Though I am confident I did well in Hong Kong and the World, in no way did it end on the same high note that Humanity did. On the other hand, it was my last final, meaning that I was then done with the semester—a fact that I now feel was bittersweet at best.
This final was organized much in the same way as my other finals here at HKU. Given the entire two-hour slot, there were two essays to write with a good selection of prompts. There are hardly any questions asked during the final because the prompts are all approved my other professors, often at other universities, as well as by the university (the department specifically if I remember correctly).
As such, all my finals except this one went by quietly. There were pens righting and the professor staring down students to mitigate the likelihood of cheating, as well as flustered students working all the way up to when time is called. This one was different though in that it was in the Lindsay Rider Sports Centre.
This Lindsay Rider Sports Centre I’d never heard of before. The only sports centers I knew of were the Stanley Ho Sports Centre which I believe is near the Sassoon Road/ Medical School Campus, and the Flora Ho Sports Centre, which I would see on the bus ride to school every day.
So not knowing where this Lindsay Rider Sports Centre was, I figured I’d ask the tutor, and what better time to ask the tutor than during the last tutorial, when the tutor was soliciting questions about the final. So I raised my hand and asked the question, “Where exactly is the Lindsay Rider Sports Centre?” Many people in the twenty-five-person tutorial laughed. Who was I to ask such a stupid question, right?
Well the tutor answered me. I was to go to the Flora Ho Sports Centre and follow the signs, because the two sports centers happened to be connected. Those people in the tutorial that had just laughed at me then took down notes for where they were supposed to go for the final—they were just to principled to ask themselves and just too polite to not laugh at my question.
I showed up on time—though it was more like forty-five minutes early, since I didn’t want to be late and had but a rough idea of where the venue was exactly. I found some people to talk to, friends even (though more like a person and a friend, respectively), so it wasn’t too bad of a wait.
The examination room turned out to be a sizeable gymnasium. It was cold (apparently low 60s are like piercing icicles to me now) and had noisy ventilation that served little to no purpose, seeing that it was freezing. With such a big examination room, it was no surprise that we were sharing the venue with two other classes. It was more of a surprise to me that we were sharing the gym with two math classes, especially after my annoyance during the test.
The clocks started at 9:30 a.m. and I got to work. My hands were freezing but I did my best to warm them up, mostly by starting to write my examination. Almost immediately, they had to make an announcement for one of the math classes. It was to fix a mistake in the answer choices, which, seeing that it was a math final, was understandable. Whatever, back to work.
All of ten minutes later, the other math class had a correction to announce. Unfortunately, this time I was in the middle of my train of thought, and that little statement (after being repeated twice lasting a few minutes) derailed it. I stared down one of the many people administering the examination to voice my frustration.
Unfortunately, this happened throughout the first hour and a half, and I just so happen to be used to silence during written exams, and the exam was only two hours long. Needless to say I didn’t churn out my best piece of work ever. More than likely I will formally complain to the university, knowing that it won’t do anything for me myself.
Oh well, I’m sure I passed. Other assessments for the class included an eight hundred- to one thousand-word editorial-style term paper about a particular subject in Hong Kong. I won’t go into that since I have previously. Other assessments were tutorial participation and lecture participation, which I’m sure I did fine on.
Showing posts with label finals. Show all posts
Showing posts with label finals. Show all posts
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Class Roundup: Humanity
Humanity in Globalization ended on a high note in all regards. The final I felt I did quite well on, having used the entire two hours to compose two solid essays. There is one service here at HKU where you can pull up old examinations from previous terms, but being that the first time this class was taught, this particular resource became more approximate than anything else. For part of the course content, our professor said to look up exams from a different class, Human Security, to get a good idea of what that will look like. Some questions were almost exactly, if not entirely, word for word the same.
To study, I went over all the readings (again) as well as my class notes. Being that most of the lectures were guest speakers, my notes were kind of sparse and largely irrelevant. However, for the optional review session, the professor gave us a thorough outline of the class with which we could structure our studying better.
Besides the final examination, there were also the term research paper, which I did on language rights and language evolution in the wake of globalization, as well as participation grades in lectures (based mostly on attendance) and tutorials.
For the last two tutorials, we did a role-playing exercise called Zanda. Zanda is a multinational state with a president who bombs tribal people to get them off their well-endowed mining lands, which the government has leased to a multinational corporation. Yanda is a neighboring country that has national security on its mind with the instability of Zanda yet supplies rebel armies with weapons. Wanda also borders Zanda and has had an influx of tribal people coming in as refugees. Queensland is the ex-colonial government that owned Zanda up until recently.
We got roles from tutor, ranging from nurse with multiplex relationships to heads of state and United Nations officials, along with NGO leaders, journalists, and the head of that multinational mining company. I was given the role of President of Wanda.
The whole exercise was quite amusing, with us debating for our interests and attempting to reach solutions. The problem was that we had no idea if we were allowed to reach solutions, meaning that we had no idea how much action we could take or if we were just talking.
