in Campbell’s work. It never talks about the potential of myths hindering entire societies, causing strife and causing people who can’t fit to become outcasts. Not even the cruel ones, like the Aztec death cult is treated as sublime, ignoring the fact that the Aztec neighbors helped to Spanish because they had enough of the Aztec myth.

I have changed my article. While I will still write on the hero entrepreneur, I’ll take a more critical view. The focus of the entrepreneur as an individual has many issues, because it ignores the role of public investment (necessary for high risk enterprises, like going to the moon or creating touch screens) and it treats with contempt the worked wage. Cambpell also treated with contempt the “masses”, who cannot be “heroes”. The theory on the entrepreneur is the same, treating the entrepreneur as a hero and the waged workers as lowlifes who have nothing to do, but to work, obey and be paid – to the point it feels like some economists treat strikes as crimes worse than murder. Not only that, but they can exploit the worker (see a book named “Do what you love and other lies about success and happiness”, it could be replaced with “Follow your bliss…”).

Campbell wrote in a time that there was no Wikipedia. So his book was the introduction of myths to a lot of people. It helped it was well-written. He considering his approach apolitical, but it’s clear that’s it’s not exactly like that (though this is a reason why Jordan Peterson failed to become the next Campbell, since he’s also a Jungian scholar, but he tried to become a conservative guru and this was his downfall). And, nowadays, Campbell is still inevitable in the circles that his themes matter, unlike Freud and Jung. Read it, but be aware of its problems, because it has already influenced what you consume.

#my rants #this is just a rant #so don't take it as a final word #sources can be provided on request

[littleworldbigdreamsblog]

Intruders- Jessie Reyez (A Review)

Introduction

So from the first time I heard this song and watched the video I knew I had to write something on this. I have always loved Jessie Reyez, I even wrote one of my thesis papers about her song “Gatekeeper”. If I can find it I will definitely post it here. The topics that I will tackle with this one are quite heavy but it must be done. We will be looking at colonialism, the manipulation of history and the personification of nature. 

The Artist 

My girl Jessie Reyez has been making music people have been afraid to make and I will say something I don’t say often; she is so underrated. I wish more people knew about her and the messages she convey in her lyrics. Her voice is also so unique and she sings with so much passion and conviction. I have watched so many live performances of hers and I haven’t been disappointed so far. If you have never heard of Jessie Reyez I do encourage you to give her music a listen. Also she has a new album out called “Before Love Came to Kill us”, stream that ish everywhere.  

Song 

Listen here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVhqNnFh25E

So in most of Jessie’s lyrics she does this very interesting thing which again I wish more people talked about. The lyrics of her songs usually create a meta narrative. This just means that there is a main story which possesses a message or a world view within another story. For instance using “Intruders” as an example it reads like a love letter and sounds like a love song. I was casually browsing the comments on some lyrics sites for this song and a lot of people just saw the song as her saying that the man is hers and these “intruders” or other females don’t belong within their relationship. Absolutely nothing is wrong with seeing the lyrics as that alone but if you dig deeper paying special attention to certain words, you would see that this song is a lot more than what meets the eyes or ears. That is where the concept of the meta narrative comes into play. The story we read or hear on one level is a love story and the main story is about land being taken. People who would have done a little history even secondary school history know there is a term for such actions:colonialism. For a little recap National Geographic explains it to be when “one nation subjugates another, conquering its population and exploiting it, often while forcing its own language and cultural values upon its people”. If you watched the music video you would see more physical representations of colonialism which I will get into but for now we are looking at the words and what they say. 

From the first set of lines in the song there is reference to the original natives of whatever colonized land she is writing about, “I found ya, cleared land /  Put down my flag /This is mine from now on”. As someone from the Caribbean I immediately thought of the Amerindians of the greater Antilles. These Amerindians or Indigenous people are known to be the original settlers of the Caribbean and possibly that of America. There were some studies done to try and track where these people came from and the results varied. Some researchers claimed they came from the Amazon while others said the DNA found from bones matched that of  people from Asia. Wherever they traveled from they are the known first civilization of people to inhabit these lands. Just those opening lines say a lot as it relates to theme and it is amazing how much just a few lines can say.      

There are other pieces of evidence of this song alluding to a telling of the colonization of native lands and people. In the second verse she sings “ I wrote you a love song /A war song/ I'll sing it when the ships come, yeah / I'll die for my state” which paints the picture of the natives standing together as the ships of the foreigners arrive willing to die for their land. And that is exactly what happened. Some assimilated while the ones who rose up were killed like animals. It was an act of genocide and historical records tend to see it another way. These records refer to the Amerindian settlements as pre-history which is incorrect as pre-history implies that the colonization of the land is the main or more important part of history when all of it is our history. This is what I meant by the manipulation of history. Just like there is evidence ie artifacts and relics as proof of the Europeans “discovering” the land, there is also evidence of the first settlers. It was a fully structured civilization which involved the tools they used, the type of agriculture grown and even their burial rituals and customs.  So therefore we cannot and should not see it as pre-history. For instance, growing up in the Caribbean, history was taught according to a British curriculum.It was only when I got older and more educated that I realised how biased it was. it was framed to make the Europeans look like our saviours. No sir! 

Video 

So the music video is a visual representation of this message or meta narrative that the song has. The video starts with a kind of Pocahontas like colours of the wind vibe with the main character worshiping the land. The land itself is personified as a man. Personification is giving more of less inanimate objects human-like features. The main character is using every part of the land to live and at the same time not harming it. 

It is a relationship that functions in harmony..... 

......until the fire nation attacked....I mean colonizers.

I feel like the Toronto-based studio, Solis Animation really studied the lyrics of the song and were able to create a video that works with the true meaning. Actually with both meanings of the the meta narrative. It functions as painting a picture of a love story but also one that shows an aspect of history that some people gloss over, that is, colonialism. I mean you can’t get clearer about what this video is really about. Even taking a look at what the colonizers were wearing. The uniforms were very similar to that of either the English or Spanish military like the colour scheme and the shape of the hats.  

 I also think it is important to note that all the people who came off the ships were female. This ties back to the part of the song that infers that it is about a love story. It is to mean that the intruders in the video while describing European colonizers, are also symbolizing the other women that would want to enter the relationship.  

As the good parts of the land were personified we also saw what happens when land is pillaged and destroyed, mainly how it bleeds. This heavily reminded me of the poem by Eric Roach called “Carib and Arawak” from his book The Flowering Rock. The poem really speaks about the land remembering the history of the genocide of the indigenous people of the Caribbean in particular the Caribs and Arawaks of Trinidad and Tobago. The poem highlights the concept of the flowers (hibiscus) grown on the land after colonial times being a reminder of the blood and death that occurred on the land. The hibiscus because of their original and true colour being red, it symbolizes how the land is bleeding out of revenge of the past.  I absolutely love this poem and if you have an interest in reading it, message me as I know it is almost impossible to find online.     

In these couple of frames we also see that she is willing to fight for her lands. This time marking herself with the blood of her home on her way to defend it. This shows the fighting spirit of the natives in order to protect their home. Based on historical accounts and records it states that some natives were peaceful and ready to cooperate until they were betrayed and they felt the need to reclaim their home.   

I believe we have come to the end of analyzing this piece of art. As someone from the Caribbean I really appreciated the way this video was put together. It emphasizes a part of our history which is sometimes buried and lost. It took a little longer to pull together not only because of the the research but also things going on in real life. I hope you learned something from reading this and if you feel like you can educate me some more on the topic feel free! 

References: 

Lyrics : https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/jessiereyez/intruders.html

What is Colonialism? : https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/topics/reference/colonialism/

Where Native Americans came from: https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/where-native-americans-come

Eric Roach-https://www.peepaltreepress.com/authors/eric-roach

All gifs : https://giphy.com/channel/BobbieSan

#jessie reyez #intruders #jessiereyezintruders #colonialism #amerindian #music video review #song review

[uncivilengineering]

What Kind of Two Years Has it Been

At the end of an experience, and therefore a blog, I usually write a reflection on the experience. The Master's programme ended six years ago and due to life and procrastination and other excuses, I'm finishing this blog only now. But this delay has its advantages, because I know how the story ends and I can tell you what happened to the characters. So maybe, for the first time, this is truly an epilogue.

The journey to this program started in 2012. I was living in Germany and working as a consultant. I always knew I wanted to work first before continuing with any kind of education, because toward the end of undergrad, I had classes with grad students and the ones who had work experience before going back to school seemed to bring more to the experience from applying what they learned from the real world. As I researched Master's programmes, I focused my search in Europe because I was still paying off the loans for my Bachelor's degree. I Googled another program when the MIND programme turned up in the results. After a process of applying, obtaining references, phone interviews and traveling to Munich from Stuttgart to take the GRE in Germany (really), even though this is Europe, the choice came down to Humboldt University in Berlin, with a scholarship from the DAAD, and the MIND programme, with a scholarship from the European Commission. (Lappeenranta University of Technology in Finland takes a close third because I had a really, really pleasant scholarship interview with a very pleasant young man and sometimes I think about how my life might be different if I went there and studied Innovation Management instead.)

I'm sure there was a long decision process and I'm sure I spent a lot of time thinking about it, like most decisions. This all took place eight years ago and I cannot remember the salient details. But I can imagine that I felt like it was time to leave Germany, even though I love (LOVE) Berlin, and the appeal of having an adventure in two countries (I didn't yet know that Asia was on the table) was great. So I gave notice at the consulting firm, said goodbye to my friends in Stuttgart, (wrapped up my last performances as a roller skating Greek muse in the local military base's production of Xanadu - that's real) and moved to Sweden.

In the two years that ensued, I met the best people, took wild risks, had the best time, made my dreams come true and had the adventure I sought. I lived.

I lived in Sweden for a year and was inspired by their example of how to treat guests in your country. I had a job interview in a sauna in the winter and learned what gender equality in society might actually look like. After an application process, I had the opportunity to spend a semester in Thailand. In Thailand I learned how to get from the university to town (Bangkok) and back again. I hosted a cultural show that lasted for eight (or more?) hours. I felt closer to my mom than I had ever understood before. C pointed out that after the midterm exams, I have sat for exams on three continents. I celebrated my birthday at a German brewery in Bangkok. I saw Angkor Wat after the semester ended. I went to all the Disneylands in the world (at the time...back then, there were only 11 parks). I didn't stay long in Austria, but I was there long enough to experience a Buschenschank and run into visa problems. I also saw Carousel and Cabaret in German, and puzzled as to why it was an hour longer than Cabaret in English, which I saw soon after on Broadway. In Glendale I lived in a conference room turned into an ad hoc intern bullpen for four and a half months writing my thesis. I saw things I had been nearby my entire life but never dreamed of seeing in reality.

Blogs are cheesy and navel-gazey but I am glad I did it. I am glad that this and the Germany Part I blogs exist. Sometimes I will look at an old post because someone asked for a travel recommendation (for example), and I will discover something that I forgot. I didn't remember that I was contacted by Swedish public radio to talk about the 2012 United States election. I forgot I had this conversation at NASA JPL about living in Germany. So what's the moral of this paragraph? If you can't blog, at least journal. You think you will remember the exciting things that happen in your day to day life but the truth is, you won't. I am proof!

What happened to everyone? Some stayed in Europe. Some went home. Some went home in Europe. Some got married. Some had babies. Some moved to Amsterdam. Many stayed in Sweden. When I left C, she wanted to stay in Italy. She has since worked her way up to an awesome job at a major company and had a baby! A has moved and is engaged to be married! I was happy to attend C's wedding in Ankara in 2015. I was happy to attend Z's wedding in Czechia last year, and to see my friends again at both.

What happened to me? I accepted an internship in Florida where I spent about five years (and made a bunch of new friends and had a bunch of good times) before moving back to the country where I left when this all started. To be honest, I never expected to be back. Not in this country. In 2017, I was fortunate to attend my class reunion in Leiden; it was also the celebration of the closing of the program. They invited all alumni back to watch the last class graudate. I met the newest generations of the program and saw a lot of old friends. It was just like old times. I came to the first afternoon of the organized program. I thought we would observe the new kids doing their work. No. We kicked off with a case exercise and divided into groups to discuss and then present our results. Our groups consisted of current students, alumni, professors and mentors. In Europe, we are all equal. It was just like old times.

The rest of the program consisted of lectures, discussions and watching the final presentations of the graduating class. Before I left for this trip, I joked that my master programme was ending because it lost funding (truth) from the European Commission because of Brexit (also true but I didn't realize it until I got there and they confirmed that Brexit was one of the factors that cut funding to the programme). There was a party the final evening. In the way that we do. I remember telling all my friends that it would be a very long time before I will see them again. I couldn't foresee an immediate excuse to get to Europe and hang out with them. The day I returned to work in Florida from the trip, I received an email about joining a project that is based in Germany. If I chose to accept this mission, I would have to move to Germany for a period of time. What.

I learned later that, basically, someone found out that I know German. (I promise that I have other skills.) When I was in high school, if you told me I was going to move to Germany, I would have said that you're crazy. I was just this nerd who went to Space Camp and really liked The West Wing and Saturday Night Live. If you told me I was going to move to Germany twice, I would have said, "Then why did I spend all this time learning Spanish?" (among other questions) I know that's true, because I did ask myself that in the first two months of intensive language school in 2010. But the truth is, Germany made things happen for me. When I talk to young people who (for some reason) ask for my advice, in addition to telling them to "follow your dreams," I also tell them the story of how moving to Germany (the first time) changed my life. (And then I tell them why so they know I'm not exaggerating.)

I couldn't refuse. I'm back in Germany. I'm working on getting better at German.

I should have seen this coming. The fall I moved to Sweden in 2012, I came back to Germany to celebrate Thanksgiving. During my Swedish spring, the squad from Germany came to visit Sweden and I put in my tea and hairspray requests (from dm, of course). After my thesis defense in 2014, my first destination was Nuremberg to see E, then on to Quakenbrück to wait with C who was finishing her defense. I attended S's wedding in Leipzig in 2015. I went to Oktoberfest in Munich in 2016. The point is, I cannot stay away from Germany. This is evident and not a surprise.

So far, I have been fortunate that this opportunity has allowed me to meet up with so many friends. A and M are in Amsterdam and have introduced me to Y and T, who are also in the MIND network. S is back in Oslo from Thailand. A is in London. S has moved from Stuttgart to Berlin. A and P and B and K and E are in New York. I still cite the meal in Haarlem (note that's Haarlem in the Netherlands, not Harlem, but I can see why you might be confused because I just mentioned New York) as the best I've ever had and J told me that the restaurant has received a Michelin star since 2014 when we were there so now it's overpriced and overrated. So funny! At Z's wedding in Czechia last year I was happy to reconnect with A, B and M. Everyone else, I'm coming for you! (And I mean that in the creepy way!)

