November wrap-up

I haven't posted anything for quite a while, but that doesn't mean nothing happened, on the contrary! Ling Ling came to see me for a few days, that was very nice. The weather had been quite bad for a week, with lots of rain, but it improved instantly when she arrived, so we went swimming and made long bike rides along the coast. Needless to say, we had a good time. I skipped 3 days of class, but one day she joined me. Being a language teacher herself, she was curious to see how my teachers are handling things.
Actually, my teachers have been adding a lot of entertainment to their classes lately. We often play games where we have to guess words, or do some role playing. We also have done some presentations by students, showing photos and videos of their home country or travels, and talking about it (in Chinese, of course). I picked a nice selection of images from my travels in the northwest of China, where none of my classmates, nor my teacher had ever been, so it was quite interesting. Also my experience as a volunteer English teacher in Hainan in 2006, on my first visit to China, made a good story.
I went out to foreign restaurants a few times, including two Thai, one in Zeng Cuo An, and one near the university, and I joined a cute (and tall) Chinese girl whom I met a month ago to the Korean grill restaurant at the four-star Ramada hotel where she works as a hostess, welcoming guests with her charming smile and beautiful eyes. She also lives in Zeng Cuo An, so finally a friend who lives nearby. The food was nice too ;-)

The weather is almost like summer again, so I swam a lot this month, and also made a long (40 km) bike tour along the coast, almost up to the airport. I passed a very big beach which I had not seen before. It's called Fantasy Beach, and the surrounding area is developed into a large entertainment park with rides, a big water world, kart racing, night life, and of course shopping. Further north I passed a deserted village, which looks like a ghost town, with crumbling houses and rusting vehicles. Like an apocalyptic movie set. Strange enough, a bit further down the road emerges another equally old neighbourhood, but full of people and very lively.
Continuing around the northeast corner of Xiamen island, I reached Wutong, which has a lighthouse, and from there you can overlook the bay separating the island from the mainland, with plenty of big sailing yachts. After Wutong I had to turn around (or rather, inward), because there is a tall bridge over the bay that also harbours the big marina. Around the bay a whole new suburb of many apartment towers is rising, already finished but still uninhabited, except for the sales offices of the boat dealers. Another charming and lively village nearby is already partly demolished, and will have totally disappeared within a few years, no doubt.
In my village life goes on at the usual slow pace, although there is an ongoing process of entrepreneurial renovation which turns every house into a small hotel or cafe. Some of them are actually rather large and fancy, with prices reaching not so friendly levels. It doesn't stop the stream of young couples and slightly more adventurous singles coming to Zeng Cuo An to escape the hectic life in Guangzhou or Shanghai. The latter are good targets for Chinese practice, and sometimes a nice seafood dinner at my favourite restaurant.

Tomorrow I will get on the train to Nanning again. It has been two months already since I last saw Xiao An, and this time I will have the opportunity to meet the people who I missed on my last visit. It's not a holiday now, so everybody will be there. I have to skip some classes again, but I will bring my textbook, and I have my flashcards app on my phone, loaded with the latest vocabulary...

Hanzi flashcards app for Android

I ported my Hanzi J2ME application which I developed last year to help me memorize Chinese characters using my mobile phone. The original app was written for my Nokia phone which I lost last July, and now I ported it to Android to be able to use it on my current phone. It's been a while already since I did this, but I added some minor improvements today to speed-up loading data from the SD card, so I thought the time was right to write a little blog post about it. The porting process was pretty much straight-forward, but I had to learn a lot about the Android application model, since I never did anything on Android before. Using Eclipse and the Android SDK and emulator, it was not too hard to get it working. The data files are the same as for my original app, so there was no time wasted in re-entering text.
In the mean time I also got the official HSK level 3 word list (600 words), which I also included in the data set. Word lists (or card decks, to use the flashcards terminology) can be selected in any combination through a tree-list interface with check boxes. The only difference in operation is that I included touch gestures as an alternative to the 5-way navigation button in the J2ME app. The translation to touch is straightforward: the 4 directions are translated to swipes, while the center key is implemented as a tap action.
Source code is available on github.

86

That's the result of the comprehensive Chinese test I did on Wednesday. 不错! (not bad!). I did particularly well in the grammar section, with just one mistake. Most other errors were related to writing Chinese characters, which remains the most difficult part of the language, but also the least useful, if you ask me.
My overall score would be the average of the scores for speaking (95), listening (83), and this last test, which adds up to 88. I'm quite happy! We will see if I can keep it up for the next two months. In the second week of January we will have the final exams for this semester.

Mid-term tests

This week we had our mid-term exams, consisting of three parts: listening, speaking, and comprehensive Chinese, which includes vocabulary, grammar, and writing. The listening test was on Monday, and I already got the result today: 83. Not bad! At the speaking exam on Tuesday I scored even higher, no less than 95!
For the speaking exam our class was divided in groups of three students, and we had to practice conversation about six different topics, all of which we had covered in the past two months of class. We did not know the topic for our exam until the last moment, which was determined at random. Lucky for us, we got the easiest topic: introduce yourself. This was not only the first topic covered in class, but also comes up regularly in daily life, so it wasn't so difficult to make some fluent conversation during the exam.
The listening test was more challenging, especially the part where you have to listen to a recorded dialogue followed by a question, and then choose the right answer out of three options. Not only do you have to understand the spoken Chinese, but you also have to be able to read the answers (written in Chinese) to be able to select the proper one. And all that in a very limited time, before the next dialogue starts. And no opportunity for a review. I had to guess several times, because I had no idea what the text was about...
The final test was today, and took me almost the full hour and half to finish. It was not really that difficult, but just a lot of reading and writing, and that still takes a lot of time for me. I can't read or write at normal speed yet, instead I have think about almost every single word, to remember what it means, and how to write it. Often I know how to say it, but not how to write it, and for this test we have to write Chinese characters. Anyway, the result will be announced soon...