The funny thing is that we were told that we were allowed to bring up Zanda as an example for our final examination. I thought it was funny to use such a frivolous activity as evidence for such an examination. Needless to say, I didn’t use it at all. Instead I referred to readings and guest speakers. Anyways, Zanda was mainly done to show how much work it is to reach consensus and get action done on such levels. I think that most of us already understood this concept though, seeing that not much gets done on the macro level on a day-to-day basis in the world.
The class ended on a positive note in all regards because my little dispute with Globalpost.com has been resolved. To refresh, they republished this blog by automated means consistently and without permission. To make things more irksome, they in no way acknowledged the fact that they did not own my content, claiming copyright over absolutely everything on their site. And on the monetary side of things, they were ostensibly making money off of my original work. After persistently emailing their blog coordinator for about a month, informing them of my position, they finally got back to me.
They apologized profusely, saying that they thought they got permission from all the authors of the blogs they copied onto their website to do so and that mine just fell through the cracks. They also said that if I would like, they would keep my posts on their website, praising my writing, lol. Maybe if they had said it the other way around, that they would like to publish my posts on their website for whatever reason, I would have gotten off my high horse and granted it.
One more final to go now!
To study, I went over all the readings (again) as well as my class notes. Being that most of the lectures were guest speakers, my notes were kind of sparse and largely irrelevant. However, for the optional review session, the professor gave us a thorough outline of the class with which we could structure our studying better.
Besides the final examination, there were also the term research paper, which I did on language rights and language evolution in the wake of globalization, as well as participation grades in lectures (based mostly on attendance) and tutorials.
For the last two tutorials, we did a role-playing exercise called Zanda. Zanda is a multinational state with a president who bombs tribal people to get them off their well-endowed mining lands, which the government has leased to a multinational corporation. Yanda is a neighboring country that has national security on its mind with the instability of Zanda yet supplies rebel armies with weapons. Wanda also borders Zanda and has had an influx of tribal people coming in as refugees. Queensland is the ex-colonial government that owned Zanda up until recently.
We got roles from tutor, ranging from nurse with multiplex relationships to heads of state and United Nations officials, along with NGO leaders, journalists, and the head of that multinational mining company. I was given the role of President of Wanda.
The whole exercise was quite amusing, with us debating for our interests and attempting to reach solutions. The problem was that we had no idea if we were allowed to reach solutions, meaning that we had no idea how much action we could take or if we were just talking.
The funny thing is that we were told that we were allowed to bring up Zanda as an example for our final examination. I thought it was funny to use such a frivolous activity as evidence for such an examination. Needless to say, I didn’t use it at all. Instead I referred to readings and guest speakers. Anyways, Zanda was mainly done to show how much work it is to reach consensus and get action done on such levels. I think that most of us already understood this concept though, seeing that not much gets done on the macro level on a day-to-day basis in the world.
The class ended on a positive note in all regards because my little dispute with Globalpost.com has been resolved. To refresh, they republished this blog by automated means consistently and without permission. To make things more irksome, they in no way acknowledged the fact that they did not own my content, claiming copyright over absolutely everything on their site. And on the monetary side of things, they were ostensibly making money off of my original work. After persistently emailing their blog coordinator for about a month, informing them of my position, they finally got back to me.
They apologized profusely, saying that they thought they got permission from all the authors of the blogs they copied onto their website to do so and that mine just fell through the cracks. They also said that if I would like, they would keep my posts on their website, praising my writing, lol. Maybe if they had said it the other way around, that they would like to publish my posts on their website for whatever reason, I would have gotten off my high horse and granted it.
One more final to go now!
Friday, December 11, 2009
The Trips that Never Happened
I thought I was going to go out with a bang. To end my stay here, I was going to travel around—to Singapore, Japan, and South Korea to be exact. Despite my intentions though, I won’t be going to any of them in the near future, and while I’m a little saddened, I know I’ll get over there some day.
It came down to a lack of earlier planning and the fact that I would have been traveling by myself. I was highly advised by my parents not to travel alone, because it’s always good to have at least one traveling companion for safety, even if you speak the language. (English and Mandarin for Singapore—yes, Japanese I could brush up on, South Korea I would have been relying on hoping to find English speakers.) I understood my parents concerns, but I wanted to go for it at least once. I heard that traveling alone is an experience like no other, and similar to studying abroad, I wanted to make this experience my own.
The ultimate reason why it didn’t work out was because of money. Because I hadn’t planned earlier, the prices were all inflated for the holidays. Because I was to be traveling alone, accommodation priced for two was little cheaper for one. One of the major services that I’ve been using, Cathay Pacific Holidays, doesn’t even allow for single travelers to book because all their prices are worked out for parties of two.
I looked into a weeklong trip to Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. Hotel and flight alone would have cost me $700 USD. For just $300 dollars more, I could have brought along two more people. So in the end, I decided that in order to spend money in a more sensible manner, I would postpone these trips indefinitely. After all, I’m most definitely coming back to East Asia sometime.
It came down to a lack of earlier planning and the fact that I would have been traveling by myself. I was highly advised by my parents not to travel alone, because it’s always good to have at least one traveling companion for safety, even if you speak the language. (English and Mandarin for Singapore—yes, Japanese I could brush up on, South Korea I would have been relying on hoping to find English speakers.) I understood my parents concerns, but I wanted to go for it at least once. I heard that traveling alone is an experience like no other, and similar to studying abroad, I wanted to make this experience my own.