What's going to happen next? Let's find out! Thank you for reading and joining the adventure.

Good night, have a pleasant tomorrow and see you in the future!

Lauren

[oko-ideas]

My Journal: My Journey

Week 1: Wednesday, September 4, 2019

The more you know the more you know you don’t know - Aristotle

 I arrived in Canada on August 10, 2019 and had been looking forward to another exciting chapter in my education. The first class for this course GSE 510: Academic Reading and Writing was on September 4, 2019. As I made my way to the campus I kept wondering what the personality of the lecturer would be. Charismatic? Assertive? Friendly disposition? I found out it was an online course once I arrived at Nicholls room 310. Together with a group of 11 confused students we huddled around the two computers in the room for the class. Luckily for us a colleague was able to set up the big screen in the class just as the lecturer, Professor Mitchel Mc Lamon-Silk started teaching. There were initial issues with sound and feedback from the class but eventually the class ended successfully and we were generally introduced to the course. As I made my way out of Bishop’s University on my way home that night, these words kept ringing a bell in my years: “Remember how you entered; be proud of how you leave”. I just learned a new word on day one: epistemological! 😊😊 Allons-y!

 Week 2: Wednesday, September 14, 2019

There is only one good…knowledge and only one evil…ignorance- Socrates

I completed reading the preface and chapter 1 of Giltrow. A bit difficult to digest at times but I have the impression that this is the time for me to ask probing questions and take risks as I prepare to apply the necessary academic and non-academic pieces. The online class started with minimal technical hitches. Style and genre were the key areas of discussion. My colleagues gave different ways they understood style and genre but in my opinion genre determines the style to be used when writing. For example, I can post classified advertisements online or in the print media without using a dictionary, thinking about margins, spacing, font size or use of abbreviations. Practically free style. I was in a group with Todd, Kim, David and Gretchan and we had to put in practice what we just learnt about genre form chapter one. We wrote a hotel review which gave us an opportunity to use a humoristic yet mundane style to complete the review. Another interesting class. 😎 Genial!

  Week 3: Wednesday, September 18, 2019

“There is no method of knowing when one has reached the truth, or when one is closer to it than before.” Rorty, 1983

My understanding of academic writing and reading is gradually getting clearer. I spent hours reading Cleo H. Cherryholmes’s piece on academic writing in preparation for the class. I am also beginning to get a grasp of the academic community’s code of writing and the textual complexity I have to grapple with especially when reading most of the reading materials for the course. For example supporting arguments raised in research findings, questioning or challenging others and raising new areas of interest for discussion.  

Another area which has not generally attracted my attention over the years is the prevalence of patriarchy across many literary genres and the implicit or explicit gender bias towards feminism during my reading. The linguistic privilege of the masculine for in French, Spanish and English grammar is well known but can anything be done about it in the 21st century? Are researchers adequately addressing these issues? 🤓

I can still recollect one of my former French lecturers (from France) when I was in college who always had a slogan during grammar lessons...”en grammaire l’homme est fort” (The man is strong in grammar). 💪 From a historique perspective, the Académie Française, the pre-eminent French council for matters pertaining to the French language was officially established in 1635. Since it was established it has had 732 member out of which only a paltry 9 have been women. A clear case of androcentrism perpetuated for centuries not only in the French language but in other romance languages.

References.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Académie_française

https://youtu.be/NwI79Gcbq3s

Amusez-vous! 👩‍👩‍👧‍👦

Week 4 : Wednesday, September 25, 2019 Audience

I  started reading chapter 4 before  the class...quite long. I  gathered that social routines make it easier for  us to communicate primarily because  we  are  familiar with our audience. However, how do we  define audience? This is  what  we  discussed  in our  group.  We did  not come out with a clear definition but we all agreed  an audience is  the recipient  of a specific  message. This discussion additionally took us  back  to the relationship between genre and audience. 

Week 5: Wednesday, October 2, 2019. Coloring Epistemologies

Patti Lather’s text on paradigm proliferation was difficult to read so I had to read it twice before understanding her arguments and her message. She argued that researchers should have the ability to navigate the constantly changing landscape of educational research. Additionally, she called for an understanding and tolerance of diverse epistemological perspectives and methodologies, especially in the field of education. She referred to this as an “epistemology of emancipation”. I strongly believe in this call to move educational research in many different directions in the hope that more interesting and useful ways of learning would eventually emerge. This is a reflection of Giltrow chapter 3 which encourages writers to take a position as they write. I look forward to doing just this in my academic writing.

Week 6:Wednesday, October 9, 2019

Scholarly styles and the discursive I.

“Writing in the first person helps to make clear the author's role in constructing rather than discovering the story/knowledge.” ― Gayle Letherby , Feminist Research in Theory and Practice.

My main topic of interest for the week was scholarly styles and the discursive I. Reading some of the scholarly texts for this course has been challenging especially with reference to Patti Lather and the contextual complexity of her writing. This scholarly style of writing tends to be exclusionary and elitist in my opinion. Trying to derive meaning from such material can be painstaking, challenging and frustrating sometimes especially if I have to consult a dictionary every few minutes. 

Oko: after reading Patti Lather...

Another scholarly style which can be difficult to read is agentless writing or heavily nominal sentences. Noun phrases or noun strings bear a heavy load and can easily lead to ambiguity and the loss of meaning especially to the average reader looking for simple information.

There appears to be divided opinions with regard to the use of the discursive I. However, I strongly believe that writers in the scholarly style should be allowed to have some latitude in the use of the discursive I.  I believe that the absence of this technique erases elements of identity, the ability to predict or forecast based on the writer’s personal experience or observation. 

All these points discussed will help shape my writing style as I keep my audience in mind throughout the period of my academic writing at Bishop’s.

WEEK 7: OCTOBER 16, 2019

RHETORICAL TECHNIQUES: ETHOS, PATHOS, LOGOS.

The use of rhetorical devices such as ethos, pathos and logos was one of the important topics of the week. In addition to the video we watched in class, this video I uploaded even makes it easier for me to understand the use of these three techniques in writing or in speeches. Another important take from this week is the technique for citation in academic writing. It was an area I always found tricky and challenging but I am now ready to explore the technique to make my writing acceptable at the graduate level. I especially appreciate the way Prof Mitchell took his time to walk the class through the appropriate steps when citing in academic writing using a chapter from his PhD thesis. Bravo Monsieur! 🥇🥇

Reading the text, “A kind word for Bullshit” was fun. 😂😂Probably the most interesting article about academic writing I’ve ever read. So is academe the mother lode of bullshit? Is academic writing bullshit of the worst kind? Is bullshitting a male genre? And is the aim of academic writing to ex-communicate certain readers? I will ponder over these questions for a long time. 

Based on the importance of this week’s class and reading I will have another look at my Critical Response paper and make amendments and corrections. The learning process and consolidation of different writing genres is becoming more and more practical to me.

WEEK 8: WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2019.

The greatest of all pleasures is the pleasure of learning- Aristotle.

More on rhetorical concepts and writing tips.

After weeks of classes, head scratching, reading and assignments, the chips of academic writing are finally falling in place for me. This is another important week in the process of developing my writing skills even further. Last week was a pivotal point but the reinforcements this week have even added more ammo to my writing arsenal.

 Notable tips for this week 

1. Using short headings as I write

2. Supporting an argument I raised with detailed information, supported with citations.

3. Putting my unique and independent perspectives in my arguments.(Discursive I)

4. Citing other sources to support an argument (which I generally overlook).

5. Giving an account of something new I learnt in any reading.

6. Including the educational value of the text.

7.Avoiding sweeping generalizations.

8.Defining key terms when they first appear.

9. Staying within the word limit.

10. Taking APA very serious at all levels of my work. (My Achilles heel) 

With this in mind I realized I could have avoided several mistakes when I did my critical response assignment. I will certainly take everything I have studied so far into consideration as I go over my critical response paper and make the necessary improvements. 

Aristotle stated that the greatest of all pleasures is the pleasure of learning. It’s been a real pleasure for me as I have learnt so much within a relatively short period of time at Bishop’s and especially in all my three interesting courses  since the beginning of the semester. Prof Mitchel has been very patient and encouraging throughout this journey.  With this rich and insightful course on academic writing, I hope to continuously strive to maintain acceptable academic writing standards with my target audience in mind at all times. Hasta la vista...

[superlinguo]

Linguistics jobs -  Interview with a university course coordinator

I’ve known Colleen since we were both PhD students at The University of Melbourne. When I found out that she had also moved to La Trobe, it was lovely to have a friendly face around the place! Colleen has taken a slightly unusual, but increasingly common, lateral step; although she’s no longer working in linguist research she’s still working at a university and running courses. She kindly agreed to be interviewed about her work.

What did you study at university?

For undergrad I studied a BA (Languages) at Monash University (in Melbourne, Australia). I did a double major - Chinese and Linguistics. I also did a minor in Spanish to satisfy the "languages" part. Originally I wanted to work as a translator at the UN! When I realised that probably wouldn't work out, I pursued Linguistics for Honours. My thesis looked at the efficacy of using the first four formants of certain vowels to distinguish one speaker from another.

After Honours I got a job as a Research Assistant at The University of Melbourne in Otolaryngology (now Audiology and Speech Pathology). My PhD topic was a response to what I'd been hearing and experiencing in working with individuals using cochlear implants. I looked at the perception and production of some aspects of prosody in adolescents who had grown up with cochlear implants as their only hearing. What is your job?

I’m the Deputy Coordinator for the first year of a range of Allied Health Courses. There’s about 2000 students across six campuses, so it’s huge! I mainly look after those courses where the teaching involves external partners. There’s a lot to do around compliance and reporting for these third party teaching contracts. I also teach myself – I teach a Work Integrated Learning subject that’s open to all students from the College of Science, Health and Engineering. They go out on placement and we look at career management and how to utilize what’s learnt on placement out in the job market. I also teach an Industry Innovation subject that brings students together from all over the uni. They work in small teams to tackle wicked problems.

How does your linguistics training help you in your job?

A lot at The University of Melbourne because I'm still involved in research. At La Trobe it does help, particularly when you need to advise students who are struggling. I used to teach in the Master of Speech Pathology at the University of Melbourne and between that and Linguistics I've gained a wide perspective on what could be going on when someone is struggling in first year. Linguistics also helps in the subjects I teach at La Trobe. It's great to be able to provide very specific advice for students as to their writing and how to improve it. I also try to slip in activities on intercultural communication where I can. Do you gave any advice do you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?

I wish they had been more honest about studying languages (not linguistics) as a career. I realised after awhile that people born into bi- or multilingual households would be the ones landing the interpreter/translator jobs, although I don't regret studying languages. I think in general I would have appreciated some advice re jobs that you could go onto with Linguistics. I'm assuming they're better at that now but we really received no career advice at all. For those doing PhDs I think we do well on the research training side, but not so well on the careers side, both in talking about potential industries you could go into and about what a career in academia actually entails. 

Any other thoughts or comments?

I'd like to say something about how Linguistics is so undervalued but I'm not sure how to put it. I feel like perceiving, producing, communicating is something so fundamental that linguistics should be a standard part of everything!

Previously:

Interview with a Communications Consultant

Interview with a Linguistic Project Manager at a Language Tech Company

Interview with a Data Scientist

Interview with a Librarian

Interview with a Text Analyst

Check out the Linguist Jobs tag for even more interviews

#linguistics #linguistics jobs #lingjobs #linguist #linguist jobs #job #jobs #career #work #academia #altac #academic

[bitchingteacheressay671]

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NaNoWriMo ‘17 Day 16 - Behind the Mask

Day 01   Day 02   Day 03   Day 04   Day 05   Day 06   Day 07   Day 08 Day 09   Day 10   Day 11   Day 12   Day 13   Day 14   Day 15   Day 16 Day 17   Day 18   Day 19   Day 20   Day 21   Day 22   Day 23   Day 24 Day 25   Day 26   Day 27   Day 28   Day 29   Day 30

Summary: Stan finds out a secret.  Based on this, suggestion from @darfichihrenhundstreicheln.  [West Coast Outcasts AU] Word count: 2003

               Stan walked into the apartment he shared with his twin and Fiddleford. Like he had hoped, Fiddleford was at the kitchen table, idly perusing a dog-eared cookbook.  Stan sat down next to him.

               “There you are, Fiddlesticks,” Stan said.  Fiddleford sighed.  

               “At this point, I don’t know if it’s worth it to keep correctin’ ya on my name.”

               “Probably not,” Stan said cheerfully.  “I’ve got a question for you.”

               “Shoot,” Fiddleford said, putting the cookbook down.

               “Where did your sister learn to disarm a man with a gun?”

               “Wait, Angie can do that?” Fiddleford asked.  

               “You don’t know?”

               “No, I don’t!  This is the first I’ve heard of it!”  

               “Dammit.  Then you probably don’t know where she learned how to do that,” Stan said, disappointed.  

               “No, I do not.”  Fiddleford ran a hand through his hair.  “How do ya know she can do that?”

               “I just saw her do it.”

               “Really?!”

               “Yeah.  We got cornered by some…people, and when they tried to grab her, she took ‘em down like they were pins at a bowling alley.”

               “She’s not that good at bowling,” Fiddleford said, leaning back in his chair.  “Better analogy would be takin’ ‘em down like ducks in huntin’ season.”

               “Does the metaphor really matter here?” Stan demanded.

               “Analogy.”

               “Fiddlesticks, focus.  Your little sister handled three men twice her size, with guns, and no one got hurt.  Except for the guys with the guns.”

               “Yeah, that’s strange,” Fiddleford said softly.  “I mean, I knew she was takin’ self-defense classes, but-”

               “You mean the boxing lessons Ford’s been giving her?  Dude.  Do you really think Ford coulda taught her to take down armed criminals?  She hadta have learned this stuff somewhere else.”

               “That’s a fair point.  But I don’t know where.”

               “I thought you talk to her.”

               “She don’t tell me everything in her life.  Heck, Stanley, you talk to her, too, and she didn’t tell ya.”

               “Angie gets weird around me.  Today, when she was kicking ass, that was the first time she hasn’t been all quiet and nervous in front of me.”

               “Ya don’t say,” Fiddleford muttered, suddenly opening the cookbook again and looking at the recipes with renewed interest.  Stan frowned.

               “Do you know why she acts weird around me?”

               “I might, but if I do, I ain’t tellin’ ya,” Fiddleford said shortly. Stan huffed and crossed his arms, slouching in his chair.

               “Dammit.”  The front door opened.  “Sixer, that you?”

               “Yes,” Ford said, joining the two men in the kitchen.  He set a backpack on the kitchen table.  “Whew, today was a long day of meticulous work on my thesis.”

