Stuff and Moonshine

Continuing to work at it every day, hoping at some point it will click. One of the reasons I’ve been doing this is that I wanted to see if I really am as bad at learning languages as I feel I am. I’m still undecided— I’m reasonably good at doing the exercises in the course, but a lot of the time I feel like a Chines Room— like I can fill in the missing word, etc., correctly without actually understanding the overall sentence at a glance.

Description of a conference of linguists in post-1911-Revolution (1913) China, trying to come up with a scheme of phonetic characters and also a unified pronunciation scheme for the whole country. Which went about as well as you’d expect.

Sounds like at one point there was an attempt at gerrymandering Mandarin, which is not a pair of words I usually get to use together.

(Googles Yüan Shih-k`ai)  Whoah. OK, you never really hear about that period.

(Reads further down, gets to the ‘teens and early ‘twenties) I should have known somebody would suggest Esperanto sooner or later.

(Even further) Oh good, here comes Y. R. Chao, the reason I looked this up in the first place.

(1930s) “Many supporters looked not to themselves but to a strong man to force the reform of the script, as had happened in the case of Turkey. "If China had a Kemal Pasha," said a Western admirer of the National Language Romanization, "we should probably see this system replace the characters in daily life."”

Uh....