The ultimate reason why it didn’t work out was because of money. Because I hadn’t planned earlier, the prices were all inflated for the holidays. Because I was to be traveling alone, accommodation priced for two was little cheaper for one. One of the major services that I’ve been using, Cathay Pacific Holidays, doesn’t even allow for single travelers to book because all their prices are worked out for parties of two.
I looked into a weeklong trip to Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. Hotel and flight alone would have cost me $700 USD. For just $300 dollars more, I could have brought along two more people. So in the end, I decided that in order to spend money in a more sensible manner, I would postpone these trips indefinitely. After all, I’m most definitely coming back to East Asia sometime.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Class Roundup: Chinese Society
Traditional Chinese Society ended yesterday, with my first final during finals week(s) and my fourth final overall. Being my first one during finals it was officiated in an authoritarian manner that I’m only used to for standardized tests. The professor had the exams on our desks when we came in then read verbatim off of an instruction sheet provided to him by the university. I know that it was provided to him because he laughed when he read aloud that you are allowed to have calculators out (since the only number we dealt with was the number of souls that a person has).
Out our class of twelve, I was given seat number twelve. For the large classroom, we were all squished onto the left side rather than spread out over the room, as would have been sensible from an administrator’s standpoint.
After we were read out loud the directions, the professor, who already had us down by name, seeing that he taught all the tutorials and the class was really small, had to verify all of our identities by means of our student identification cards.
I didn’t think the final examination was too hard. To study, I did all the readings again and went over our class discussions of the topics—both those online and those in the classroom. He specifically said not to stress specific details—so I didn’t.
We were given seven questions based on various topics that we covered in class and we had two hours to answer two of those questions in an extended in-class essay format. And I feel I answered those two questions well and completely, despite the fact that I was the first to finish. (I usually finish somewhere in the middle, though the fact that I finished first may be because I was the only native English speaker in the class.) We’ll see how I did.
Other assessments for this class included the weekly journal, online discussions, and project.
The weekly journal entries only had to be two hundred words long each, and I usually went past that. Many of my classmates, realizing that you can’t really say much in two hundred words went well over four times that. This blog has already added up to over one hundred thousand words, so I’ll attest to the fact that you can’t say much in two hundred words. We were to write on the topic of traditional Chinese society that we were covering that week. Whereas other classmates treated the entries as anthropological research assignments, I did less of that and instead had personal reflections on the topics. Often, I would through in the line or two about how I feel we’re exoticizing the subject too much, but I’ve talked about that a lot already.
The online discussions I contributed to more often than not. Some people had contributions several times a week. It was also apparent that some people had not contributed once to the discussions. I always tried to interact with other students on these online discussions rather than only summarizing articles as was prevalent at the beginning of the semester.
I can’t remember if I talked about the term project, but it consisted of a two thousand-word (field) research paper accompanied by a presentation to be made during tutorial. On the syllabus, it said that it was due week seven. To that effect, I got it done before the week seven tutorial, ready to present. I was the only one in the tutorial that had anything to show, not that the professor was expecting it. That week he decided to schedule in everybody’s presentations, and when it came to me, I asked if I could do it that day, since it was already done. He (reluctantly) said yes and I got it over with—meaning that I unintentionally lectured for forty minutes.
My topic was on the (Christian) religious beliefs of HKU students. My sample size was small, as he only required about ten interviews. Overall, my results fell in line with Hong Kong SAR statistics. I noted that I didn’t encounter as many self-described Christians as I imagined. My professor made the note (that I didn’t see) that the number of self-described Buddhists was higher at HKU than in Hong Kong SAR statistics. I felt that my report was well-researched and well-written.
On a different note about the same class, I’m planning on petitioning to have this course qualify for my minor in the Study of Religion for my degree back at UCSD. The undergraduate advisor told me I couldn’t because nothing in the syllabus mentioned directly “religion,” so I had to rebut by saying that religion in the modern, scholarly sense ultimately refers to one’s overall view on the world and what things are significant and how those things are significant. In addition, there is a class called “Chinese Society” at UCSD that has the same course description as the course I was about to take, and it happens to fulfill the requirement without petition. She then forwarded my request for preapproval to the director or the program, who decided that I did have a case and that I did receive preapproval. So hopefully everything falls in line.
Out our class of twelve, I was given seat number twelve. For the large classroom, we were all squished onto the left side rather than spread out over the room, as would have been sensible from an administrator’s standpoint.
After we were read out loud the directions, the professor, who already had us down by name, seeing that he taught all the tutorials and the class was really small, had to verify all of our identities by means of our student identification cards.
I didn’t think the final examination was too hard. To study, I did all the readings again and went over our class discussions of the topics—both those online and those in the classroom. He specifically said not to stress specific details—so I didn’t.