               “Hey, you’re pretty close to Fiddlestick’s little sister,” Stan said. “How come she knows how to disarm someone with a gun?”  Ford froze. “You know something.”

               “Uh, no I- no I don’t,” Ford stammered.  “I insisted she watch some sci-fi films with me a while back, in exchange for watching some of her nature documentaries.  Maybe she picked it up from those.”

               “If that was true, you’d be able to do it, too.  And you can’t,” Stan said firmly.

               “You don’t know that for sure.”

               “Yeah, I do.”

               “…You’re right, I can’t,” Ford mumbled.  

               “Where’d she learn it, then?”

               “I already told you, I don’t know.”

               “You know somethin’,” Stan said.

               “I know nothing!” Ford said, beginning to get visibly flustered. “Well, about this particular situation. I know many things.”

               “Why are ya so stressed and upset?” Fiddleford asked.  He cocked his head in a concerned manner.  “This ain’t the Spanish Inquisition.”

               “Speak for yourself,” Stan muttered.

               “I- I’m a grad student,” Ford said.  “My natural state is stress.”  He grabbed his bag from the table.  “I…I’ve got to go!”

               “You just got home!” Stan said.

               “More research needs my attention,” Ford said, already halfway to the door.

               “But you said that you spent the whole day-”  The door slammed shut.  “And he’s gone.  Damn,” Stan said.  “He knows something.  He’s got stress from his work or whatever, but that’s different.  That’s lying stress.”  Stan looked at Fiddleford.  “You can see it in shitty liars.”

               “Fascinating,” Fiddleford said dryly.  He paused.  “Hang on, I’ve seen Angie get that way sometimes, too.  When I ask her how she got a bruise, or why she’s late, or what’s makin’ her so dang tired all the time.”

               “They’re both lying,” Stan said, leaning against the table and steepling his fingers.  “But what are they lying about?”  Fiddleford shrugged.

               “So long as it don’t harm anyone, I don’t see the point in pokin’ ‘round. They’re adults.  They can have their secrets.”

               “Geez, Fiddlesticks, where’s your curiosity?  Your irresistible urge to stick your nose in other peoples’ business?”

               “Look, I ain’t goin’ to go messin’ with whatever those two are up to. They’re grad students.  They’re liable to explode at any given moment,” Fiddleford said.  “You can look into it, if’n ya want, but I won’t.”

               “Fine,” Stan said.  He stood up. “I’ll get involved in things that don’t concern me on my own.”

----- 

               “Look, Carl, I’m sure we can resolve this in a way where everyone is happy,” Stan said, raising his hands in a placating gesture as he backed away. Carl glowered at him.  “…Or not.”  Stan reached for Angie’s arm, to shove her behind him, but Rodney beat him to it.

               “Hey!” Angie yelped.  She struggled to break free of Rodney’s grip.  “Let me go, ya goon!”

               “She doesn’t have anything to do with this!” Stan shouted.  “Let her go!”

               “She’s seen our faces.  She knows our names, since you insisted on making small talk,” Carl said snidely. “And if we let her go now, what’s to stop her from going to the police?”

               This is what I get for thinking I could outwit loan sharks.  Surprise attack during a trip to the beach.  All I wanted was to see some cute chicks in swimsuits.  Instead, I’m getting roughed up by some guys named Carl and Rodney. Man, I’m not even important enough for them to send a third person.

               “Stanley, who are these people?” Angie asked.

               “I owe them money,” Stan said vaguely.  Angie groaned.  “Don’t worry, they’ll just break my kneecaps or somethin’.”

               “Not this time, Pines,” Carl said.  Stan froze.

               “What?”

               “You’ve tried to outrun us for the last time,” Carl snarled.  He pulled out a gun.  Stan stumbled backwards, startled.  His heels caught thin air.  He wobbled on the edge of the seaside cliff for a brief moment.  “Heh, look at that.  You’re doing the dirty work for me.”  Stan fell.

               “Stanley!” Angie screamed.  Stan looked down at the rapidly approaching ocean.  He swallowed nervously.

               Those are some really sharp rocks. He closed his eyes.

               But he never hit the water.

               What the fuck?

               “Are you all right?” a soft voice asked.  

               “Airstream!” Stan said.  “Holy shit, you came, you-”  He opened his eyes.  “…Angie?”

               “Are you all right?” Angie repeated.  Stan stared at her.  Her thin arms were wrapped tightly around his torso, in a forward-facing hug of sorts. Stan looked down.  They appeared to be hovering at a constant height above the ocean.  He looked back at her.

               “I…”

               “Ya shouldn’t have hit yer head or anything like that.  I caught ya ‘fore then, I think.”  Stan didn’t respond.  “Oh, Lord.  Yer broken.”

               “I, uh, what?” Stan said.  Angie sighed.

               “Okay, yer not completely broken.  I’ll take ya back up.  My shoulder’s a bit weak right now, so this is more straining than usual.  You’ve got that fear of height.  You’ll prob’ly want to close yer eyes fer this part.”  Stan did as she suggested.  He felt a rush of air, then ground beneath his feet.  Angie let go of him with a small sigh.  He opened his eyes again.  

               “What the fuck?” Stan muttered.  Carl and Rodney were on the ground.  Angie idly nudged Rodney with her foot.  

               “They’re out cold, don’t worry.”

               “Angie, what the hell happ- you’re hurt!”

               “Huh?” Angie looked up at him.  

               “Your shoulder!”

               “Oh, right,” Angie said, looking at the bullet wound in her left shoulder. “That.”  She shrugged.  “Whatever. Are you okay?”

               “Wha- you got shot.”

               “Yeah.”  Angie shrugged again.  “No biggie.”

               “Why are you being so casual about this?” Stan asked.

               “Eh.  Been through worse.”

               “Yeah, I bet you have, since you’re a fucking superhero,” Stan said shortly. Angie sighed.

               “Yes.  It’s a long story, and-”

               “Does Fiddlesticks know?” Stan interrupted.

               “No.  And please, don’t tell him.  He’d lose it.”

               “Who else knows you’re the superhero that saves my neck every other week?”

               “My roommate.  Marley caught me sleep-flyin’ a few times.”

               “Anyone else?”

               “…Stanford,” Angie mumbled.

               “I knew it!” Stan burst out.  He scratched his cheek.  “Well, not the specifics.  But I knew that he and you had some sorta secret together.”

               “It’s his dang fault I wear that mask, of course he knows.”

               “Makes sense that he’s the reason, but why?”

               “His machine,” Angie groaned.  “The one he’s been tinkerin’ with since we started grad school.  I came over to help him study one night, and it zapped me.  Next thing I knew, I was breakin’ doorknobs off handles, kickin’ up windstorms when I got angry, and floating randomly.”  Angie crossed her arms.  “Stanford was the one who thought I should be a superhero.  ‘You’ve got the powers, you need to use them!’”

               “That sounds like him.”

               “But I didn’t want to.  Bein’ a grad student is difficult enough without deadly extracurriculars.  I changed my mind, though, after I rescued Ford from bein’ mugged.”  Angie quirked a small smile.  “It’s nice, bein’ able to give bullies what for.”

               “Fuck yeah, it is,” Stan said with a nod.  Angie chuckled softly.  “So, Ford’s your sidekick?”

               “Fer lack of a better term, I s’ppose he is.”  Angie shook her head.  “I know he wants to be the one wearin’ the mask.  But fer some reason, the machine didn’t give him any powers.  He tried.”

               “Do powers run in your family?  Maybe they skipped generations or something,” Stan suggested.  “Actually, if superpowers run in your family, that would explain a lot.”

               “As far as I know, they don’t.”

               “Huh.  Weird.” Stan frowned.  “Wait.  Airstream’s saved Fiddlesticks before.”

               “Yeah, so?”

               “How come your own big brother didn’t recognize you?” Stan asked.

               “Ford designed the mask.  He says that it projects a minor hologram, so that people I know won’t know it’s me behind it.  Or somethin’ like that.  There’s no way Ford could’ve made a mask like that on his own, so I’m pretty sure he got Fidds to help him out.”  Angie tapped her chin.  “Prob’ly bribed him with molasses popsicles again.”

               “Um, you’re, uh, dripping,” Stan said, pointing at her shoulder.  The bullet wound was beginning to ooze in earnest.

               “Oh, shoot!” Angie yelped.  “I like this swimmin’ suit, I don’t want it to get all blood-stained!”

               “It is a nice swimsuit,” Stan agreed.  Angie blinked.

               “Was that a flirt?”

               “Geez, Ford’s rubbing off on you.  ‘Was that a flirt’,” Stan said.

               “You didn’t answer the question.”

               “Why aren’t you more upset about being shot?” Stan asked.  Angie rolled her eyes.

               “You still didn’t answer the question.  Whatever.  That machine what gave me powers also deadened my nerve cells.  Can’t feel pain no more.”

               “Really?”

               “Yup.”

               “Where does Ford keep the machine?”

               “It don’t matter.  Bein’ unable to feel pain is more inconvenient than you’d think.  I burn myself almost constantly, ‘cause I can’t tell somethin’s so hot it hurts.”

               “Yeah, but you also keep forgetting you got shot in the shoulder,” Stan pointed out.  

               “It has its upsides, fer sure.  But it’s got its downsides, too.”  Angie sighed. “Guess we should quit the beach trip early so’s I can dig this slug out.”  She nudged Rodney with her foot again.  “We’ll call the police once we’re a few blocks away.”

               “Yeah, sorry I messed up our beach trip on your one day off,” Stan said.

               “It’s all right.  At least ya fin’ly know the secret.”  Angie grinned and elbowed him.  “Hey, now I’ve got two sidekicks!”

#I decided spontaneously that Angie becoming a superhero #is canon in the context of the West Coast Outcasts AU #idk. it just seems like it fits the AU. #two outcasts becoming crimefighters #...after they've gotten their bachelor's degrees and are working on their graduate degrees #I mean if anyone wants to argue with me bc they think that's not something that should be canon in the AU #be my guest. I am 10000% willing to hear any arguments about my AUs #West Coast Outcasts AU #Stanley Pines #Fiddleford McGucket #Stanford Pines #Angie McGucket #NaFicWriMo #ficlet #my writing #speecher speaks

[phynxrizng]

