Monthly Archives: March 2009

SXSW 2009 Thoughts

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As is my usual yearly tradition, here are a few collected thoughts inspired by the scheduled aspects of SXSW 2009. I hope you enjoy them!

From Educating Kids Through Gaming

Although this “Core Conversation” was a bit rambling and confrontational at times, there were common threads in the anecdotal examples which the participants discussed. The easiest way to inject an educational experience into a game is to cause the player to actively reflect on their time, through writing or discussion. With regards to games, it seemed like the most interesting approach to causing learning through games was to have a teacher guide their students through reflective thinking and writing about their experience. I remember book reports being rather useless and often cheated on by extreme use of Cliff Notes. Why not start having Game Reports instead? Many modern games do carry a good narrative, and there’s arguably much more incentive to experience the game world firsthand. It could create a good habit of reflection and critical thinking over a medium that the current generation is more likely to actively expose themselves to instead of books.

Also, it seemed that entertaining formats are natural incentives towards developing the basic skills that are needed to access them – skills which many children do not yet have. Arithmetic games need basic arithmetic knowledge. Adventure games typically need reading skills. Would it be so bad to provide “pure” adventure games to illiterate kids to encourage them to read?

In either case, I think the way forward will be for teachers to develop skills as shepherds that assist in causing learners to actively seek out value from their experiences. There are certainly risks associated with blindly tossing kids games to play, but with a guide present, children can be encouraged to make the most of their experiences, regardless of whether they are pure entertainment or traditional “edutainment.”

From What Can We Learn From Games

In this panel, I especially enjoyed the dialog between a questioner, Warren Spector, and Henry Jenkins near the end of their talk. The questioner wanted to know how to save the world through games, and WS and HJ had some unexpectedly blunt responses. Warren Spector responded that people should give up the idea that they are somehow going to change the world through content creation. He believed that the best thing you could do would be to give someone a world complex enough that they start developing system-level thinking. Henry Jenkins said that we should not expect games to produce social activists any more than we can point to games as the origin of psycho killers. It was a nice dose of reality just when I needed it.

From Journey to the Center of Design

Now available to view via Youtube! [Part 1, Part 2]

Jared Spool’s talk was one of the most entertaining this year, and it was also one of the most iconoclastic and thought-provoking. So much good stuff to talk about in this one, but i’ll try to keep it to two paragraphs.

He’s been doing research on the things that companies and groups do that produce great products, and he ended up splitting the “things that companies and groups do” into five groups – namely, tricks, techniques, process, methodology, and dogma, with each one reflecting more and more unwavering belief in formality, until you end up with a quasi-religious viewpoint. Surprisingly, the groups that did the best relied almost solely on tricks and techniques, with little tolerance for the rest. This fits with my experience, and to me, feels pretty validating, so I can’t be counted upon to provide much criticism for this finding.

He took this schema and then proceeded to knock on the door of User-Centered Design dogma, telling us that there’s never been any actual research proving that these practices actually work. Instead, Spool gave us some real-world practices that he’s found do actually work in providing a good user experience. Now, keep in mind that although these don’t seem like design activities, if they have an impact on the end result, then we should be aware of them. The first was having a shared group vision. Every team member should be able to independently describe what the user experience will be like in five years.The second was a feedback loop. Jared’s pH test for the presence of a feedback loop was this question: In the last six weeks, have you spent at least two hours watching someone use yours or a competitor’s design? The third was a good culture. The question for this was interesting, too: In the last 6 weeks, have you rewarded a team member for creating a major design failure? Jared’s talk was all about converting from blind faith in a design dogma to a results-based set of techniques with which to inform design.

From other stuff…

I enjoyed several other panels, and took some limited notes, but these were the main themes that I felt ran through my experience. The discipline and practice of working on the web is advancing, and although it is still young, the worlds of business and learning are cautiously reaching out to learn lessons from the work that people are creating on the web. We’re an industry that is growing more quickly than other industries of the past, less formalized and more communal in nature, but still an industry that is exploring what its practical reach and applications are. The developers and builders that go first are trying many things, making mistakes, and learning, and as a whole, we all benefit from that. It’s a promising time to be working on the web, and SXSW has again proven to be a useful reflection for the web community to glance at.