We were given seven questions based on various topics that we covered in class and we had two hours to answer two of those questions in an extended in-class essay format. And I feel I answered those two questions well and completely, despite the fact that I was the first to finish. (I usually finish somewhere in the middle, though the fact that I finished first may be because I was the only native English speaker in the class.) We’ll see how I did.
Other assessments for this class included the weekly journal, online discussions, and project.
The weekly journal entries only had to be two hundred words long each, and I usually went past that. Many of my classmates, realizing that you can’t really say much in two hundred words went well over four times that. This blog has already added up to over one hundred thousand words, so I’ll attest to the fact that you can’t say much in two hundred words. We were to write on the topic of traditional Chinese society that we were covering that week. Whereas other classmates treated the entries as anthropological research assignments, I did less of that and instead had personal reflections on the topics. Often, I would through in the line or two about how I feel we’re exoticizing the subject too much, but I’ve talked about that a lot already.
The online discussions I contributed to more often than not. Some people had contributions several times a week. It was also apparent that some people had not contributed once to the discussions. I always tried to interact with other students on these online discussions rather than only summarizing articles as was prevalent at the beginning of the semester.
I can’t remember if I talked about the term project, but it consisted of a two thousand-word (field) research paper accompanied by a presentation to be made during tutorial. On the syllabus, it said that it was due week seven. To that effect, I got it done before the week seven tutorial, ready to present. I was the only one in the tutorial that had anything to show, not that the professor was expecting it. That week he decided to schedule in everybody’s presentations, and when it came to me, I asked if I could do it that day, since it was already done. He (reluctantly) said yes and I got it over with—meaning that I unintentionally lectured for forty minutes.
My topic was on the (Christian) religious beliefs of HKU students. My sample size was small, as he only required about ten interviews. Overall, my results fell in line with Hong Kong SAR statistics. I noted that I didn’t encounter as many self-described Christians as I imagined. My professor made the note (that I didn’t see) that the number of self-described Buddhists was higher at HKU than in Hong Kong SAR statistics. I felt that my report was well-researched and well-written.
On a different note about the same class, I’m planning on petitioning to have this course qualify for my minor in the Study of Religion for my degree back at UCSD. The undergraduate advisor told me I couldn’t because nothing in the syllabus mentioned directly “religion,” so I had to rebut by saying that religion in the modern, scholarly sense ultimately refers to one’s overall view on the world and what things are significant and how those things are significant. In addition, there is a class called “Chinese Society” at UCSD that has the same course description as the course I was about to take, and it happens to fulfill the requirement without petition. She then forwarded my request for preapproval to the director or the program, who decided that I did have a case and that I did receive preapproval. So hopefully everything falls in line.
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Class Roundup: Phonetics
Here I sit in the medical library—three exams down, three to go, and that’s it to the semester. I think I did well enough on my last final, that being for Phonetics, one class which I’m glad to have taken abroad. It’s not so much that it’s bad back home, because it’s not; it’s more because I get to study phonetics in light of other languages here, and the best part is that instruction is still in English.
I’m told that here, HKU imposes a curve. I’m used to curves just being advantageous to the student, because back in UCSD professors have a lot of leeway in letter-grade assignment. Hardly ever would a curve be used if it would systematically lower most everyone’s grades. I had one teacher who only gave out Fs to people with less than 40% in the class (whereas the standard F grade is under 59% or 60%).
So I don’t think I did poorly in the class, but I hope that I did better than average. Even though most of the class was focused on English (and I have English intuition), I found that on the first midterm I missed a lot of points because I wasn’t dealing with Standard American or British English. It worked to the local students’ advantage because they got to memorize standard language rules, whereas I had a hard time memorizing standard language rules since I had intuition to contend with. On the other hand though, the local students were allowed to go by their intuition in the Cantonese segment of the course.
The final examination turned out to be all right. It wasn’t super easy but it was fair. It turned out to be okay mostly because the professor allotted us a lot of choice, all languages considered.
For the last two assignments of two exercises each, we had to transliterate a series of sentences and phrases in and out of Cantonese and Mandarin to the International Phonetic Alphabet. It was difficult for me because even though I have some experience with both languages, many of the words that I know in my head I wouldn’t know how to write down. This is because while there are something aspects of writing characters in Mandarin that lend hints as to their sounds, there is little to no other indication of how to pronounce characters you don’t know (especially considering the tone). Colloquial Written Cantonese, using many of the same characters as Standard Written Chinese (based on Mandarin), is a whole other story, since many older speakers of Cantonese can write things down as they would literally say it. Luckily, I have a friend who helped me pronounce these phrases, and with the fact that we went over them in tutorial before turning them in, there was no problem with the exercises.
What was disconcerting was that the professor said that he’d have some similar problems on the final examination. It was a little worrying, but I was confident that he would try to accommodate the few exchange students because not knowing what characters were going to be presented beforehand practically meant that you had to learn the language to do the test. After the TA/tutor sent an email out asking for a reply for those needing accommodation, I was confident that it would be fine—and it was. The final had six questions translating the orthography of English, Mandarin, and Cantonese into the International Phonetic Alphabet and six from the International Phonetic Alphabet to English, Mandarin, and Cantonese. We only needed to answer two out of each set of six, so I ended up picking the two English ones in each section after having a look and subsequently deciding I had no idea what was written in Cantonese and Mandarin.