AN INTERESTING LOOK AT REINCARNATION

THE REINCARNATION EXPERIMENT™ "Promoting Scientific Reincarnation Research" Web Hosting powered byNetwork Solutions® THE EXPERIMENT'S PURPOSE IS: To Determine if Science Can Prove Reincarnation Reincarnation in Historical Context This experimental project looks at traditional perspectives of reincarnation from a 21st-century view of consciousness studies, neuroscience, behavioral psychology, and quantum physics. Its research also attempts to shed light on concepts like life-after-death, soul transcendence, memory and archetypes, and shared/entangled consciousness. This link provides a quick review of reincarnation in history. Psychologist Carl Jung, a 20th century legend, seeded the modern field of scientific reincarnation research. Psychiatrist Ian Stevenson caused it to flourish. Introduction of Illustrative Reincarnation Cases Present Incarnation Likely Past-Life This subject’s facial biometrics differ from her apparent past-life facial bone structure by only .09 percent difference warranting full-fledged assessment. Click here for more about the case. Present Incarnation & Likely Past-Life Reincarnation of a Poetic Soul with Artistic, Spiritual, and Activist Traits?? Our evaluation of the case that the soul-genome of the 19th-century poet Elizabeth Barrett-Browning reincarnated a century later. Click for a summary here .......... Life-After-Death Research Supports Reincarnation and Vice Versa The consciousness that survives death is a soul genome filled with the experience of an individual's lifetime, which in time returns into a new physical body. For examples of life-after-death evidence see Paul Davids' DVDs of The Life After Death Project, including Paul Von Ward's comments on this thesis here. Belief in the phenomenon we call reincarnation — a process where the core substance of an individual is reborn in a future lifetime — has existed in all major historical cultures. It has largely been rooted in dreams, hypnosis and psychic clues. Recently, more objective evidence has included memories of events or knowledge apparently based in the lives of deceased individuals. New research suggests that physical and personality traits may be inherited from the past. REXP seeks to evaluate areas of empirical evidence suggesting reincarnation and determine its reliability for identifying past-life connections in individual cases. Truth in this area is an illusion, but it can be approached through use of 21st-century science's concepts and tools. Hear how the Reincarnation Experiment started, its purpose, and its results. IF REINCARNATION IS REAL, IT CAN EVENTUALLY BE PROVEN. TYPICAL POTENTIAL CASES ANALIZED BY THE EXPERIMENT I. Many clues may suggest possible past-lives: Dreams with historical images or information. Recognizing people or places never seen before. Unexplained emotions related to new places or people. Knowing an untaught foreign language or fact. Precocious abilities in any field. Parallel physical features. Drawn to strange people and places. II. Several types of possible past lives submitted to us: WW-II service in Germany, UK, Italy, and Japan or Civil Wars as in America or Spain. Past-lives ended by violent accidents, ship wrecks, murders, or drugs. Well-known musicians or other artists and writers. Past lives from other races or cultures. Famous figures or ordinary citizens. Previous incarnations from early or ancient times. Regina Meredith of Gaiam TV Interview with Paul Von Ward on the Reincarnation Experiment and its implications for understanding our personality and behaviors. Check TV Interview here and claim 10-day free Gaiam TV membership. Hear introduction to the Reincarnation Experiment on Coast to Coast AM Radio Host George Noory Interviews Paul Von Ward on The Soul Genome Listen to hour interview and following call-ins by clicking icons below. Hear Weekend Host George Knapp with Paul on another occasion. New Article: Reincarnation Experiment and Science This experiment attempts to link mainstream science with the more illusive aspects of the reincarnation theory. It tests the hypothesis that knowledge, talents, and experiences in one life-time can be found in individuals who have no direct biological link with the deceased person. Adding to the comparisons between two individuals separated overtime, we use independent research relevant to the soul genome concept. If memories from a specific life can survive through the epigenetic field that transcends physical death, they may also be available to people outside the DNA tree of that life. Read about the Spanish memories of a Sephardic Jew expressed by a distant Catholic descendant. TheSoul Genome Paul Von Ward Best Price$4.14 or BuyNew $17.69 PrivacyInformation TheSoul Genome Paul Von Ward BuyNew PrivacyInformation Purchase Your Copy of The Soul Genome Print version to the left for $13.92 Kindle version to the right for $5.99 Researcher Vera Tallmadge says: "My favorite book in the last five years was your The Soul Genome." Paul was chosen to present his natural cosmology involving human evolution beside more advanced beings at Edinburgh, Scotland 2014 Symposium. Click here. Now postponed. Do Newborns Have A Past-Life Legacy? Hear Paul Von Ward's TV Response. More than half of the world's people believe in reincarnation, and polls suggest at least a quarter of U.S. citizens do. What is the basis of this belief? Is it rooted in delusions or wishful thinking? Or, is there a tangible basis for such ideas? It is beyond the current tools of science to definitively prove the general theory of reincarnation to a skeptical public. Likewise, it is also beyond the tools of modern science to disprove it. However, this project is designed to test whether empirical evidence exists that can plausibly account for the apparent non-parental link involved in robust reincarnation cases. In other words, it challenges the assertion that all of the newborn's psychophysical inheritance can be completely accounted for by its immediate parental genomes. Read More.... Click on the newborn's picture to the right for a excellent video of Paul Von Ward's clear and concise responses to a TV journalist's questions about the concept of reincarnation and the Reincarnation Experiment. SCIENCE CAN VALIDATE BELIEF BASED IN OBSERVATIONS OF NATURE. Early human and later aboriginal societies based their beliefs in reincarnation on observations of their contemporaries that revealed similarities with known people who had lived and died before those being observed were born. Over several generations, people collected many persuasive correspondences between the present personalities and various ancestors that they posited some carry-forward of legacies from the past. As an example, an African tribe used the terms "babatunde" and "yetunde" to indicate the possible reincarnations of boys and girls, respectively, from earlier individuals two generations removed. The cases described on this website and in the book The Soul Genome provide credible examples of such observable data which cannot be more plausibly explained than by a reincarnation hypothesis. We attempt to be as careful as the team who ultimately concluded two-year-old Lhamo Dhondup is the reincarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama. From a comparable secular approach, The Soul Genome's author's perspective places the experiment in the context of emerging research findings in physics, biology, neuroscience, and evolutionary studies. C2C Host George Noory With Paul Von Ward on REXP Listeners to C2C Talk with Paul SCIENCE CAN CORROBORATE SPIRITUAL BELIEFS? The Eastern metaphysics of Hinduism and Buddhism, their religious derivations, and early Judaism and Christianity describe reincarnation in terms that cannot be easily, if at all, tested by the nonbeliever. Such supernatural beliefs require unquestioning credulity. A historical overview of some of these religious and spiritual beliefs can be seen by clicking here — which also links to a good introduction to Jewish and Christian beliefs. Science cannot prove any aspects of these spiritual beliefs without measurable evidence of their veracity. Fortunately, several areas of the physical and behavioral evidence that led to such ancient beliefs can be found linking the lives of people living today with people who died leaving documented information about themselves and their behaviors. The Reincarnation Experiment is the first-ever effort to treat reincarnation as a natural process that can and should be subjected to scientific analysis. For that reason alone, it provides a credible data base for interdisciplinary discussions and evaluations of the psychoplasm (or soul-genome) hypothesis. A MOVE FROM SUBJECTIVE TO OBJECTIVE RESEARCH: The objective evidence that led nature-oriented societies to postulate a process like reincarnation includes physical features and psychological factors. Facial architecture, body types, hair patterns, ear forms, hand-finger proportions, voice, and odor have been noted to correspond in two separate lifetimes. Some physical similarities also include special markings, birthmarks and deformities. Matching psychological traits include levels of mental development, emotional patterns, styles of interacting with others, and areas of creative interest. (See analysis of reincarnation-case facial comparisons with random matches.) All these factors seem to make up a psychoplasm (an information-rich, energetic field) that enfolds and animates the genomic material synthesized at conception. When we have a better understanding of the interaction between the genome and the epigenome, this project will test the psychoplasm concept by comparing a subject's relevant DNA sequences with the genome from his or her alleged previous incarnation. Could some of the 21,000 human, protein-producing genes play a role in reincarnation as well as in culture? Read more.... Much empirical date now suggests that what a person accomplishes in terms of self-development and learning becomes a legacy the soul genome/psychoplasm transmits to the next generation. The question is whether it is passed individually or some collective consciousness. Click here to see the forms that can be used to develop a scientific data base for a particular case. They can be used for one's own case or for someone else's. INDIVIDUAL PARTICIPATION IN REINCARNATION EXPERIMENT If your reincarnation research efforts are compatible with the experiment's methodology, there are several options for your participation: 1. Submit a Self-Developed Case. 2. Propose A New Tentative Case for Evaluation. 3. Use Our Methodology for Self-Discovery. Regardless of your location and professional background, if one of the three interests you, click here more details. CLUES LEADING TO POSSIBLE PAST-LIVES Many people receive hints of possible past lives that cannot be considered as definitive proof of reincarnation or of a specific past-life connection. Some come through extrasensory channels such as dreams, visions, intuitive feelings, or hypnosis. Some may come from other-dimensional sources such as psychic readings or through channeled messages from apparent disincarnate beings. Since neither such sources nor the information from them can be accessed by independent observers, they provide only potential clues that require validation by third parties. Nevertheless, they should not be dismissed out-of-hand as they may lead to verifiable evidence to support the posited past-life connection. Skillful use of regression hypnotherapy can assist in recovering details that can be later verified. FINANCIALLY SUPPORT COSTS OF SCIENTIFIC EQUIPMENT, SOFTWARE, AND ANALYSIS Professionals involved in this project do so on a pro bono basis. Certain expenses for measurement equipment, data processing software, and technical analysis is paid for by participants and supporters like you. If you appreciate the project's approach, facilitate the DNA and biometric comparisons necessary for credible research with a donation made below. Home Research Collaborators Overview/Periodic Updates Illustrative Cases Cases in Progress Croatian Project German WW-II Initiative Past-Life Clues Past-Life-Based Coaching Public Events/Interviews Book and Peer Reviews Soul/Psychoplasm Book Purchases/Comments Video & Audio Links Research Forms Have Questions?

[young-anarchist]

I'm taking my mother to tour my university today!

I'm going to get to be a part of the Anthropology honors program at UCSD where I'll conduct my own research project with the intent of it being published. I'm super excited because I get to throw myself into academics that I'm actually interested in. I love art and literature, which were the majors I was originally studying, but I've decided to double major in Anthropology - Sociocultural Concentration and Linguistics - Language studies (French). I've decided to pair these two majors for my degree because A) Learning a secondary language would be pertinent in expanding my academic and social opportunities abroad and in the developing nations France once colonized and B) Understanding the meaning of language and how that meaning is significant in different cultures; meaning being indicative of societal values.

If you know me, I'm super interested in religion and how it's affected humanity historically and today and I think understanding culture in tandem with language will help us further the discussion. Anyways, I'm thinking about doing my honors thesis on something about the language of the abrahamic religions and the cultures that preceded their establishments.

Another idea I had for my thesis was the connections between French and Arabic and why Arabic language – particularly slang – has been adopted into the French language so easily but less so (I believe) in Spanish which historically had longer connections to Arabic.

When writing a research thesis, you're not supposed to share it with anyone for a bunch of reasons, but I figure no one who would influence my ideas is gonna read this here, so fuck it! It'll be cool to look back on this when I'm done with university to see where my aspirations took me. Last semester, students from my honors program were accepted to MAJORLY prestigious institutions like MIT, Oxford, and Yale; and I want to set the bar high for myself to motivate my academics. I wanted to study abroad for a year, but I doubt i'll be able to do that now because I'm double majoring.

So yeah, today should be fun! I'm excited for my future. I have so much to learn and so many people to learn from. I'm taking a few classes this summer before officially moving to UCSD to free up some space for the next two years, but i'll be FOR SURE taking classes all four quarters unlike the three students normally take.

There are a fuck ton of internship opportunities here, especially with the Native American reservations and archaeological sights being that I live in beautiful and historically culturally diverse Southern California. I'll have a tight schedule because of school and internships and whatever job i'm gonna have; I have to work because of my car payment and insurance. Such a pain in the ass.

I'm making moves y'all ;-; And I'm excited as FUCK. I kinda feel like I have something to prove to my family and friends because I feel like they all think I'm vapid and dumb. Maybe I am a little pretentious and arrogant (I am American, after all. Can you blame me? LOL) but I'm not stupid and I hope this experience at uni will help put things into perspective for those who expect the least from me.

#personal #ucsd

[blatantlyprocrastinating]

My First (and hopefully last) soapbox post

Disclaimer: this is a rant, if you aren’t into that sort of thing then by all means, pass this by and enjoy other folks’ posts. Normally, I wouldn't add to the vast number of these already drifting around the web as I usually just shout these things over a nearby cliff when I’m in the mood. Tonight however, my neighbors are home and they, unlike all of you, cannot simply scroll past my shouting. Before you read this I would also like it to be known that just because I’m ranting does not mean I don’t think i’m fortunate or that I’m not thankful for what I have or what people have done for me. On the contrary, much of what I’ll be ranting about makes me relieved that I don’t have more serious problems to deal with like starvation or having to provide for a family. On occasion I just get fed up and need to vent a bit, even if it means setting my opinions adrift into the vast uncaring sea of memes, misinformation, porn, and cat videos that is the internet. Lastly, I’m going to apologize in advance for the atrocious grammar your about to see, I’m tired, a bit out of practice with my writing, and honestly, wont be bothered to go through this whole damn thing when i’m done to make sure all the I’s are dotted and all the T’s are crossed. I also get a bit wordy with my writing when I’m angry, just to warn you. So without further adue, I’ll begin:                                                                                                                     

         I am, like many others I suppose, frustrated and frankly a little pissed off with my current state of affairs. Though this frustration has been brought to new heights by the recent onset of the corona virus, it has its source awhile back. From about the age of eleven, I’ve had a kind of foggy, but constant, Idea of what I wanted out of life: a small house far enough out in the country that I wont have to see my neighbors on any given day if I want to but close enough to civilization that I would have to go on a quest every time I needed milk and eggs. this house would preferably back up onto a stream or creek and have a garage for me to work in. I also always wanted to have a job that would allow me to study history, help people in some way, and would either allow or require me to travel a bit. Finally, if I got over my shyness and was fortunate enough, I hoped I’d find a partner to share all of that with, unlikely as it is that I could find someone patient or crazy enough to put up with me (no kids though, I doubt I’d make much of a father). When I was younger, and more naive, I would mention some or all of these things to people I looked up to, like my father, my teacher or my uncles. Though their responses varied a little, they all carried the same basic advice: work hard, be honest, do well in school/college and with the exception of love, you can have what you’ve dreamed of.

     So, I followed their advice: I got through grade school with flying colors though my reading disability made it a bit difficult, got through college with a 3.6 G.P.A, presented a senior thesis to the history department, and worked whenever and however I was needed on family’s various home repair, boat repair, and farm duties, all the while holding out for the metaphorical light at the end of the tunnel. Towards the end of my senior year I began to look for work for history majors but, like so many other ill-prepared liberal arts majors before me, couldn't find a job that didn’t require prior experience. graduation came and went, I kept looking and found nothing. my friend-group split up and went our separate ways, I kept looking and found nothing. The first of many student loan payments started showing up in the mail, I kept looking and, well, at this point I’ll wager you know where this is going.

       Now, I live at home and work in a wholesale department of a greenhouse. my days usually consist of loading and unloading trucks, working on a planting line (think assembly line but for flowers) and packaging thousands of plants for shipping. its hard work, but the wage is decent for the job (12$per hour) and my coworkers are nice, most of them are recent immigrants from El Salvador so my practical Spanish has improved alot over the last year and a half. And to top it of most of the time my foreman doesn't usually mind if I’m  five or ten minutes late to work.

   However, sometimes, when I’ve been on the planting line for so long that my vision blurs a little and my shoulders ache from being in the same position for too long, or when one of my coworkers tells the same joke about testicles for the fourteenth time that day when it was only a little funny the first time,  I cant help but ask myself: I can do better than this, can’t I? This isn't to say that I think that I’m better than the people I work with, many of them have endured hardships and supported their families despite the odds in a way that I think, demands anyone’s respect. But often I look at where I am in life and think: did I really just spend all that time and effort and take out all those loans just to end up in a worse position than where I started? Did all those people who advised me in the past lie to me, or were they just misinformed? Is there really any way I can still achieve that dream of mine or should I just accept that with the way things are in America right now, I probably wont find a history job or own land, and perhaps I should just come to terms with that.

    For a little while, I stubbornly resisted accepting this. I looked for volunteer opportunities figuring that I could work part time and that maybe volunteering would eventually lead to a job. I also kept looking for a different job, if not history, then perhaps something that would require me to do research or write reports. Hell, anything that let me use more of my head than just my brain stem would have been a welcome sight. but now, with this whole covid-19 thing, alot of people have been telling me that  I “should be grateful to still have any job” and while I can see where they’re coming from, I also cant help but despair and be a bit angry, not at them you understand, but at the general state of things: Is it reasonable that after all I’ve done that I should not just settle for the life I have now, but be grateful to stay in it? am I being ungrateful? perhaps I’m just not looking at this from the right angle? I bare my situation to your judgement good people of the internet, wise or foolish as it may be.  

[neptunecreek]

Speaking Freely: An Interview With Ada Palmer

Ada Palmer is a Renaissance historian whose work lies at the intersection of ideas and historical change. She is currently on research leave from the University of Chicago, where she teaches early modern European history. She is also a writer of fiction; her 2016 novel, Too Like the Lightning, was a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Novel.

Ada’s research encompasses many topics, including the history of censorship. In 2018, she worked with EFF’s own Cory Doctorow on a project that looked at censorship and information control in information revolutions.

I’ve been thinking about censorship for a long time, but much of what Ada said during our conversation still managed to surprise me. We talked about censorship during the Inquisition, and how that parallels to today’s online censorship challenges. We also discussed what Ada, as an historian, sees as the harmful long-term effects of censorship, some of which might surprise even the most dedicated free expression activist. It was an honor and a pleasure to get to interview Ada for this wide-ranging edition of Speaking Freely.

York: My first question is what does free speech, or free expression, mean to you?

Two very different things, because I’m both an academic studying a phenomenon, and then a human being living in a world. So, as an academic studying a phenomenon, you observe, you describe … and in that sense, I can—when having my historian hat on—speak very neutrally about it. I spend a lot of my time researching major censorship operations of the past—researching the Inquisition, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, researching the Comics Code Authority. With your historian hat on, you can discuss these things very neutrally, even with a sort of fondness of “yes, this is my subject, and these people are terrible, and it’s kind of fun in that way.”

This is very different from when you zoom out from that semi-artificial historian neutrality to the realities. One of the things that has colored my approach to free speech is trying to de-separate and reunify those things. One of the problems we’ve faced trying to understand free expression, and its significance, and what the consequences are of infringing it, is that so much of our historical research on it tries to present as neutral, because that’s how you present historical research—distanced and balanced. But, in a way, that undermines the power of that historical research to show how bad it is and galvanize action. Does that make sense?

