Mandarin Mashup June 20, 2012
- Students Learning Mandarin Chinese - KELOLAND TV SIOUX FALLS, SD -
It's one of the most difficult languages in the world to learn, but that's not keeping some Sioux Falls students from trying their hand at Mandarin Chinese during a ten-day summer camp.
"We were moving really, really quickly. We had to remember everything we learned yesterday, and we had to do it again," Lincoln High School Student Chaska McGowan said.
McGowan is spending two weeks in Chinese Camp. The first eight days are online. The final two are in-person presentations.
"For the final two days, we come here to do a lot of really fun activities to do with the students directly face-to-face," Sheree Willis said.
Willis is the Program Director at Confucius Institute at Kansas University. Through a federal grant, she teaches students how to read, write and speak the language 1.3 billion people already know.
"Clearly learning Chinese is a very useful skill and we think we'll open doors for young people in our country who have that skill," Willis said.
Obviously, the students are not expected to be fluent in the language after just ten days. But they are learning about two to three months worth of material compared to a typical language class because they're immersed in the language.
"I was surprised at how much I learned and how difficult it was, and also how interesting it was," McGowan said.
No English is spoken to help students grasp the language, which can be even more difficult because it's tonal.
"Each syllable when pronounced in a different tone means something different," Willis said.
"Like ma means something different if you say ma, ma or ma (in different tones), which really makes a big difference if you're trying to say something and you say it wrong, it could mean something completely different," McGowan said.
McGowan says the challenge has been a lot of fun, and she's hoping it will open more doors in the future. That's just what the program is designed for.
This is the third year the camp has been held through the Sioux Falls School District. The district doesn't have a Chinese class during the school year, but they do offer an online learning program.
© 2012 KELOLAND TV. All Rights Reserved.
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- Siri Really Speaks Chinese — Just Don't Ask Her About Tiananmen - Wall Street Journal
For foreigners picking up Chinese, one of the few perks of learning the incredibly difficult language is how generally encouraging Chinese people are of the effort. Often just a few poorly spoken sentences will earn a neophyte undeserving praise.
Unfortunately for Apple, the Chinese are showing far less understanding as Siri, its voice-controlled artificial intelligence system, learns the language.
Last week at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, the consumer electronics giant unveiled a host of upcoming features tailored to Chinese users, including a Mandarin- and Cantonese-speaking Siri.
Reactions to a number of user video tests of the new Siri (released last week as part of a developmental version of the company's new iOS 6.0 mobile operating system) have so far been mixed.
Chinese-speaking Internet users have complained that, in contrast to her lilting English, Siri speaks Mandarin in a decidedly clipped and clinical manner reminiscent of the robotic voice one hears announcing stops in the country's subways. Yet Siri proves not to have lost her sense of humor in the process of studying the new language, rejecting one tester's marriage proposal by saying she's already fallen in love with his friend's black iPhone and responding to another user's request to play music by telling him she can't because his iPad doesn't have any songs loaded onto it. "All that's there is … a lot of silence," she says.
Tests show Siri handling basic tasks – placing calls, sending text messages – just fine while struggling with some other requests.
Perhaps inevitably, some users have tested her devotion to free speech by asking her questions about the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen Square crackdown—a topic she seems loathe to broach. One screenshot posted to Twitter shows Siri responding to the question "Do you know about the Tiananmen incident?" with the answer: "I couldn't find any appointments related to 'Do you know about Tiananmen.'" A second try with the question rephrased – "What happened on June 4, 1989?"—produced an even stranger response: "I'm sorry, the person you are looking for is not in your address book."
- Screenshots posted to Twitter showing a user's attempt to ask Siri if she knows about the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.
A screenshot posted on China Digital Times suggested Siri wasn't even able to provide directions to Tiananmen Square, though several posts on China's Twitter-like microblogs have shown the virtual assistant encountering errors as she tries to track down other, less politically sensitive locations as well.
"At this point, Siri's Chinese isn't up to snuff. She can understand basic speech, but with complex speech she doesn't work," one reviewer wrote on the popular Sina Weibo microblogging service above a screenshot of Siri producing an error when asked directions to a location in central Beijing. "Right now, she doesn't support searches for some types of information."
It's not clear how Apple's updated artificial intelligence system will work in China once it's released to the general public. Many of the Internet services Siri depends on in the U.S. and elsewhere, including Google's search engine, are sometimes subject to filtering inside China.
Apple declined to comment on Siri's Chinese functionality.
One certainty: The addition of Mandarin to the virtual assistant's linguistic repertoire means the Chinese-speaking world can now commence producing a whole new series of Siri spoof videos – a project that already appears to be under way.
– Paul Mozur. Follow him on Twitter @paulmozur
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