In addition to those two sections, there was a vocabulary (definition plus example) section that I think I fared well on. What was different from the midterm examination was the addition of essay questions—two to be exact. They were straightforward enough, and I’m confident I got most all points for both. What was almost to be expected though was that though I had spent plenty of time studying for the examination before the fact, the subject of one of the essay questions was something that I had literally study half an hour before the test, sitting at Starbucks on campus with my venti drip coffee.
Now, I don’t know if everyone studying linguistics (especially phonetics) does this, but I find that when I study, I talk out loud to myself. It’s not complete sentences or anything that makes sense, more examples that I’m told exist and I just want to check.
As an example, I’ve read over to myself “Polish is great.” Written down, give it to a group of people and have them read the sentence. Chances are, there will be two ways of pronouncing “Polish.” One reading means polish as in nail polish. The other refers to the Polish nationality, with the grammar of the sentence suggesting that what’s meant is the Polish language.
In phonetics, though, I find myself doing stuff like realizing that in fast speech, “rider” and “writer” are pronounced pretty much the same by American English speakers. Today though at Starbucks, I was trying to straighten out my Mandarin affricates, because I can pronounce all the differences when I’m presented with Hanyu Pinyin but I need to equate Pinyin to the International Phonetic Alphabet. To this effect, I was sounding out. There are six in total in Mandarin (in comparison to two in English), but I pronounced nine sounds in total to get the system straightforward in my head. In Pinyin, it would be “s, z, c. x, j, q. sh, zh, ch;” in the International Phonetic Alphabet, it would be rendered as [s, ts, tsʰ. ɕ, tɕ, tɕʰ. ʂ, tʂ, tʂʰ]. I got some looks, probably from people thinking I was mental, but whatever.
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
I’m told that here, HKU imposes a curve. I’m used to curves just being advantageous to the student, because back in UCSD professors have a lot of leeway in letter-grade assignment. Hardly ever would a curve be used if it would systematically lower most everyone’s grades. I had one teacher who only gave out Fs to people with less than 40% in the class (whereas the standard F grade is under 59% or 60%).
So I don’t think I did poorly in the class, but I hope that I did better than average. Even though most of the class was focused on English (and I have English intuition), I found that on the first midterm I missed a lot of points because I wasn’t dealing with Standard American or British English. It worked to the local students’ advantage because they got to memorize standard language rules, whereas I had a hard time memorizing standard language rules since I had intuition to contend with. On the other hand though, the local students were allowed to go by their intuition in the Cantonese segment of the course.
The final examination turned out to be all right. It wasn’t super easy but it was fair. It turned out to be okay mostly because the professor allotted us a lot of choice, all languages considered.
For the last two assignments of two exercises each, we had to transliterate a series of sentences and phrases in and out of Cantonese and Mandarin to the International Phonetic Alphabet. It was difficult for me because even though I have some experience with both languages, many of the words that I know in my head I wouldn’t know how to write down. This is because while there are something aspects of writing characters in Mandarin that lend hints as to their sounds, there is little to no other indication of how to pronounce characters you don’t know (especially considering the tone). Colloquial Written Cantonese, using many of the same characters as Standard Written Chinese (based on Mandarin), is a whole other story, since many older speakers of Cantonese can write things down as they would literally say it. Luckily, I have a friend who helped me pronounce these phrases, and with the fact that we went over them in tutorial before turning them in, there was no problem with the exercises.
What was disconcerting was that the professor said that he’d have some similar problems on the final examination. It was a little worrying, but I was confident that he would try to accommodate the few exchange students because not knowing what characters were going to be presented beforehand practically meant that you had to learn the language to do the test. After the TA/tutor sent an email out asking for a reply for those needing accommodation, I was confident that it would be fine—and it was. The final had six questions translating the orthography of English, Mandarin, and Cantonese into the International Phonetic Alphabet and six from the International Phonetic Alphabet to English, Mandarin, and Cantonese. We only needed to answer two out of each set of six, so I ended up picking the two English ones in each section after having a look and subsequently deciding I had no idea what was written in Cantonese and Mandarin.
In addition to those two sections, there was a vocabulary (definition plus example) section that I think I fared well on. What was different from the midterm examination was the addition of essay questions—two to be exact. They were straightforward enough, and I’m confident I got most all points for both. What was almost to be expected though was that though I had spent plenty of time studying for the examination before the fact, the subject of one of the essay questions was something that I had literally study half an hour before the test, sitting at Starbucks on campus with my venti drip coffee.
Now, I don’t know if everyone studying linguistics (especially phonetics) does this, but I find that when I study, I talk out loud to myself. It’s not complete sentences or anything that makes sense, more examples that I’m told exist and I just want to check.
As an example, I’ve read over to myself “Polish is great.” Written down, give it to a group of people and have them read the sentence. Chances are, there will be two ways of pronouncing “Polish.” One reading means polish as in nail polish. The other refers to the Polish nationality, with the grammar of the sentence suggesting that what’s meant is the Polish language.