York: Absolutely.

In that sense, I consider my work parallel in facing some of the challenges as my colleague Kathleen Belew, who works on the history of white supremacy in the U.S. We’re studying phenomena that we’re fascinated by, but when you try to think about them directly and honestly you have an ethical responsibility to consistently remind the reader of the terrible consequences of them.

York: I’d like to dig into that a bit more. Tell me about one historical phenomenon in terms of censorship that perhaps I or our readers wouldn’t know about.

One of the victims of censorship that I’ve never heard anyone else talk about, although I’m sure someone must have, is the later future capacity to tell histories of the period when censorship happened. Because, since there was censorship, it sort of invalidates the historical record and the documents that survived, which you know were coerced or doctored (or if they weren’t, were written in a state of fear and self-censorship). It renders that whole historical record patch unreliable in a way that then makes it easier for later people to come and make claims about that period that you can’t refute using the historical sources.

To give the specific example that made me think of this: I work a lot on the Renaissance and the early period of the Reformation, and this is a period where everybody knows the Inquisition is in full operation. And lots of people tell histories of the Renaissance where they claim that all these important people, big ideas people who changed the world, were secret atheists, secretly anti-Catholic, or anti-Christian. And you come to this person who’s made this claim and you show them tons of documents and the person comes back and says “oh, there was censorship, so they weren’t being honest, and if you read between the lines they really think this…”

And it’s true there was censorship, and so you have to be very careful in interpreting the documents. The fact that there was censorship means anybody can come to those documents and claim that anything was false because censorship was there, and that what people really did or thought matches their narrative.

York: Wow, that’s really interesting, I hadn’t thought of it quite that way.

Yeah, we’re very conscious of the consequences of censorship during the short term, within our lifetimes. But censorship sort of poisons the historical record for centuries after it by making this tool by which people can invalidate things.

It’s similar to how we see people invalidating things now—like “that climate study wasn’t really valid because those people got funding from a leftist political group”—they’re invalidating the material by claiming that there has to be insincerity in the development of the document. And the more a period is known to have censorship (which isn’t the same thing as actually having it) or other pressure that are in some sense potentially distorting or affecting what people say and write, the easier it is for people to make the claim that they don’t really mean what they say.

I don’t think we think about truths on that larger historical scale being one of the victims of censorship.

York: Yeah, the way that you framed this reminds me of something I’ve been thinking of, which is how the LGBTQ movement here in Berlin was censored by the Nazis...but that’s kind of the opposite of what you’re saying. Here it’s the lost information about what happened in Berlin, and what you’re talking about is the mistruths that result from that.

Yes - it will never be possible to write a history of LGBT issues during and before this patch of censorship. Everyone’s always going to be combing through partial records trying to construct what might have been. A good historian will be modest in their claims. You can coax a lot out of a few documents, though.

It’s easy for anybody who has a strong pre-expectation of what must be true to project that pre-expectation onto the material, because anything that doesn’t match that pre-expectation can be dismissed as unreliable or false. And so it will make it both easier to create histories that distort in a pro-LGBT and an anti-LGBT way and in many other ways that will tie into future political issues we haven’t even gotten to. [You] know, 50 years from now when the new frontier of ethics is, I don’t know, octopus rights (because we will have already given civil rights to high primates and will be working on octopuses next), the factions in that battle will be able to exploit documents to advance narratives on any and all sides of a polarizing issue.

York: That’s really fascinating. I don’t mean this to be such a big question, but … what led you to that particular interest in the historical aspects of censorship?

I was led to it because I did my dissertation on Atomism and Epicureanism and we associate these with the history of atheism, which I was always very interested in. So I sort of came to it wanting to find secret atheists. And yet the more I looked at the material, the less I saw any evidence of that, and the more I saw rather orthodox Catholics nonetheless being interested in and reading this radical material.

As I’ve published and had to defend this thesis, I will then over and over have the following conversation:

“But aren’t all these people secret atheists?”

“No, here’s all the things that they say that is incompatible with atheism.”

“Oh, but they’re just being disingenuous.”

It’s been fascinating to watch that ineradicable repetition of “oh, but they’re just secret atheists, right?” But this happens with all our myths about the past. And yet, when I’m working with Renaissance materials, every single book I pull out has been censored, especially in the printed period where quite early in the dissemination of the printing press, the Inquisition had this system set up where you had to submit a text to a censor before you could have permission to publish it. Every book has a page at the front that says who censored it and that it has official permission to be censored, and that it’s good. And on many Italian books it’ll be one page, but if they’re produced under the Spanish or Portuguese regime where the Inquisition was better funded, it will sometimes be dozens of pages or, in a few of extreme examples, half of the book will be filled with letters from censors. The censorship is extremely visible and extremely integral to the text.

At the same time, the Inquisition was allowing the circulation of Lucretius, which says there’s no such thing as immortality of the soul, and prayer doesn’t work, and the gods didn’t create the cosmos...there’s this confusing apparent paradox of: “Inquisition, why are you spending so much effort and yet allowing these things that we think should be your number one target to circulate with your permission and even recommendation on the title page?”

And so I’m fascinated with trying to figure out what the Inquisition was doing when it wasn’t going after who we think it should’ve been. If you had a time machine, you’d go back and tell the Inquisition “You know, you’re fighting the wrong battles —if you want to really want to ferociously control the world, you should be going after Voltaire and not these bizarre Jansenist theologians no one in the future will have heard of.”

And so I became fascinated with the question of what the Inquisition’s actual goal was … and then that became a larger interest on a global scale, which is what my current project is: taking the patterns I’ve observed in European censorship and comparing them to China, the USSR, the Indian subcontinent both before and after British rule, to try to figure out what big global patterns there are in censorship that operate differently from what our expectations are.

York: I’ve thought about that as well, in terms of how countries censor the Internet. In my previous work at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, I managed a project that looked at the various reasons and ways in which governments censor the Internet and the tools that they use to do so.

Okay, I want to talk about a couple of parallels here: You’ve got some countries that are more secretive, and others that are very visible in the way that they display blockpages. And then you also talked about the goals of the Inquisition, and I’d love to get your thoughts on why governments—and companies for that matter—censor today.

So, in recurring patterns, one thing I’ve noticed is that pretty much every censoring operation post-printing press—which is of course earlier in the East than in Europe—recognizes that it isn’t possible to track down and destroy every copy of a thing. You’re never going to track down all of the copies once it’s been printed, and efforts to attempt to do so are actually remarkably rare in addition to being consistently unsuccessful. We think of the Inquisition as doing a lot of book burning, but an Inquisition book burning was the ceremonial burning of one copy of a book. In fact, the Inquisition kept examples of all of the books they banned in order to have them for reference.

So what is the Inquisition doing if it’s not trying to obliterate texts? I think it’s trying to do a couple of different things. A big one is projection of power, because every time you pick up a book, the first page you see is that the Inquisition had control over this book. Every time you’re thinking about publishing, you’re thinking about getting past the censor. Whether you’re the author, publisher, or especially the reader, the act of reading becomes an act of being reminded of orthodoxy, power, et cetera, especially in the practice of expurgation, which ties into the visibility question for the internet.

The expurgation system was basically “you may have this book, but you must go to page 210 and cross out paragraph 3—that paragraph is forbidden, but the rest of it you may have.”

What you produce at the end doesn’t actually obliterate the content—you can put a light behind it and see the text, it’s not that hard—but what it means is that every time you turn the page and see the blacked-out parts, you’re reminded of power, reminded that there is an authority out there, lurking. And one of the most telling examples of this is that the content censored isn’t always what we’d think of as the most meaningful.

Here’s an example: There’s an encyclopedia of animals, think a subset of Wikipedia, published by Conrad Gessner in the late 1600s, and he’s collected material that’s been sent to him by people all over Europe who observe animals. He has pictures of animals and little articles, and it’s really as close to Wikipedia as anything gets, because it’s crowdsourced in the pre-modern world.

And the Inquisition looks at it because he’s a Protestant and because they look at everything. And they say “okay, you can have the animals,” but under each animal he’ll usually thank the learned and excellent Doctor So-and-So. But if Doctor So-and-So is a Protestant, he must cross out “learned and excellent,” because Protestants aren’t learned and excellent—they’re bad and wrong. And so you have to go through this six-volume giant encyclopedia and find every point where he praises a Protestant as learned and excellent, and cross it out.

Notice no information has been destroyed at all—what this is is a didactic tool, it’s just like making Bart Simpson go through and write “I will not do X” over and over again on the blackboard.

York: [laughs heartily]

It’s making you go through and write “Protestants are bad”, “Protestants are bad”, “Protestants are bad” on every single page. So it’s about turning your reading process into a tool of power for this entity, to reinforce barriers, to reinforce what is taboo and not taboo, and to remind you through every bit of the reading process that there is this authority out there. And that’s what parallels the versions of censoring the internet where they make it obvious, whether it’s having a box pop up, or having the page partially load—that reminds you with a little chill that you tried to do something forbidden. And it has a didactic, power-projecting purpose.

York: That’s so interesting and true.

I see that over and over...they know they’re never going to eradicate material that’s already there, but they can turn that material into a tool for advancing their own agenda. And then the other half of this is that a lot of these activities aren’t for erasing information that already exists, but to cause self-censorship and prevent the production of new things that don’t yet exist.

The motto for the book I’m currently working on is, “The vast majority of censorship is self-censorship, but the vast majority of self-censorship is intentionally cultivated by an outside power.”

York: Yeah, absolutely.

We had a great discussion in class at one point about the Galileo trial—you’re the Inquisition, here’s this guy Galileo, you think his ideas are dangerous. You then have a giant, showy trial that makes him a hundred times more famous than he was before, so that everyone is talking about him and he remains a major figure in the history of culture for hundreds of years afterward...what are you doing? It would be much more sensible to have him quietly murdered, which is not hard in 1600. It would be more sensible to smear him, say nothing, accuse him of sodomy, any normal sort of destroy-your-enemy tactic of 1600 makes more sense, if what you want to do is silence Galileo.

And a student in the class was asking: “How do we judge when censorship succeeds?” The answer is we have to figure out what the goal of the censorship was, because if the goal of the Galileo trial was to silence Galileo, it was one of the worst failures of anything anyone has ever tried to do in the history of the planet. But if you think of it differently, the goal of the Galileo trial is that it gets Descartes to withdraw his treatise that was about to be published, and then revising it to be way more orthodox and way more Catholic, and then publish that, which continues to be the dominant force in the French intellectual world for a century, and results in a much more orthodox and much more Catholic France than it would have if Descartes had published the uncensored original version—that’s the victory of the Galileo trial.

York: This feels like what we’re seeing in Egypt at the moment—the silencing of some of the louder voices in order to prevent more people from coming forward...of course, the main impact is self-censorship.

Yeah, and...I’ll talk to people sometimes about censorship and they'll want to say things like “okay, we’re going to talk about real censorship, not self-censorship, that’s different.”

York: [laughs]

And I have to say “No, it’s not different.”

The other one I sometimes run into is “We’re going to talk about state censorship, because only state censorship is real censorship—”

York: Yes, that’s my life.

[Palmer laughs] Nooo, it’s not true! And if you want an absolutely foolproof thing that’ll shut that person up for a few minutes while they try to come up with a rebuttal: “The Inquisition wasn’t the state. The Inquisition was a private organization comparable to Doctors Without Borders or Unicef that was organized through Rome, but run by private organizations like the Dominicans and the Jesuits, and was decentralized with lots of offices all over the place and often competed with the state.

In addition to which, the First Amendment—Congress can make no law—there is absolutely no incompatibility with the Inquisition operating in the U.S. right now like the way that it operated in France and Spain and everywhere else. What it is is an organization that has permission to have private police, and have private prisons, and arrest people on private authority and do its thing...the U.S. allows all that stuff. There’s nothing in the First Amendment or the U.S. legal system that wouldn’t allow the Inquisition to operate. There are particular things about policies against religious restriction that might mean they’d have to work around certain local laws in certain states, but [the Inquisition] could absolutely operate the same way here, and it wouldn’t be against the state, and it wouldn’t be against the First Amendment.*

And when you get that across to people who are trying to argue that it isn’t censorship when it’s not the state, I’ve found that to be very successful in getting people to wake up and see that it’s more complicated. Because nobody would ever argue that the Inquisition wasn’t censorship.

York: In that sense, I’d be really curious to hear your thoughts on the increasingly centralized—I mean, I’ve called it censorship but I’m not sure everyone agrees—behavior of platforms like Facebook.

Right, it’s a major example of the dangers of centralization, which is to say that we want to have lots of platforms that have radically different policies so you can move from platform to platform and voice to voice, and they all can regulate stuff, because they’re private groups and they do. But if you have a plural set of voices, then you’re always going to have some spaces where things can be said, just like you have a plurality of printers printing books, and some will only print orthodox things and some will only print radical ones. It creates an ecosystem in which the consumer of media knows perfectly well which printer to go to.

One of the things that electronic stuff is enabling is that for the first time we’re approaching levels of things that were sort of undreamt of in the pre-digital world in terms of scale and efficacy...they’re now possible. You can make a program that can hunt down every instance of a particular phrase and erase it from being there. That’s something the Inquisition would surely have liked to do if they could have.

It’s always been the case, before and now, that when you get to the very bottom of it, there’s a deeply human penetrability of all censorship systems, because censorship has to be done by people—not only by people, but generally by more educated and more literate people. What is the Inquisition? It employs thousands upon thousands of fresh-out-of-college lit majors with a first job out of college where you go through books, and read them, and report dangerous content. And that’s your day job while at home you’re writing your own treatise.

We have letters of these young scholars whose first job it is while they’re looking for a second job.And we even have letters where they’re writing to each other, like, “Oh Francoise, I got your book to censor today, and I’ll be sure to do an extra good job and make sure that it gets through.”

It creates this level of sympathy and human penetrability to the system. [The] great example of this is a treatise against Jesuit education and endorsing radical enlightenment education, written by one of the leading lights of the Portuguese enlightenment in the 1740s. And it’s printed in Naples because he knows he can’t get it printed in Portugal where the Jesuit-led local Inquisition is very powerful...just think of the Inquisition as very, very decentralized: a plural group of organizations that have to run themselves separately but are pretending to be one thing. He has it printed in Naples. And the local Jesuits find out, intercept the boat at the port in Lisbon, raid it, and seize the entire print run—this is as close to eradication as the Inquisition gets—and they destroy that print run, leaving only the copies that the printers in Naples had as their reference copies. However, within three months, a new edition of this book is printed in Portugal by one of the Inquisitors whose job it was to destroy the first edition. He’d kept a copy from the library of banned books, and then liked it and secretly printed it.

