Christopher > Recent Status Updates

I think I'm in love. I have never before found a Chinese grammar that was really worth reading. Some are crazy enough to only give Pinyin, no 汉字! Most are built around a purely artificial Latinate framework that absolutely does not work for Chinese. Many are so artificial in their selection of sentences and fail to give any real sense of the language. This one seems to be the answer for all those problems.

There's just too many mistakes in this book. I find something wrong with the English, the Chinese, the translation, or the Romanization on almost every page. It's turned into a game, finding the errors. While I try to be pragmatic and accept finding the errors as a learning activity, it's also very distracting and does nothing to foster confidence.

Brownlee makes way too many assumptions of issues of great importance to his conclusions, making it difficult to take them seriously. He treats modern articles of faith as if they are bedrock facts. While they very well may be mythical, to simply declare that they are with no real discussion is intellectually irresponsible.

Almost there! Three years! Three years I've spent on this book! A year studying Chinese almost full time. A year reading other books in Chinese in preparation. And then about seven or eight months of 射雕英雄传, already the longest book I've ever read with still over a hundred pages to go!

Such a delightful story, but I wish it felt more Korean. As with the old Vietnamese lit I have read, every allusion calls back to Chinese culture.

I am quite impressed with this story, so perfect in every way, such great pace and tempo and diction. Probably going to end up as my favorite medieval romance or story outside of Scandinavia.

No only are his pronouncements on Chinese hilarious, but he seems equally uncertain in his English etymology. I want to enjoy this book for what it offers about its main topics, but when so very many of his asides are bogus, his quality as a scholar can't but be called into doubt.

Almost there. Almost three years of study to get to this point.

"We don't like what this person says so we're going to take his word and define it in a way that makes it incompatible with his usage, then we're going to mock him for using the word wrongly." This seems to be Chomsky's MO whenever anybody comes up with arguments discomforting to Chomsky.

Too many foreign words in the text. Amdani, chowkidar, faltu. Too often I'm left with a faint idea what's going on. Some I can find translations for, like prostration for pronaam or lieutenant for jamadar, but not always. And sometimes whole sentences are in Bangla, sentences unrelated to the following English one, according to Google Translate, which I keep having to use. I wouldn't translate like this.

The most flawed assumption is the one that language is distinctly human. How can such a claim possibly be justified based on anything but our own ignorance? And especially with Chomsky's idea that language is internal rather than external, I truly can't believe there's justification for pretending we know what the internal mental life of any animal is. Speciesism is the basis of linguistics, no wonder it fails so!

The first two thirds were phenomenal. Then it became about as boring as can be. I hope it's just a brief interlude.

He doesn't inspire confidence, but I am going to have to hope he knows his own speciality better than Chinese.

The problem seems to me to be a misplaced scientism. The only questions of interest are those that meet a very strict definition of science. I agree that science should be strictly defined in such a constricting way, but I deny that the questions which fall thereunder are the only ones of interest! To ignore half the problem is a recipe for disaster.

I love this book so much more than I had expected.