In phonetics, though, I find myself doing stuff like realizing that in fast speech, “rider” and “writer” are pronounced pretty much the same by American English speakers. Today though at Starbucks, I was trying to straighten out my Mandarin affricates, because I can pronounce all the differences when I’m presented with Hanyu Pinyin but I need to equate Pinyin to the International Phonetic Alphabet. To this effect, I was sounding out. There are six in total in Mandarin (in comparison to two in English), but I pronounced nine sounds in total to get the system straightforward in my head. In Pinyin, it would be “s, z, c. x, j, q. sh, zh, ch;” in the International Phonetic Alphabet, it would be rendered as [s, ts, tsʰ. ɕ, tɕ, tɕʰ. ʂ, tʂ, tʂʰ]. I got some looks, probably from people thinking I was mental, but whatever.
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
Friday, November 27, 2009
Class Roundup: Asian Art History
Introduction to Arts of Asia: Past and Present (coded FINE1008) was my first and only class to end thus far. I took the final this past Monday and now have but to wait and see what I get in the class. This class roundup serial is for me to conclude my posts about the classes that I’m taking here. It’s odd in a way that everything’s ending. I’ve echoed this before and I will still talk about it later in more detail, but I feel like I’m just not ready to go back yet.
This class was comprised of three assessments apart from general participation in tutorials and attendance at lectures. (I didn’t miss a single class or tutorial for this class). The three assessments consisted of two medium-sized papers and one final examination.
The two term papers were different for me. It was a challenge in that I’d never written a paper for any humanities subject before. Writing for political science, much is quantitatively based, more so at UCSD than at HKU (where we seem to be more on the philosophical side of things), I was constantly unsure of whether what I was doing was right. Furthermore, I wondered whether what I was doing was wrong.
The first paper, we had to choose any one object from either the HKU Art Museum, the Hong Kong Museum of Art, or Sotheby’s art auction house. Not really opting for traveling, I chose a Buddhist statue in the university’s art gallery. It was of Weitou, guardian of the Dharma (named Skanda in Sanskrit). The statue was gilt wood, but I could find hardly anything on Weitou or wood gilding. I was forced to deduce more than I was comfortable with and rely heavily on my own opinions and observations without having published scholars to back me up. When it was all said and done, I got an A-, which considering that she said she doesn’t grade easy, was a relief.
The second paper, we had a choice between two tasks. The first was do create a piece of art ourselves using the techniques talked about in class. This had to be accompanied by a paper describing your own work, telling why and how you used certain techniques. And I preferred to do this assignment. However, seeing that I had about a week to do this assignment (which is no time by my anti-procrastination standards), along with the fact that I had no idea where to get the resources to paint, I felt pressured to do the second task.
The second task was to compare two particular handscrolls, one a copy of the other. My thesis was something to the effect of the techniques used in the copy bring more meaning to its basis in the original. I got a B+ on it.
As for the final, the jury (of one member) is still out. I won’t likely find out my grades until January at the earliest, late March at the latest. All things considered though, I felt I did reasonably well.
It was organized into three parts: image identification, unfamiliar object identification, and short essay.
Image identification consisted of four pictures of works we studied in class. To each we were to place with applicable names and titles as well as a general time frame. In addition, we were to describe the significance of the presented works and analyze their importance, preferably with a sociohistoric emphasis.
To study for this, I printed out all the images from the Fine Arts Interactive Visual Archive (or FAIVA for short), and took extensive notes on them in lecture and in tutorial, as well as on the side, like information on the time period in general and background information on the author and such. As a rough estimate, there were between thirty and forty images that I went through over and over.
Out of the four of them, I probably did a bang-up job on like two and a half of them. The other one and a half I believe I knew enough to earn most of the points.
For the second part, we were to be presented with a (replica) ancient Chinese object. In all honesty, the only reasonable object that she would have given us was an ancient Daoist vessel—and it was.
For this, we had to describe the technique behind making it (basically bronze into a clay mold) and its significance. I figure I did pretty well. I had a lot to say about it, especially because she talked about it extensively in the last tutorial (and I took extensive notes which I studied over).
The last part was a short essay question. We were given the topics beforehand—to describe the function, significance, and perception of a place of leisure either in Ming China or Japan. I went over the Ming Garden, since the professor reviewed that one as well the day before in tutorial.
I have reason to believe that I did decently well in the class. Hopefully I got at least a B+, which they say will round up a third to an A- when grades transfer back to UCSD.
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
This class was comprised of three assessments apart from general participation in tutorials and attendance at lectures. (I didn’t miss a single class or tutorial for this class). The three assessments consisted of two medium-sized papers and one final examination.
The two term papers were different for me. It was a challenge in that I’d never written a paper for any humanities subject before. Writing for political science, much is quantitatively based, more so at UCSD than at HKU (where we seem to be more on the philosophical side of things), I was constantly unsure of whether what I was doing was right. Furthermore, I wondered whether what I was doing was wrong.