The human being is the point of penetrability there. And that doesn’t happen to every book the Inquisition tries to destroy, but it sure happens enough that it makes an enormous difference. So whether it’s a fresh-out-of-college English major who decides this radical book is actually kind of cool and lets it slip, or it’s this person printing an underground version of a forbidden book, there’s always been this hidden level where, when enough of the culture supports an intellectual movement, the human beings doing the censoring also become sympathetic to that movement and let it slide.

That has enabled, for example, the proliferation of local materials against attempts at global censorship. When, the L'Encyclopédie de Diderot et d'Alembert radical enlightenment encyclopedia is printed in France, France loves it. It’s full of the richest, newest enlightenment philosophy, it’s full of cool technical illustrations. We have a wonderful report of where the King and Queen were looking up how silk stockings are made, and she was excited to learn how her silk stockings work. We have an endorsement from the king and so on. They gave it official royal permission to be printed despite all of its radical and especially anti-centralized church stuff. It got as far as volume seven until the Papacy was like, “No, this is not okay.” And so it was banned in Rome. And when things are banned in Rome, the order is it must also be banned in France, and France has to have a ceremonial book burning and ban this book. But everyone in France likes this book, including the king. So what they do is have a ceremonial book burning in which they carry the Encyclopédie over to the fire, but then set it aside and burn in its place volumes of Calvinist sermons which they don’t like.

And so they keep the Encyclopédie, and from then on everyone in France knows that it’s officially forbidden but they don’t care. And they keep printing it in secret across the border in Switzerland, and smuggle it in, and it’s allowed to be smuggled in with such regularity that people who are printing more radical forbidden works wrap them inside the Encyclopédie—because if the border guards catch you they’ll just let you go, because the whole of France is angry at the Pope about the ban and wants to support the book.

That’s a space where you can say the region of an empire was able to, independently because of a cultural movement, allow the dissemination and proliferation of a text even when it had been banned by the central government. But we’re talking about books, and those take weeks to travel on horse. In the electronic world, that kind of regional, local autonomy and permeability starts to become much harder. Hackers can hide things on the darkweb and so on, but your average citizen of 18th-century France had much more access to the Encyclopédie than your average citizen in Guangzhou in China right now has access to electronic materials banned by the central government. You see that difference?

York: Yes, definitely.

So I think that’s one of the key things that’s changing.

York: I think what concerns me is the effectiveness of censorship now.

I think of it as saturation—how much of the material can be touched by the censorship. And that varies. So if we look at something as simple as how the Kindle automatically updates books that Amazon puts in, but the Kobo doesn’t change ebooks unless you give it explicit permission. If some malign actor took over the administration of both Kindle and Kobo, that malign actor could delete every copy of 1984 off every Kindle simultaneously and replace them with a propaganda wheel. But, in the case of the Kobo, it would say, “We want to update your copy of 1984, is that okay?” A few people would not know what was going on and say yes. But a few people would notice what was going on, say no, and a large number of Kobo owners would retain the original text. That very simple difference between the design of two ebook readers would therefore result in 100% saturation of censorship implemented through the Kindle, but maybe between 30-80% of saturation of censorship through the Kobo, depending on how many Kobo users get alerted to the censorship before they hit okay on the button. And both of them are censorship, but one of them is far more irrevocable.

York: That’s certainly true. I think a lot about how architecture of a technology influences the impact of censorship. Okay, I have one last question for you, one that I’ve been asking everyone: Do you have a free speech hero, either from past or from present?

A lot of people don’t know how hard Diderot worked on the Encyclopédie. Diderot was prizedly, personally an atheist, and his atheistical writings are absolutely gorgeous. They’re fascinating to read from a modern standpoint, because the atheism of his century was totally different from post-Darwin atheism, it’s the atheism of somebody who doesn’t have science on his side.

York: Oooh—

...who doesn’t have an atheistical explanation for how the world works, and why forest animals have forest camouflage and desert animals have desert camouflage. Who, when he writes about it, admits that science is in fact on the side of theism and that he doesn’t have good explanations for things, but that he nonetheless in a groping and incomplete way feels like atheism describes the actual events that he sees in the world around him—the chaoticness of daily life, and the lack of apparent meaning and providential action in human life. And therefore he feels sort of, as he says, on an irrational and instinctive level that atheism is true, and he’s trying to grope toward a coherent atheism but doesn’t have it yet. It’s really beautiful and some of the most heartful, honest—a philosopher telling you that he doesn’t know the answer and that he’s uncertain of his own convictions. Beautiful material.

In the 18th-century, or really the very end of the 17th, is really the first point in Europe’s history that there started to be atheism as a movement. But it wasn’t just a silent thing or something that people use as a slur toward other people. There was actually atheist literature, atheists talking to each other, atheist poetry, and Diderot was perfectly positioned to really be the leader and center of this movement. But he self-censored everything, and he didn’t publish any of his atheistic work in his lifetime at all. He circulated it privately among friends and that’s it, because he was the editor of the encyclopedia.

The purpose of the encyclopedia was to enable universal education for the first time, to empower everybody by giving everybody the knowledge to understand their tools, their agriculture, the way society was put together. It was a project to try to transform the world to where everybody had the power that only elites had before. And, as he also articulates it, it’s insurance against a new dark age. That if a new dark age should come upon humanity and only one copy of the encyclopedia survives, it would preserve all the technology, all of the social and ethical development, kindness of law that had developed at that point so it would be possible to reconstruct all of those things, and humanity would never be doomed to lose its achievements again.

He knew that if the editor of this project was known to be an atheist, that they would absolutely crack down on this and they would never allow it to circulate. So, in order to protect everyone else, in order to protect the achievements of everybody else leading up to him, and in order to achieve effective immortality of everybody else’s life, he self-censored his own and didn’t allow any of it to be published in his lifetime, leaving orders that it be printed not only after his death but after the death of his daughter, who was a pious Catholic and he didn’t want her to be sad that her father was going to hell.

As the result of this, some of his works were permanently or temporarily lost or inaccessible. This is a bit part of why Voltaire’s works are on high school syllabuses and almost nobody knows Diderot wrote anything that wasn’t the Encyclopédie.

Rameau's Nephew, which is one of the most absolutely most amazing philosophical works I’ve ever read—the work in which Diderot wrestles with the fact that by radically changing the education of the new generations, and encouraging them to dismantle current institutions, and create better ones—Diderot realizes that this also means creating a future in which his generation will no longer have a place, in which his values will be outdated and replaced by values that will be better but also frightening to him and to his peers who didn’t grow up in that world. [It wrestles] very directly with the problem of progressivism versus conservatism, and the fact that being progressive means that by the time you’re old, the world will be a place where you’re no longer comfortable.

It’s an amazing work, and it survived only in one handwritten copy which was missing for over a century until it only turned up by chance in a used book stall on the side of the Seine in the late nineteenth century. If that one copy had been destroyed, we wouldn’t have it at all. And he decided to risk that for all of his work in order to give us the encyclopedia and universal education.

York: That’s really powerful. Thank you so much for sharing that.

What we want is a world where nobody ever has to do that again.

* Under US law there are some situations in which a private actor may be considered a "state actor" subject to First Amendment restrictions. But these are difficult and highly specific legal questions. Although EFF has First Amendment experts, we are not historians and do not know enough about the Inquisition to know whether a good state action argument could be made under modern US law. Nevertheless, recent history has shown that modern-day private censors like the Moral Majority and Focus on the Family, or the various private groups that sustained the Hollywood Blacklist, have been able to exercise great influence without official state action.

from Deeplinks https://ift.tt/3aS6GsP

#Deeplinks

[englishchinesetranslations]

(简体字：为什么中文这么TM难？) 

(繁體字：為什麼中文這麼TM難？)

The first question any thoughtful person might ask when reading the title of this essay is, "Hard for whom?" A reasonable question. After all, Chinese people seem to learn it just fine. When little Chinese kids go through the "terrible twos", it's Chinese they use to drive their parents crazy, and in a few years the same kids are actually using those impossibly complicated Chinese characters to scribble love notes and shopping lists. So what do I mean by "hard"? Since I know at the outset that the whole tone of this document is going to involve a lot of whining and complaining, I may as well come right out and say exactly what I mean. I mean hard for me, a native English speaker trying to learn Chinese as an adult, going through the whole process with the textbooks, the tapes, the conversation partners, etc., the whole torturous rigmarole. I mean hard for me -- and, of course, for the many other Westerners who have spent years of their lives bashing their heads against the Great Wall of Chinese.

From

Schriftfestschrift: Essays on Writing and Language in Honor of John DeFrancis on His Eightieth Birthday

(Sino-Platonic Papers)

No. 27, August 1991), edited by Victor H. Mair

If this were as far as I went, my statement would be a pretty empty one. Of course Chinese is hard for me. After all, any foreign language is hard for a non-native, right? Well, sort of. Not all foreign languages are equally difficult for any learner. It depends on which language you're coming from. A French person can usually learn Italian faster than an American, and an average American could probably master German a lot faster than an average Japanese, and so on. So part of what I'm contending is that Chinese is hard compared to ... well, compared to almost any other language you might care to tackle. What I mean is that Chinese is not only hard for us (English speakers), but it's also hard in absolute terms. Which means that Chinese is also hard forthem, for Chinese people.1

If you don't believe this, just ask a Chinese person. Most Chinese people will cheerfully acknowledge that their language is hard, maybe the hardest on earth. (Many are even proud of this, in the same way some New Yorkers are actually proud of living in the most unlivable city in America.) Maybe all Chinese people deserve a medal just for being born Chinese. At any rate, they generally become aware at some point of the Everest-like status of their native language, as they, from their privileged vantage point on the summit, observe foolhardy foreigners huffing and puffing up the steep slopes.

Everyone's heard the supposed fact that if you take the English idiom "It's Greek to me" and search for equivalent idioms in all the world's languages to arrive at a consensus as to which language is the hardest, the results of such a linguistic survey is that Chinese easily wins as the canonical incomprehensible language. (For example, the French have the expression "C'est du chinois", "It's Chinese", i.e., "It's incomprehensible". Other languages have similar sayings.) So then the question arises: What do the Chinese themselves consider to be an impossibly hard language? You then look for the corresponding phrase in Chinese, and you find Gēn tiānshū yíyàng 跟天书一样 meaning "It's like heavenly script."

There is truth in this linguistic yarn; Chinese does deserve its reputation for heartbreaking difficulty. Those who undertake to study the language for any other reason than the sheer joy of it will always be frustrated by the abysmal ratio of effort to effect. Those who are actually attracted to the language precisely because of its daunting complexity and difficulty will never be disappointed. Whatever the reason they started, every single person who has undertaken to study Chinese sooner or later asks themselves "Why in the world am I doing this?" Those who can still remember their original goals will wisely abandon the attempt then and there, since nothing could be worth all that tedious struggle. Those who merely say "I've come this far -- I can't stop now" will have some chance of succeeding, since they have the kind of mindless doggedness and lack of sensible overall perspective that it takes.

Okay, having explained a bit of what I mean by the word, I return to my original question: Why is Chinese so damn hard?

1. Because the writing system is ridiculous.

Beautiful, complex, mysterious -- but ridiculous. I, like many students of Chinese, was first attracted to Chinese because of the writing system, which is surely one of the most fascinating scripts in the world. The more you learn about Chinese characters the more intriguing and addicting they become. The study of Chinese characters can become a lifelong obsession, and you soon find yourself engaged in the daily task of accumulating them, drop by drop from the vast sea of characters, in a vain attempt to hoard them in the leaky bucket of long-term memory.

The beauty of the characters is indisputable, but as the Chinese people began to realize the importance of universal literacy, it became clear that these ideograms were sort of like bound feet -- some fetishists may have liked the way they looked, but they weren't too practical for daily use.

For one thing, it is simply unreasonably hard to learn enough characters to become functionally literate. Again, someone may ask "Hard in comparison to what?" And the answer is easy: Hard in comparison to Spanish, Greek, Russian, Hindi, or any other sane, "normal" language that requires at most a few dozen symbols to write anything in the language. John DeFrancis, in his book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, reports that his Chinese colleagues estimate it takes seven to eight years for a Mandarin speaker to learn to read and write three thousand characters, whereas his French and Spanish colleagues estimate that students in their respective countries achieve comparable levels in half that time.2 Naturally, this estimate is rather crude and impressionistic (it's unclear what "comparable levels" means here), but the overall implications are obvious: the Chinese writing system is harder to learn, in absolute terms, than an alphabetic writing system.3 Even Chinese kids, whose minds are at their peak absorptive power, have more trouble with Chinese characters than their little counterparts in other countries have with their respective scripts. Just imagine the difficulties experienced by relatively sluggish post-pubescent foreign learners such as myself.

Everyone has heard that Chinese is hard because of the huge number of characters one has to learn, and this is absolutely true. There are a lot of popular books and articles that downplay this difficulty, saying things like "Despite the fact that Chinese has [10,000, 25,000, 50,000, take your pick] separate characters you really only need 2,000 or so to read a newspaper". Poppycock. I couldn't comfortably read a newspaper when I had 2,000 characters under my belt. I often had to look up several characters per line, and even after that I had trouble pulling the meaning out of the article. (I take it as a given that what is meant by "read" in this context is "read and basically comprehend the text without having to look up dozens of characters"; otherwise the claim is rather empty.)

This fairy tale is promulgated because of the fact that, when you look at the character frequencies, over 95% of the characters in any newspaper are easily among the first 2,000 most common ones.4 But what such accounts don't tell you is that there will still be plenty of unfamiliar words made up of those familiar characters. (To illustrate this problem, note that in English, knowing the words "up" and "tight" doesn't mean you know the word "uptight".) Plus, as anyone who has studied any language knows, you can often be familiar with every single word in a text and still not be able to grasp the meaning. Reading comprehension is not simply a matter of knowing a lot of words; one has to get a feeling for how those words combine with other words in a multitude of different contexts.5 In addition, there is the obvious fact that even though you may know 95% of the characters in a given text, the remaining 5% are often the very characters that are crucial for understanding the main point of the text. A non-native speaker of English reading an article with the headline "JACUZZIS FOUND EFFECTIVE IN TREATING PHLEBITIS" is not going to get very far if they don't know the words "jacuzzi" or "phlebitis".

