Monday, March 5th, 2007
Hi –
Typically, I have posted on this blog about Mandarin Chinese learning topics and features of my first Macintosh application called Global Talk, a Mandarin Chinese - English flashcard application. However, I posted a question to the Macintosh Small Business Yahoo! Group, and I was unable to include a file as an attachment. So, I’ll blog about it instead.
If you came to this post from the macsb user group, thanks for visiting! I have put together a single PDF document that attempts to capture the current state of Merchant Services that you may choose from as an independent Macintosh developer. For those of you not familiar with this stuff, a “Merchant Service” is provided by a third party company, allowing the independent Macintosh developer to accept payment for software via credit card processing, cash payment, etc.
I am painfully close to launching my first application, Global Talk, and have been spending much time recently trying to select a Merchant Service. It is difficult water to navigate, and I hope that providing this simple chart helps my fellow Macintosh developers to see the Merchant Services landscape at-a-glance. This chart is probably not exhaustive, but I have made every effort to present the data objectively. If you see blatant errors, please flame me. 
I hope you find it useful!
– bk
Saturday, March 3rd, 2007
你好!
How is your Mandarin Chinese progressing? I have now passed my fourth week of formal Mandarin Chinese instruction, and it is getting very difficult! I am trying to cram about 40 characters per week into my little head, and each character requires memorizing how to say it (the Pinyin), what it means in English, and stroke order. It is challenging, to say the least.
Last week in Mandarin Class, we had our normal quiz, except I flunked. Yes, it’s the first time I have ever flunked anything in my life. I felt terrible. Our 老师 (teacher) normally says a vocabulary word, then we write the character. She’ll pick six or seven words, and then the quiz is over. Up to this point, I have gotten all A’s. But, this week, she was giving us two words at a time, and I got very confused. I couldn’t think fast enough, and the two character combinations didn’t seem to make sense to me. When she graded my quiz, she came up to me, shook her head, and said, “What happened?!”
What did happen? Well, I learned something very important about Mandarin Chinese. It’s really obvious now that I think about it, but it didn’t dawn on me until last week. When learning Mandarin Chinese, you must learn character combinations as well as the characters themselves. I call them “constituent parts” (remember, I’m an engineer and not a linguistics master ). Let’s take a simple example. In Mandarin, you memorize the character for “east”, which is 东 (dōng) . You also memorize the character for “west”, which is 西 (xī). And, so you have memorized two characters. BUT, it’s also very important to memorize 东西 (dōngxī), a single Chinese word that means “thing” or “object”. My initial confusion was that 东西 does NOT mean “east-west”, it means “thing”. So, you must memorize not only the constituent parts but also character combinations.
So, how to account for this in Global Talk, my Mandarin flashcard program for the Macintosh? Simple! I have now started adding Chinese words that consist of more than one character into the database. My Global Talk pre-launch checklist is now down to seven items; it’s almost done! It’s been a long road, but I really hope that it proves to be another useful tool for you in your quest to learn Mandarin Chinese.
Take care, and again, please share your thoughts!
– bk