The first paper, we had to choose any one object from either the HKU Art Museum, the Hong Kong Museum of Art, or Sotheby’s art auction house. Not really opting for traveling, I chose a Buddhist statue in the university’s art gallery. It was of Weitou, guardian of the Dharma (named Skanda in Sanskrit). The statue was gilt wood, but I could find hardly anything on Weitou or wood gilding. I was forced to deduce more than I was comfortable with and rely heavily on my own opinions and observations without having published scholars to back me up. When it was all said and done, I got an A-, which considering that she said she doesn’t grade easy, was a relief.
The second paper, we had a choice between two tasks. The first was do create a piece of art ourselves using the techniques talked about in class. This had to be accompanied by a paper describing your own work, telling why and how you used certain techniques. And I preferred to do this assignment. However, seeing that I had about a week to do this assignment (which is no time by my anti-procrastination standards), along with the fact that I had no idea where to get the resources to paint, I felt pressured to do the second task.
The second task was to compare two particular handscrolls, one a copy of the other. My thesis was something to the effect of the techniques used in the copy bring more meaning to its basis in the original. I got a B+ on it.
As for the final, the jury (of one member) is still out. I won’t likely find out my grades until January at the earliest, late March at the latest. All things considered though, I felt I did reasonably well.
It was organized into three parts: image identification, unfamiliar object identification, and short essay.
Image identification consisted of four pictures of works we studied in class. To each we were to place with applicable names and titles as well as a general time frame. In addition, we were to describe the significance of the presented works and analyze their importance, preferably with a sociohistoric emphasis.
To study for this, I printed out all the images from the Fine Arts Interactive Visual Archive (or FAIVA for short), and took extensive notes on them in lecture and in tutorial, as well as on the side, like information on the time period in general and background information on the author and such. As a rough estimate, there were between thirty and forty images that I went through over and over.
Out of the four of them, I probably did a bang-up job on like two and a half of them. The other one and a half I believe I knew enough to earn most of the points.
For the second part, we were to be presented with a (replica) ancient Chinese object. In all honesty, the only reasonable object that she would have given us was an ancient Daoist vessel—and it was.
For this, we had to describe the technique behind making it (basically bronze into a clay mold) and its significance. I figure I did pretty well. I had a lot to say about it, especially because she talked about it extensively in the last tutorial (and I took extensive notes which I studied over).
The last part was a short essay question. We were given the topics beforehand—to describe the function, significance, and perception of a place of leisure either in Ming China or Japan. I went over the Ming Garden, since the professor reviewed that one as well the day before in tutorial.
I have reason to believe that I did decently well in the class. Hopefully I got at least a B+, which they say will round up a third to an A- when grades transfer back to UCSD.
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Finals (Three) Week(s)
I can’t believe this term is starting to come to an end. It’s now been just over three months since I arrived here (confused) in late August. That means that I have just under a month left here, so I figured I’d sum up my plans for the remainder of my stay.
Believe it or not, classes have begun to end. One of my classes is completely finished—I took my final for it yesterday. One more will be all over after a group presentation next Monday. The third will end with a final examination on Thursday of revision week.
This week is actually the last week of instruction. My lectures have started ending one by one and I’ve harbored mixed feelings about my classes ending, but that’s for a later post. I still have two classes next Monday though, because the instructors wanted to make up for the fact that classes began on a Tuesday. I don’t mind; I’ll be here then.
This weekend will the first in a while that I’m not planning on going somewhere outside of Hong Kong. I’ve got work to do, with four more finals to study for a research paper due the end of revision week. It’ll be nice and quiet here.
After revision week though comes the official period for final examinations. Granted, I’ll only have three (as one’s already taken and the other two are likewise scheduled prematurely). Back at UCSD, finals take up one week. That week is appropriately named finals week, and occurs immediately after instruction stops. We have no revision week and little time to revise in between finals.
Here’s different. It’s partly to blame I suppose on it being on semesters rather than quarters here, but finals week is actually three weeks here. (Okay, in actuality it’s two, but it feels like three to me.)
If you remember from when I registered that we wouldn’t receive our timeslots and venues for finals until mid-November, that time has come. While I would have hoped for them to be grouped together, preferably at the start, they all turned out to be spread out. I have one on December 8, one on December 14, and one on December 18. I leave back for the States on the 21st.
In no way do I plan to use all those gaps for studying. I want to keep travelling! To this effect, I’m going to go to Nanjing from December 4th to the 8th. And in the other gaps, I’m still negotiating where to go and what to do. No worries though—it’ll be good.
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
Believe it or not, classes have begun to end. One of my classes is completely finished—I took my final for it yesterday. One more will be all over after a group presentation next Monday. The third will end with a final examination on Thursday of revision week.
This week is actually the last week of instruction. My lectures have started ending one by one and I’ve harbored mixed feelings about my classes ending, but that’s for a later post. I still have two classes next Monday though, because the instructors wanted to make up for the fact that classes began on a Tuesday. I don’t mind; I’ll be here then.
This weekend will the first in a while that I’m not planning on going somewhere outside of Hong Kong. I’ve got work to do, with four more finals to study for a research paper due the end of revision week. It’ll be nice and quiet here.