The problem of reading is often a touchy one for those in the China field. How many of us would dare stand up in front of a group of colleagues and read a randomly-selected passage out loud? Yet inferiority complexes or fear of losing face causes many teachers and students to become unwitting cooperators in a kind of conspiracy of silence wherein everyone pretends that after four years of Chinese the diligent student should be whizzing through anything from Confucius to Lu Xun, pausing only occasionally to look up some pesky low-frequency character (in their Chinese-Chinese dictionary, of course). Others, of course, are more honest about the difficulties. The other day one of my fellow graduate students, someone who has been studying Chinese for ten years or more, said to me "My research is really hampered by the fact that I still just can't read Chinese. It takes me hours to get through two or three pages, and I can't skim to save my life." This would be an astonishing admission for a tenth-year student of, say, French literature, yet it is a comment I hear all the time among my peers (at least in those unguarded moments when one has had a few too many Tsingtao beers and has begun to lament how slowly work on the thesis is coming).

A teacher of mine once told me of a game he and a colleague would sometimes play: The contest involved pulling a book at random from the shelves of the Chinese section of the Asia Library and then seeing who could be the first to figure out what the book was about. Anyone who has spent time working in an East Asia collection can verify that this can indeed be a difficult enough task -- never mind reading the book in question. This state of affairs is very disheartening for the student who is impatient to begin feasting on the vast riches of Chinese literature, but must subsist on a bland diet of canned handouts, textbook examples, and carefully edited appetizers for the first few years.

The comparison with learning the usual western languages is striking. After about a year of studying French, I was able to read a lot. I went through the usual kinds of novels -- La nausée by Sartre, Voltaire'sCandide, L'étranger by Camus -- plus countless newspapers, magazines, comic books, etc. It was a lot of work but fairly painless; all I really needed was a good dictionary and a battered French grammar book I got at a garage sale.

This kind of "sink or swim" approach just doesn't work in Chinese. At the end of three years of learning Chinese, I hadn't yet read a single complete novel. I found it just too hard, impossibly slow, and unrewarding. Newspapers, too, were still too daunting. I couldn't read an article without looking up about every tenth character, and it was not uncommon for me to scan the front page of the People's Daily and not be able to completely decipher a single headline. Someone at that time suggested I read The Dream of the Red Chamber and gave me a nice three-volume edition. I just have to laugh. It still sits on my shelf like a fat, smug Buddha, only the first twenty or so pages filled with scribbled definitions and question marks, the rest crisp and virgin. After six years of studying Chinese, I'm still not at a level where I can actually read it without an English translation to consult. (By "read it", I mean, of course, "read it for pleasure". I suppose if someone put a gun to my head and a dictionary in my hand, I could get through it.) Simply diving into the vast pool of Chinese in the beginning is not only foolhardy, it can even be counterproductive. As George Kennedy writes, "The difficulty of memorizing a Chinese ideograph as compared with the difficulty of learning a new word in a European language, is such that a rigid economy of mental effort is imperative."6 This is, if anything, an understatement. With the risk of drowning so great, the student is better advised to spend more time in the shallow end treading water before heading toward the deep end.

As if all this weren't bad enough, another ridiculous aspect of the Chinese writing system is that there are two (mercifully overlapping) sets of characters: the traditional characters still used in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and the simplified characters adopted by the People's Republic of China in the late 1950's and early 60's. Any foreign student of Chinese is more or less forced to become familiar with both sets, since they are routinely exposed to textbooks and materials from both Chinas. This linguistic camel's-back-breaking straw puts an absurd burden on the already absurdly burdened student of Chinese, who at this point would gladly trade places with Sisyphus. But since Chinese people themselves are never equally proficient in both simplified and complex characters, there is absolutely no shame whatsoever in eventually concentrating on one set to the partial exclusion the other. In fact, there is absolutely no shame in giving up Chinese altogether, when you come right down to it.

2. Because the language doesn't have the common sense to use an alphabet.

To further explain why the Chinese writing system is so hard in this respect, it might be a good idea to spell out (no pun intended) why that of English is so easy. Imagine the kind of task faced by the average Chinese adult who decides to study English. What skills are needed to master the writing system? That's easy: 26 letters. (In upper and lower case, of course, plus script and a few variant forms. And throw in some quote marks, apostrophes, dashes, parentheses, etc. -- all things the Chinese use in their own writing system.) And how are these letters written? From left to right, horizontally, across the page, with spaces to indicate word boundaries. Forgetting for a moment the problem of spelling and actually making words out of these letters, how long does it take this Chinese learner of English to master the various components of the English writing system? Maybe a day or two.

Now consider the American undergraduate who decides to study Chinese. What does it take for this person to master the Chinese writing system? There is nothing that corresponds to an alphabet, though there are recurring components that make up the characters. How many such components are there? Don't ask. As with all such questions about Chinese, the answer is very messy and unsatisfying. It depends on how you define "component" (strokes? radicals?), plus a lot of other tedious details. Suffice it to say, the number is quite large, vastly more than the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet. And how are these components combined to form characters? Well, you name it -- components to the left of other components, to the right of other components, on top of other components, surrounding other components, inside of other components -- almost anything is possible. And in the process of making these spatial accommodations, these components get flattened, stretched, squashed, shortened, and distorted in order to fit in the uniform square space that all characters are supposed to fit into. In other words, the components of Chinese characters are arrayed in two dimensions, rather than in the neat one-dimensional rows of alphabetic writing.

Okay, so ignoring for the moment the question of elegance, how long does it take a Westerner to learn the Chinese writing system so that when confronted with any new character they at least know how to move the pen around in order to produce a reasonable facsimile of that character? Again, hard to say, but I would estimate that it takes the average learner several months of hard work to get the basics down. Maybe a year or more if they're a klutz who was never very good in art class. Meanwhile, their Chinese counterpart learning English has zoomed ahead to learn cursive script, with time left over to read Moby Dick, or at least Strunk & White.

This is not exactly big news, I know; the alphabet really is a breeze to learn. Chinese people I know who have studied English for a few years can usually write with a handwriting style that is almost indistinguishable from that of the average American. Very few Americans, on the other hand, ever learn to produce a natural calligraphic hand in Chinese that resembles anything but that of an awkward Chinese third-grader. If there were nothing else hard about Chinese, the task of learning to write characters alone would put it in the rogues' gallery of hard-to-learn languages.

3. Because the writing system just ain't very phonetic.

So much for the physical process of writing the characters themselves. What about the sheer task of memorizing so many characters? Again, a comparison of English and Chinese is instructive. Suppose a Chinese person has just the previous day learned the English word "president", and now wants to write it from memory. How to start? Anyone with a year or two of English experience is going to have a host of clues and spelling rules-of-thumb, albeit imperfect ones, to help them along. The word really couldn't start with anything but "pr", and after that a little guesswork aided by visual memory ("Could a 'z' be in there? That's an unusual letter, I would have noticed it, I think. Must be an 's'...") should produce something close to the target. Not every foreigner (or native speaker for that matter) has noted or internalized the various flawed spelling heuristics of English, of course, but they are at least there to be utilized.

Now imagine that you, a learner of Chinese, have just the previous day encountered the Chinese word for "president" (总统 zǒngtǒng ) and want to write it. What processes do you go through in retrieving the word? Well, very often you just totally forget, with a forgetting that is both absolute and perfect in a way few things in this life are. You can repeat the word as often as you like; the sound won't give you a clue as to how the character is to be written. After you learn a few more characters and get hip to a few more phonetic components, you can do a bit better. ("Zǒng 总 is a phonetic component in some other character, right?...Song? Zeng? Oh yeah, cong 总 as in cōngmíng 聪明.") Of course, the phonetic aspect of some characters is more obvious than that of others, but many characters, including some of the most high-frequency ones, give no clue at all as to their pronunciation.

All of this is to say that Chinese is just not very phonetic when compared to English. (English, in turn, is less phonetic than a language like German or Spanish, but Chinese isn't even in the same ballpark.) It is not true, as some people outside the field tend to think, that Chinese is not phonetic at all, though a perfectly intelligent beginning student could go several months without noticing this fact. Just how phonetic the language is a very complex issue. Educated opinions range from 25% (Zhao Yuanren)7 to around 66% (DeFrancis),8 though the latter estimate assumes more knowledge of phonetic components than most learners are likely to have. One could say that Chinese is phonetic in the way that sex is aerobic: technically so, but in practical use not the most salient thing about it. Furthermore, this phonetic aspect of the language doesn't really become very useful until you've learned a few hundred characters, and even when you've learned two thousand, the feeble phoneticity of Chinese will never provide you with the constant memory prod that the phonetic quality of English does.

Which means that often you just completely forget how to write a character. Period. If there is no obvious semantic clue in the radical, and no helpful phonetic component somewhere in the character, you're just sunk. And you're sunk whether your native language is Chinese or not; contrary to popular myth, Chinese people are not born with the ability to memorize arbitrary squiggles. In fact, one of the most gratifying experiences a foreign student of Chinese can have is to see a native speaker come up a complete blank when called upon to write the characters for some relatively common word. You feel an enormous sense of vindication and relief to see a native speaker experience the exact same difficulty you experience every day.

This is such a gratifying experience, in fact, that I have actually kept a list of characters that I have observed Chinese people forget how to write. (A sick, obsessive activity, I know.) I have seen highly literate Chinese people forget how to write certain characters in common words like "tin can", "knee", "screwdriver", "snap" (as in "to snap one's fingers"), "elbow", "ginger", "cushion", "firecracker", and so on. And when I say "forget", I mean that they often cannot even put the first stroke down on the paper. Can you imagine a well-educated native English speaker totally forgetting how to write a word like "knee" or "tin can"? Or even a rarely-seen word like "scabbard" or "ragamuffin"? I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the "Harvard of China". Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word "sneeze"?? Yet this state of affairs is by no means uncommon in China. English is simply orders of magnitude easier to write and remember. No matter how low-frequency the word is, or how unorthodox the spelling, the English speaker can always come up with something, simply because there has to be some correspondence between sound and spelling. One might forget whether "abracadabra" is hyphenated or not, or get the last few letters wrong on "rhinoceros", but even the poorest of spellers can make a reasonable stab at almost anything. By contrast, often even the most well-educated Chinese have no recourse but to throw up their hands and ask someone else in the room how to write some particularly elusive character.

As one mundane example of the advantages of a phonetic writing system, here is one kind of linguistic situation I encountered constantly while I was in France. (Again I use French as my canonical example of an "easy" foreign language.) I wake up one morning in Paris and turn on the radio. An ad comes on, and I hear the word "amortisseur" several times. "What's an amortisseur?" I think to myself, but as I am in a hurry to make an appointment, I forget to look the word up in my haste to leave the apartment. A few hours later I'm walking down the street, and I read, on a sign, the word "AMORTISSEUR" -- the word I heard earlier this morning. Beneath the word on the sign is a picture of a shock absorber. Aha! So "amortisseur" means "shock absorber". And voila! I've learned a new word, quickly and painlessly, all because the sound I construct when reading the word is the same as the sound in my head from the radio this morning -- one reinforces the other. Throughout the next week I see the word again several times, and each time I can reconstruct the sound by simply reading the word phonetically -- "a-mor-tis-seur". Before long I can retrieve the word easily, use it in conversation, or write it in a letter to a friend. And the process of learning a foreign language begins to seem less daunting.

When I first went to Taiwan for a few months, the situation was quite different. I was awash in a sea of characters that were all visually interesting but phonetically mute. I carried around a little dictionary to look up unfamiliar characters in, but it's almost impossible to look up a character in a Chinese dictionary while walking along a crowded street (more on dictionary look-up later), and so I didn't get nearly as much phonetic reinforcement as I got in France. In Taiwan I could pass a shop with a sign advertising shock absorbers and never know how to pronounce any of the characters unless I first look them up. And even then, the next time I pass the shop I might have to look the characters up again. And again, and again. The reinforcement does not come naturally and easily.

4. Because you can't cheat by using cognates.

I remember when I had been studying Chinese very hard for about three years, I had an interesting experience. One day I happened to find a Spanish-language newspaper sitting on a seat next to me. I picked it up out of curiosity. "Hmm," I thought to myself. "I've never studied Spanish in my life. I wonder how much of this I can understand." At random I picked a short article about an airplane crash and started to read. I found I could basically glean, with some guesswork, most of the information from the article. The crash took place near Los Angeles. 186 people were killed. There were no survivors. The plane crashed just one minute after take-off. There was nothing on the flight recorder to indicate a critical situation, and the tower was unaware of any emergency. The plane had just been serviced three days before and no mechanical problems had been found. And so on. After finishing the article I had a sudden discouraging realization: Having never studied a day of Spanish, I could read a Spanish newspaper more easily than I could a Chinese newspaper after more than three years of studying Chinese.

What was going on here? Why was this "foreign" language so transparent? The reason was obvious: cognates -- those helpful words that are just English words with a little foreign make-up.9 I could read the article because most of the operative words were basically English: aeropuerto, problema mechanico, un minuto, situacion critica, emergencia, etc. Recognizing these words as just English words in disguise is about as difficult as noticing that Superman is really Clark Kent without his glasses. That these quasi-English words are easier to learn than Chinese characters (which might as well be quasi-Martian) goes without saying.

Imagine you are a diabetic, and you find yourself in Spain about to go into insulin shock. You can rush into a doctor's office, and, with a minimum of Spanish and a couple of pieces of guesswork ("diabetes" is just "diabetes" and "insulin" is "insulina", it turns out), you're saved. In China you'd be a goner for sure, unless you happen to have a dictionary with you, and even then you would probably pass out while frantically looking for the first character in the word for insulin. Which brings me to the next reason why Chinese is so hard.

5. Because even looking up a word in the dictionary is complicated.

One of the most unreasonably difficult things about learning Chinese is that merely learning how to look up a word in the dictionary is about the equivalent of an entire semester of secretarial school. When I was in Taiwan, I heard that they sometimes held dictionary look-up contests in the junior high schools. Imagine a language where simply looking a word up in the dictionary is considered a skill like debate or volleyball! Chinese is not exactly what you would call a user-friendly language, but a Chinese dictionary is positively user-hostile.

Figuring out all the radicals and their variants, plus dealing with the ambiguous characters with no obvious radical at all is a stupid, time-consuming chore that slows the learning process down by a factor of ten as compared to other languages with a sensible alphabet or the equivalent. I'd say it took me a good year before I could reliably find in the dictionary any character I might encounter. And to this day, I will very occasionally stumble onto a character that I simply can't find at all, even after ten minutes of searching. At such times I raise my hands to the sky, Job-like, and consider going into telemarketing.