Jim Cramer’s Folly

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Man, it sure seems like Jon Stewart pulled Jim Cramer apart. It’s sad that Comedy Central is the only place I feel like I could have seen an interview this awkward and effective at informing the public. I’m concerned about the surprise to which Cramer professed about being lied to by CEO’s, though. Why would he be surprised about getting lied to, when he talked about manipulating prices through effective tomfoolery himself?

Seems like when you’re an insider with access, it’s okay to lie to people as long as they’re outsiders, but how can you expect such shifty people to tell the truth to each other?

What Americans Need to Know About Chinese “Tones”

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I always had trouble with the spoken language when I first started learning Mandarin. A friend in my dorm, Ann, gave me the most exasperated looks when she offered to help, then found herself helplessly lost in an endless loop with me.

Her: “Now, repeat after me. Bu.”

Me: “BOO.”

Her: “Bu.”

Me: “BOOooU?”

Her: “Bu!”

Me: “Hmm.”

Obviously, something wasn’t translating. In a normal Chinese class these days, you’ll get taught that there are four or five tones that you can use when pronouncing a syllable. When you get taught, your teacher will most likely speak verrry slowwwly, and overemphasize his or her pronounciation, with sharp changes in pitch.

When I was a student, my professor, Zhuang lao-shi, taught us through this method. We repeated after her: “BOO”, “booOOO”, “BooOO”, “BOoo”, singing awkwardly and uncomfortably through the lesson. To Americans, the word “tone” makes us think of tonal pitch, and the do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do training we endured as children – so, when I was hearing this stuff, all I could tell was that each tone was supposed to change in pitch. First tone – high pitch. Second tone – low to high. Third tone – kinda starting in the middle, getting low, then going back up. Fourth tone – starts high, then ends low. Fifth tone – well, let’s just say that fifth tone was inscrutable, as it’s supposed to be “toneless.” But, if you’re anything like me, you might have wondered wonder how anything can’t have a pitch, the same way a young chemistry student might wonder how a solid could have a pH acidity reading if you can’t dip your pH paper into it.

So, in spite of my confusion, I continued onwards, speaking slowly and in a way that caused Chinese people to ask why I didn’t speak with my real voice. I got through three years of Chinese training in college, but unfortunately Chinese departments are so deathly afraid of losing all their students that they’ll give you A’s if you can just read and write. I sounded nasal and weird, and wasn’t precisely sure what was going on that was wrong, and left with the real misconception that Chinese have some unnatural ear for pitch that Americans don’t.

Then, years later, in the middle of a board game in which I was fumbling through my Chinese, I heard someone pronounce a syllable in an interesting way. “HuuuUUUUU,” went the word. It’s what you say when you switch out a piece in Mah Jong, and when heard in this context, it was spoken as a monotone that increased slowly and confidently in intensity, ending with an emphasis, as if a parent is giving a stern warning meant to discourage, and ends up emphasizing the second syllable to leave an ominous warning at last, i.e. “gordoNNNN… don’t you dare touch that cookie!”

It gave me pause, because the slowness of the pronunciation made it obvious to me that it was the fabled Second Tone… but the monotone threw me for a loop. If it could be that the pitch could be held constant, but the emphasis could change within a single syllable, was that what I was missing out on all those years in class?

Could it be that the word “tone” just struck an immediate, lasting, and fundamentally incorrect mental assumption about spoken Chinese that let me block out other variations in the pronunciation of words, such as emphasis and intensity?