After revision week though comes the official period for final examinations. Granted, I’ll only have three (as one’s already taken and the other two are likewise scheduled prematurely). Back at UCSD, finals take up one week. That week is appropriately named finals week, and occurs immediately after instruction stops. We have no revision week and little time to revise in between finals.
Here’s different. It’s partly to blame I suppose on it being on semesters rather than quarters here, but finals week is actually three weeks here. (Okay, in actuality it’s two, but it feels like three to me.)
If you remember from when I registered that we wouldn’t receive our timeslots and venues for finals until mid-November, that time has come. While I would have hoped for them to be grouped together, preferably at the start, they all turned out to be spread out. I have one on December 8, one on December 14, and one on December 18. I leave back for the States on the 21st.
In no way do I plan to use all those gaps for studying. I want to keep travelling! To this effect, I’m going to go to Nanjing from December 4th to the 8th. And in the other gaps, I’m still negotiating where to go and what to do. No worries though—it’ll be good.
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
我咳香港大學嘅學生。
Right after presenting my self-introduction speech to the class, I jetted of to Taipei. That day was made thoroughly busy with the addition of a term-paper project proposal and a Phonetics midterm examination.
But back to the topic of this post, my Cantonese for Foreign Learners 1 class, I have a few more assessments to deal with. Besides the self-introduction speech, there is a group presentation in which we perform a dialogue on any topic we’d like, as well as two reading assessments in which we record ourselves reading a passage and email it to the professor, and a midterm and a final examination.
Like I said, I think I did relatively well on my self-introduction. I believe I hit almost all the tones and got all of the consonants and vowels close to perfect. Especially in comparison to my classmates (who I believe tried dearly), I have reason to believe that I got something in the range of an A on my presentation.
The midterm, which we took the class before the self-introduction presentations I did better than expected on. Using the Jyutping system of Romanization for Cantonese, we have to write either tone marks or tone numbers alongside each individual syllable. While I am confident that I can say words so that they are understood, by direct knowledge of what tone it is wavers with my mood, I suppose.
I got most of the tones right through direct memorization, but when I couldn’t remember, I’d try to remember how I’ve heard the professor say it in my head, and then try to assign a tone number to it. This worked about half the time. Lucky for me though, the professor only marked off like half or a quarter of a percent for each wrong tone. So since I got the actual sounds right on almost everything, I ended up with 91% correct on the midterm.
The class session before the midterm, the first reading assignment was due. I did it in my room while my roommate was away to Macau. I read it over about four times and then proceeded to ask my Cantonese-speaking friend to critique my pronunciation. I probably would’ve asked my mother to critique it as well had it not been for the inconvenience of time zones.
Handing it back, the teacher printed out the dialogue for each of us, circling parts of individual words that we had trouble with. On my sheet, she only marked two tones that I executed poorly, both of which fourth tone (low falling). I ended up with a letter grade A on that assignment.
Half the assignments are done with half to go. My second Cantonese reading assignment is due in her email inbox next Monday and the group presentation script is due the Monday after that with my final examination taking place the Thursday right after that.
So, off to rehearsing for the second reading assignment!
Oh, and by the way, the title is colloquial written Cantonese for the title of my previous Cantonese class post.
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
But back to the topic of this post, my Cantonese for Foreign Learners 1 class, I have a few more assessments to deal with. Besides the self-introduction speech, there is a group presentation in which we perform a dialogue on any topic we’d like, as well as two reading assessments in which we record ourselves reading a passage and email it to the professor, and a midterm and a final examination.
Like I said, I think I did relatively well on my self-introduction. I believe I hit almost all the tones and got all of the consonants and vowels close to perfect. Especially in comparison to my classmates (who I believe tried dearly), I have reason to believe that I got something in the range of an A on my presentation.
The midterm, which we took the class before the self-introduction presentations I did better than expected on. Using the Jyutping system of Romanization for Cantonese, we have to write either tone marks or tone numbers alongside each individual syllable. While I am confident that I can say words so that they are understood, by direct knowledge of what tone it is wavers with my mood, I suppose.
I got most of the tones right through direct memorization, but when I couldn’t remember, I’d try to remember how I’ve heard the professor say it in my head, and then try to assign a tone number to it. This worked about half the time. Lucky for me though, the professor only marked off like half or a quarter of a percent for each wrong tone. So since I got the actual sounds right on almost everything, I ended up with 91% correct on the midterm.
The class session before the midterm, the first reading assignment was due. I did it in my room while my roommate was away to Macau. I read it over about four times and then proceeded to ask my Cantonese-speaking friend to critique my pronunciation. I probably would’ve asked my mother to critique it as well had it not been for the inconvenience of time zones.
Handing it back, the teacher printed out the dialogue for each of us, circling parts of individual words that we had trouble with. On my sheet, she only marked two tones that I executed poorly, both of which fourth tone (low falling). I ended up with a letter grade A on that assignment.
Half the assignments are done with half to go. My second Cantonese reading assignment is due in her email inbox next Monday and the group presentation script is due the Monday after that with my final examination taking place the Thursday right after that.
So, off to rehearsing for the second reading assignment!
Oh, and by the way, the title is colloquial written Cantonese for the title of my previous Cantonese class post.
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
