你好!

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, my Skype inbox has seen a recent flurry of traffic from people in China interested in establishing contact, and although there is an almost neverending stream of interesting information about how various players in the data industry (Skype, Google, etc.) are faring in China, none of it points to any systematic scamming along the lines of the well-known 419 scheme.

I did not have my headset in place the other day when one of my new contacts showed up on Skype. I switched to the chat mode and said hi, only to get the two characters in the subject in reply. Although we both knee-jerked a proper response (greeting each other with our respective versions of "Hello!"), the expressions by each party were lost on the other. I knew no Chinese, and my interlocutor knew about the same amount of English. What had occurred, to borrow a line from Cool Hand Luke, was a textbook case of a "failure to communicate," though fortunately not for the same reason.

Now I know these characters are pronounced - more or less - as "knee how" and mean "Hello!" This naturally leads to the question as to the feasibility of learning enough Chinese for it to matter in, say, an exchange over Skype or even a visit to a Chinese restaurant.

I mean, a week ago, I did not know how to say "Hello!" in Chinese. Today, I do. Conceivably, after enough conversations, one might use such an approach to cobble together some kind of serviceable language - perhaps not suitable for the conference room or the word processor - but serviceable nonetheless.

More broadly, it is interesting to consider how my attitude has changed vis-à-vis various languages in my lifetime.

My first contact with a foreign language in school occurred in the sixth grade at P.S. 69 in Queens. Our teacher that year was a certain Miss Smith, and she decided it would be a good idea for all of us to get a head start in learning a foreign language. Sixth grade not being famous for being any kind of democracy, the issue of which language to learn was settled by professorial fiat: we were to learn Spanish from a paperback book titled See It And Say It In Spanish, my class copy of which I ran across during my recent visits back East.

The following year I began attending J.H.S. 145, a few blocks in the other direction from our apartment, and for some reason - probably the fact that my mom was a language teacher who actively taught French (though she was certified for a couple of others) - I ended up taking French with one Mrs. Tucker. French was to remain a staple of my curriculum for the rest of my high school career, and indeed, were it not for the quiet intensity of Mrs. Vamvakis and her take-no-prisoners approach to teaching French, I should have probably gone crazy from boredom in the 11th and 12th grades.

I'm sure I've covered my experience with Russian in college - probably several times over. Whereas Spanish and French were relatively tractable - virtually identical alphabets, common roots, and so on - stepping into a Russian classroom was a move wa-a-y out of my comfort zone, but in the end it worked out.

In the intervening years, I've picked up snippets of various lingo: a sentence in Italian here, a few phrases of German there, all designed to get me into trouble easily (a joke), but all - except possibly three sentences of Hungarian I memorized for a presentation in Budapest in 1992 - sharing a fundamental thread of familiarity once some preliminary barriers were broken. My knowledge of Japanese and Chinese however, is completely fragmentary and limited to the kinds of "borrow words" that have entered English (e.g., "kamikaze," "sushi," "feng shui," "wonton," "gung-ho").

One thing that has interested me about Chinese for the longest time is how one arranges words to form meaningful sentences when, for example, verbs do not change to show tenses or the person, number, or gender of the subject and nouns don't change to reflect number or case. It's not as if I don't have enough else to do in life, but I think a low-level, persistent effort to learn Chinese might have beneficial long-term results. After all, how hard can it be? (I mean, nearly a billion people speak Mandarin, and they all learned it as children! :^)

Cheers...

Stuff be happ'nin'...

One of the goals of this trip to Houston is to have the NASA flight surgeons poke and prod my creaking carcass and (hopefully) certify me as capable of continuing to do my work in the MCC for another couple of years. I awoke a few minutes ago to find out via email that I should report to the medical facility at JSC tomorrow at 7:30 am for lab work (blood, urine) and then return in the early afternoon for the first part of the physical.

It was fortunate that I rose when I did (around 6:30 pm), as I started preparing a boxed dinner before sitting down to check my mail, and the rules state that I must fast for 12 hours prior to the lab work. (Technically, I have between 5 and 65 more minutes within which to stuff my face with substances other than water, if I so choose, but I digress...)

After four days on the job, I have put in just over a 40-hour work week. Today, after returning to my room, I got a call at about 10 am asking if I could cover an EVA telecon at Building 1 at 10:30. I did, and then went to my client's office to speak with a colleague about helping edit a glossary that is descended from the one I developed back when I worked as an employee there.

I have been finding it difficult to stick to a preset sleep schedule when I work nights, reverting to a simple sleep policy that I adopted when I was in the Marines: never pass up an opportunity for some rack drill.

When I got the call for the telecon this morning, I was in bed, just drifting off, and would surely have fallen asleep had the phone not rung. After visiting the client's office, I ate lunch at a Vietnamese phơ restaurant and returned to my room, falling asleep around 1:30 or 2 pm. The quality of the sleep was poor; I woke several times and had to force myself to go back to sleep each time.

* * *In other news, my brother emailed to tell me that his daughter had gaven birth to a girl in Charlotte 8 weeks ago. Congratulations, Kristi!

I ran across the Okapi framework while surfing yesterday. It looks as if it may be able to do what I require in the translation memory department, though that really shouldn't deter me from getting more comfortable with SQL.

Hmmm... two and a half hours until I ought to leave for work. Perhaps I should try for a power nap?

Cheers...

First-of-the-month meme...

I've heard that one of my clients has changed its payment policy, at least on an interim basis.
     -- December

It took a while, but I finally got all my invoices for October out, in the hope that I'll eventually be paid.
     -- November

I put another chunk of the translation under my belt this morning, putting me in fairly good position to finish the job tomorrow, though I will probably leave the final review for Monday morning.
     -- October

I hadn't taken a close enough look at the interpreter schedule yesterday when I found it wedged under the handle of my room door; for some reason, I thought I was the early guy this morning. I was wrong.
     -- September

Two independent - or perhaps not - sources indicate that the campaign might be delayed by some as-yet unspecified period of time.
     -- August

Today was one of those days where you get the feeling you haven't done anything, and yet, things get done.
     -- July

I tried to get out of the store as early as possible so as to put some additional time into the paper chase (one major goal of two was accomplished over the two off days; I need to check over the figures for that, complete the second goal, and address two other items that were added to my plate).
     -- June

As I emerged from unconsciousness this morning, I felt more than saw or heard the cat sitting on the bed a few inches from my face, and then I became aware of a fairly insistent purring, which I thought was unusual for Baby as it was quite loud and annoying, eventually crystallizing into the ringing of my alarm clock, which I had set for 4 o'clock yesterday afternoon, to wake me from my nap.
     -- May

I don't think I've ever been a big fan of April Fool's jokes, mostly because I find most of them decidedly unfunny.
     -- April

Had to do some scrambling to offset some heavy invoices hitting the store account.
     -- March

The French have a slang term to describe coffee made in the American style: jus de chaussettes, or literally, "sock juice."
     -- February

Work actually stopped at 6 pm last night as people got ready for a party at the "Proton Club," located a short walk from the hotel.
     -- January

Wow!

Cheers...

(h/t bandicoot, kitiara)