Chinese must also be one of the most dictionary-intensive languages on earth. I currently have more than twenty Chinese dictionaries of various kinds on my desk, and they all have a specific and distinct use. There are dictionaries with simplified characters used on the mainland, dictionaries with the traditional characters used in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and dictionaries with both. There are dictionaries that use the Wade-Giles romanization, dictionaries that use pinyin, and dictionaries that use other more surrealistic romanization methods. There are dictionaries of classical Chinese particles, dictionaries of Beijing dialect, dictionaries of chéngyǔ (four-character idioms), dictionaries of xiēhòuyǔ(special allegorical two-part sayings), dictionaries of yànyǔ (proverbs), dictionaries of Chinese communist terms, dictionaries of Buddhist terms, reverse dictionaries... on and on. An exhaustive hunt for some elusive or problematic lexical item can leave one's desk "strewn with dictionaries as numerous as dead soldiers on a battlefield."10

For looking up unfamiliar characters there is another method called the four-corner system. This method is very fast -- rumored to be, in principle, about as fast as alphabetic look-up (though I haven't met anyone yet who can hit the winning number each time on the first try). Unfortunately, learning this method takes about as much time and practice as learning the Dewey decimal system. Plus you are then at the mercy of the few dictionaries that are arranged according to the numbering scheme of the four-corner system. Those who have mastered this system usually swear by it. The rest of us just swear.

Another problem with looking up words in the dictionary has to do with the nature of written Chinese. In most languages it's pretty obvious where the word boundaries lie -- there are spaces between the words. If you don't know the word in question, it's usually fairly clear what you should look up. (What actually constitutes a word is a very subtle issue, of course, but for my purposes here, what I'm saying is basically correct.) In Chinese there are spaces between characters, but it takes quite a lot of knowledge of the language and often some genuine sleuth work to tell where word boundaries lie; thus it's often trial and error to look up a word. It would be as if English were written thus:

FEAR LESS LY OUT SPOKE N BUT SOME WHAT HUMOR LESS NEW ENG LAND BORN LEAD ACT OR GEORGE MICHAEL SON EX PRESS ED OUT RAGE TO DAY AT THE STALE MATE BE TWEEN MAN AGE MENT AND THE ACT OR 'S UNION BE CAUSE THE STAND OFF HAD SET BACK THE TIME TABLE FOR PRO DUC TION OF HIS PLAY, A ONE MAN SHOW CASE THAT WAS HIS FIRST RUN A WAY BROAD WAY BOX OFFICE SMASH HIT. "THE FIRST A MEND MENT IS AT IS SUE" HE PRO CLAIM ED. "FOR A CENS OR OR AN EDIT OR TO EDIT OR OTHER WISE BLUE PENCIL QUESTION ABLE DIA LOG JUST TO KOW TOW TO RIGHT WING BORN AGAIN BIBLE THUMP ING FRUIT CAKE S IS A DOWN RIGHT DIS GRACE."

Imagine how this difference would compound the dictionary look-up difficulties of a non-native speaker of English. The passage is pretty trivial for us to understand, but then we already know English. For them it would often be hard to tell where the word boundaries were supposed to be. So it is, too, with someone trying to learn Chinese.

6. Then there's classical Chinese (wenyanwen).

Forget it. Way too difficult. If you think that after three or four years of study you'll be breezing through Confucius and Mencius in the way third-year French students at a comparable level are reading Diderot and Voltaire, you're sadly mistaken. There are some westerners who can comfortably read classical Chinese, but most of them have a lot of gray hair or at least tenure.

Unfortunately, classical Chinese pops up everywhere, especially in Chinese paintings and character scrolls, and most people will assume anyone literate in Chinese can read it. It's truly embarrassing to be out at a Chinese restaurant, and someone asks you to translate some characters on a wall hanging.

"Hey, you speak Chinese. What does this scroll say?" You look up and see that the characters are written in wenyan, and in incomprehensible "grass-style" calligraphy to boot. It might as well be an EKG readout of a dying heart patient.

"Uh, I can make out one or two of the characters, but I couldn't tell you what it says," you stammer. "I think it's about a phoenix or something."

"Oh, I thought you knew Chinese," says your friend, returning to their menu. Never mind that an honest-to-goodness Chinese person would also just scratch their head and shrug; the face that is lost is yours.

Whereas modern Mandarin is merely perversely hard, classical Chinese is deliberately impossible. Here's a secret that sinologists won't tell you: A passage in classical Chinese can be understood only if you already know what the passage says in the first place. This is because classical Chinese really consists of several centuries of esoteric anecdotes and in-jokes written in a kind of terse, miserly code for dissemination among a small, elite group of intellectually-inbred bookworms who already knew the whole literature backwards and forwards, anyway. An uninitiated westerner can no more be expected to understand such writing than Confucius himself, if transported to the present, could understand the entries in the "personal" section of the classified ads that say things like: "Hndsm. SWGM, 24, 160, sks BGM or WGM for gentle S&M, mod. bndg., some lthr., twosm or threesm ok, have own equip., wheels, 988-8752 lv. mssg. on ans. mach., no weirdos please."

In fairness, it should be said that classical Chinese gets easier the more you attempt it. But then so does hitting a hole in one, or swimming the English channel in a straitjacket.

7. Because there are too many romanization methods and they all suck.

Well, perhaps that's too harsh. But it is true that there are too many of them, and most of them were designed either by committee or by linguists, or -- even worse -- by a committee of linguists. It is, of course, a very tricky task to devise a romanization method; some are better than others, but all involve plenty of counterintuitive spellings.11 And if you're serious about a career in Chinese, you'll have to grapple with at least four or five of them, not including the bopomofu phonetic symbols used in Taiwan. There are probably a dozen or more romanization schemes out there somewhere, most of them mercifully obscure and rightfully ignored. There is a standing joke among sinologists that one of the first signs of senility in a China scholar is the compulsion to come up with a new romanization method.

8. Because tonal languages are weird.

Okay, that's very Anglo-centric, I know it. But I have to mention this problem because it's one of the most common complaints about learning Chinese, and it's one of the aspects of the language that westerners are notoriously bad at. Every person who tackles Chinese at first has a little trouble believing this aspect of the language. How is it possible thatshùxué means "mathematics" while shūxuě means "blood transfusion", or that guòjiǎng means "you flatter me" while guǒjiàng means "fruit paste"?

By itself, this property of Chinese would be hard enough; it means that, for us non-native speakers, there is this extra, seemingly irrelevant aspect of the sound of a word that you must memorize along with the vowels and consonants. But where the real difficulty comes in is when you start to really use Chinese to express yourself. You suddenly find yourself straitjacketed -- when you say the sentence with the intonation that feels natural, the tones come out all wrong. For example, if you wish say something like "Hey, that's my water glass you're drinking out of!", and you follow your intonational instincts -- that is, to put a distinct falling tone on the first character of the word for "my" -- you will have said a kind of gibberish that may or may not be understood.

Intonation and stress habits are incredibly ingrained and second-nature. With non-tonal languages you can basically import, mutatis mutandis, your habitual ways of emphasizing, negating, stressing, and questioning. The results may be somewhat non-native but usually understandable. Not so with Chinese, where your intonational contours must always obey the tonal constraints of the specific words you've chosen. Chinese speakers, of course, can express all of the intonational subtleties available in non-tonal languages -- it's just that they do it in a way that is somewhat alien to us speakers of non-tonal languages. When you first begin using your Chinese to talk about subjects that actually matter to you, you find that it feels somewhat like trying to have a passionate argument with your hands tied behind your back -- you are suddenly robbed of some vital expressive tools you hadn't even been aware of having.

9. Because east is east and west is west, and the twain have only recently met.

Language and culture cannot be separated, of course, and one of the main reasons Chinese is so difficult for Americans is that our two cultures have been isolated for so long. The reason reading French sentences like "Le président Bush assure le peuple koweitien que le gouvernement américain va continuer à défendre le Koweit contre la menace irakienne," is about as hard as deciphering pig Latin is not just because of the deep Indo-European family resemblance, but also because the core concepts and cultural assumptions in such utterances stem from the same source. We share the same art history, the same music history, the same history history -- which means that in the head of a French person there is basically the same set of archetypes and the same cultural cast of characters that's in an American's head. We are as familiar with Rimbaud as they are with Rambo. In fact, compared to the difference between China and the U.S., American culture and and French culture seem about as different as Peter Pan and Skippy peanut butter.

Speaking with a Chinese person is usually a different matter. You just can't drop Dickens, Tarzan, Jack the Ripper, Goethe, or the Beatles into a conversation and always expect to be understood. I once had a Chinese friend who had read the first translations of Kafka into Chinese, yet didn't know who Santa Claus was. China has had extensive contact with the West in the last few decades, but there is still a vast sea of knowledge and ideas that is not shared by both cultures.

Similarly, how many Americans other than sinophiles have even a rough idea of the chronology of China's dynasties? Has the average history major here ever heard of Qin Shi Huangdi and his contribution to Chinese culture? How many American music majors have ever heard a note of Peking Opera, or would recognize a pipa if they tripped over one? How many otherwise literate Americans have heard of Lu Xun, Ba Jin, or even Mozi?

What this means is that when Americans and Chinese get together, there is often not just a language barrier, but an immense cultural barrier as well. Of course, this is one of the reasons the study of Chinese is so interesting. It is also one of the reasons it is so damn hard.

Conclusion

I could go on and on, but I figure if the reader has bothered to read this far, I'm preaching to the converted, anyway. Those who have tackled other difficult languages have their own litany of horror stories, I'm sure. But I still feel reasonably confident in asserting that, for an average American, Chinese is significantly harder to learn than any of the other thirty or so major world languages that are usually studied formally at the university level (though Japanese in many ways comes close). Not too interesting for linguists, maybe, but something to consider if you've decided to better yourself by learning a foreign language, and you're thinking "Gee, Chinese looks kinda neat."

It's pretty hard to quantify a process as complex and multi-faceted as language-learning, but one simple metric is to simply estimate the time it takes to master the requisite language-learning skills. When you consider all the above-mentioned things a learner of Chinese has to acquire -- ability to use a dictionary, familiarity with two or three romanization methods, a grasp of principles involved in writing characters (both simplified and traditional) -- it adds up to an awful lot of down time while one is "learning to learn" Chinese.

How much harder is Chinese? Again, I'll use French as my canonical "easy language". This is a very rough and intuitive estimate, but I would say that it takes about three times as long to reach a level of comfortable fluency in speaking, reading, and writing Chinese as it takes to reach a comparable level in French. An average American could probably become reasonably fluent in two Romance languages in the time it would take them to reach the same level in Chinese.

One could perhaps view learning languages as being similar to learning musical instruments. Despite the esoteric glories of the harmonica literature, it's probably safe to say that the piano is a lot harder and more time-consuming to learn. To extend the analogy, there is also the fact that we are all virtuosos on at least one "instrument" (namely, our native language), and learning instruments from the same family is easier than embarking on a completely different instrument. A Spanish person learning Portuguese is comparable to a violinist taking up the viola, whereas an American learning Chinese is more like a rock guitarist trying to learn to play an elaborate 30-stop three-manual pipe organ.

Someone once said that learning Chinese is "a five-year lesson in humility". I used to think this meant that at the end of five years you will have mastered Chinese and learned humility along the way. However, now having studied Chinese for over six years, I have concluded that actually the phrase means that after five years your Chinese will still be abysmal, but at least you will have thoroughly learned humility.

There is still the awe-inspiring fact that Chinese people manage to learn their own language very well. Perhaps they are like the gradeschool kids that Baroque performance groups recruit to sing Bach cantatas. The story goes that someone in the audience, amazed at hearing such youthful cherubs flawlessly singing Bach's uncompromisingly difficult vocal music, asks the choir director, "But how are they able to perform such difficult music?"

"Shh -- not so loud!" says the director, "If you don't tell them it's difficult, they never know."

Bibliography

(A longer version of this paper is available through CRCC, Indiana University, 510 N. Fess, Bloomington, IN, 47408.)

Chen, Heqin, (1928)"Yutiwen yingyong zihui" [Characters used in vernacular literature], Shanghai.

DeFrancis, John (1966) "Why Johnny Can't Read Chinese", Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association, Vol. 1, No. 1, Feb. 1966, pp. 1-20.

DeFrancis, John (1984) The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

DeFrancis, John (1989) Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Kennedy, George (1964) "A Minimum Vocabulary in Modern Chinese", in Selected Works of George Kennedy, Tien-yi Li (ed.), New Haven: Far Eastern Publications.

Mair, Victor (1986) "The Need for an Alphabetically Arranged General Usage Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese: A Review Article of Some Recent Dictionaries and Current Lexicographical Projects", Sino-Platonic Papers, No. 1, February, 1986 (Dept. of Oriental Studies, University of Pennsylvania).

Zhao, Yuanren, (1972) Aspects of Chinese Sociolinguistics, Anwar S. Dil (ed.), Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Notes

I am speaking of the writing system here, but the difficulty of the writing system has such a pervasive effect on literacy and general language mastery that I think the statement as a whole is still valid. back

John DeFrancis, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984, p.153. Most of the issues in this paper are dealt with at length and with great clarity in both this book and in his Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989. back

Incidentally, I'm aware that much of what I've said above applies to Japanese as well, but it seems clear that the burden placed on a learner of Japanese is much lighter because (a) the number of Chinese characters used in Japanese is "only" about 2,000 -- fewer by a factor of two or three compared to the number needed by the average literate Chinese reader; and (b) the Japanese have phonetic syllabaries (the hiragana and katakana characters), which are nearly 100% phonetically reliable and are in many ways easier to master than chaotic English orthography is. back

See, for ex., Chen Heqin, "Yutiwen yingyong zihui" [Characters used in vernacular literature], Shanghai, 1928. back

John DeFrancis deals with this issue, among other places, in "Why Johnny Can't Read Chinese", Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association, Vol. 1, No. 1, Feb. 1966, pp. 1-20. back

George Kennedy, "A Minimum Vocabulary in Modern Chinese", inSelected Works of George Kennedy, Tien-yi Li (ed.), New Haven, 1964, p. 8. back

Zhao Yuanren, Aspects of Chinese Sociolinguistics, Anwar S. Dil (ed.), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976, p. 92. back

John DeFrancis, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, p. 109.back

Charles Hockett reminds me that many of my examples are really instances of loan words, not cognates, but rather than take up space dealing with the issue, I will blur the distinction a bit here. There are phonetic loan words from English into Chinese, of course, but they are scarce curiosities rather than plentiful semantic moorings. back

A phrase taken from an article by Victor Mair with the deceptively boring title " The Need for an Alphabetically Arranged General Usage Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese: A Review Article of Some Recent Dictionaries and Current Lexicographical Projects" (Sino-Platonic Papers, No. 1, February, 1986, Dept. of Oriental Studies, University of Pennsylvania). Mair includes a rather hilarious but realistic account of the tortuous steeplechase of looking up a low-frequency lexical item in his arsenal of Chinese dictionaries. back

I have noticed from time to time that the romanization method first used tends to influence one's accent in Chinese. It seems to me a Chinese person with a very keen ear could distinguish Americans speaking, say, Wade-Giles-accented Chinese from pinyin-accented Chinese. back