Experience implied that an inconsistency so striking was worth a look. So, for several months, I attempted to change the way I listened to Chinese, listening for emphasis instead of pitch. Slowly, the importance of emphasis began to unfold before me, and I realized that steady strong emphasis was the telltale sign of first tone. An emphasis that slowly built like a crescendo was a sign of second. Fourth tone, with it’s sharp initial emphasis and quick drop-off, became a completely different beast to me – pronounced in this way, it sounds very harsh to Western ears, and can make the speaker sound agitated or angry in excited contexts. Third was like fourth, with a quick return to emphasis that hangs in the air, more enunciated the slower the word is pronounced. Fifth tone finally made sense – the lack of any emphasis at all, or a “soft” word.

Word after word, phrase after phrase, I started hearing things in a completely different light.

“BAA-ba”, pronounced with a constant strong emphasis in the first syllable, with a soft or no-emphasis second word following, is the way you say “father,” so you can imagine the difference between that, and nasally pronouncing the first syllable with a high pitch and then searching for an inexplicable no-pitch sound in the second.

Changing the way I understood tones made it much easier to listen to the flow of spoken Chinese. So much of real-world Chinese is relatively pitch-less but emphasized very dramatically, that it can be completely overwhelming and foreign to Americans who mistook tones for being only pitches.

In reality, much of American spoken English contains within it embedded meaning based on the emphasis within words and within sentences. I doubt that this is commonly taught to foreign speakers of English, but it’s there nonetheless. Americans definitely can understand how the emphasis put on a word can change its meaning significantly. Not only that, but there are far more than five tones in English (how do you classify “Shiiieeeet”?)! So why don’t Americans pick up on this more quickly? I have a theory.

The first reason is that horrible translation of “Si Sheng”, “Four Tones”. Tone connotes pitch too strongly in English, and I fear that it sends people down the wrong cognitive path, as it did for me. Secondly, Chinese are so certain that Americans just can’t speak Chinese, that they teach it by speaking extremely slowly, carefully enunciating with wide variations in pitch. When we attempt to mimic that, I believe that our brains pick up on the pitch changes first, and then as the words speed up, the teachers move to naturally using emphasis while the students are left stumbling over pitch changes that are completely foreign to Americans. Many completely give up, and just end up speaking all words as emphasis-less monotone, expecting all native Chinese speakers to be as patient and encouraging as their poor teachers.

The third one is a bit more confrontational to discuss. If you take a look about the Wikipedia entry about pinyin, the generally-accepted Romanization of Chinese words, you’ll see that it explicitly states that tones are changes in pitch. The graph you see on the right-hand side is pretty much the same thing that was given to me in handout form when I started learning. It’s the establishment way of teaching people, but it’s not enough. Sure, if you tune into a government official speaking to the public, they will sound almost musical in nature, shifting pitch in a slow, deliberate manner, and in this way, they express the official-ness of their words. But, if you pay attention, you’ll notice what’s present in every bit of conversational Mandarin – the sharp contrasts of emphasis that stand out with every syllable.

How would you fix it, and make it easier for Americans to learn Chinese? I’d definitely just abandon the concept of tone-as-pitch. Just throw it overboard. It’s too confusing for Americans to focus on pitch, and I think we’d learn less bad habits if we were given some mental symbolism that didn’t send us down the wrong path. Perhaps emphasis is the right word, perhaps not. At the least, the example in differences between pronunciation of a long-drawn out second tone, and a quick, spitting emphasis in fourth tone could go a long way towards demonstrating the difference. Having both male and female teachers during lessons about spoken Chinese might also help us get rid of our habits of attempting to mimic pitch only. In addition, learning several common Chinese sayings and then breaking them down might help. Once I learned how to pronounce “Gong Xi Fa Cai” (“Happy Chinese New Year”) perfectly from a friend, it was easy – but if I’d have started by reading the pinyin out loud, I’d have sounded quite ridiculous.

Nowadays, I’ve improved slightly in pronunciation and a great deal in comprehension, but unfortunately am past the days when I have a ton of time to practice. In reality, there’s both pitch, emphasis, and more going on inside the rhythm and meter of everyday Mandarin, and even knowing what I know now, it’s still a difficult mountain to climb. If I could have had this revelation earlier, I think it could have helped out, but it’s my hope that challenging the status quo on this one might do some good even if I’m hopeless. :)