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#ielts #toefl #gre #english_vocabulary #english
Word of the Day
pollinosis
Definition: (noun) A seasonal rhinitis resulting from an allergic reaction to pollen.
Synonyms: hay fever.
Usage: It was spring, and, just like the garden, his pollinosis was in full-bloom.
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: colossal
This word has appeared in 217 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Learn English Through Football Podcast: Zombie Football
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Language Log
"There's no T in Scranton"
According to Jennifer Bendery, "At 81, Joe Biden Is Still The Last Guy To Leave The Party", Huffington Post 3/8/2024:
After his State of the Union speech, the president was so eager to keep talking to people he didn't care that the lights went down or that hot mics picked him up.
[…]
“Thank you, man,” said Biden, before shaking someone else’s hand and pointing at him. “You know there’s no T in ‘Scranton.’ It’s Scran-un!”
Fact-checking that claim, I did a quick scan of Shuang Li's INTERVIEW: NPR Media Dialog Transcripts dataset, which contains 3,199,859 transcribed turns from 105,817 NPR podcasts, comprising more than 10,648 hours. That dataset is just the transcripts, but some years ago, Jiahong Yuan and I downloaded the audio and aligned it with the texts. And I wrote a simple search script, so that checking stuff like this is easy.
In that corpus, Biden's assertion does check out — though as we'll see, it's not completely clear what he meant. If anyone can find the full "open mic" recording, including the pronunciation he was reacting to, please let me know.
Here's the first instance I found. And it's really pretty T-less:
Scott Horsley (from "In Kansas, Obama Invites Roosevelt Comparisons", Morning Edition 2011-12-06):
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https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/Scranton1.png
Zeroing in on the audio for "Scranton":
Your browser does not support the audio element.
In fairness to the person Biden was (apparently) correcting, most Americans would perform the /t/ in "Scranton" as a bit of glottalization — a bit that was lenited to (near?) extinction in the previous example. Here's a version where more of it survives, from Don Gonyea, "Biden A Vital Surrogate For Obama On Campaign Trail", All Things Considered 12/06/2012:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/Scranton2.png
Zeroing in again on the audio for "Scranton":
Your browser does not support the audio element.
Locals (like Biden) are typically prone to greater lenition of the weaker aspects of their home town's phonetic implementation, wherefore (presumably) his correction…
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Idiom of the Day
I see what you did there
An expression used to acknowledge that one understands a joke made by someone else, and to either show appreciation or a lack thereof for the wit employed. Watch the video
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Word of the Day
uncultured
Definition: (adjective) Not cultured or cultivated.
Synonyms: artless, uncultivated.
Usage: She regarded him as an uncultured brute.
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be” + intensifying adverb + word ending in -ed is commonly used to refer to drunkenness, but not often enough to explain how language users understand new drunkonyms. Sanchez-Stockhammer and Uhrig therefore provide an additional explanation: by the time English native speakers reach adulthood, they have most likely experienced so many different words ending in -ed meaning ‘drunk’ that it allows them to interpret words with unknown meaning ending in -ed (e.g. “pyjamaed”) as ‘drunk’ in many contexts. The appendix of the paper alone contains a list of 546 English synonyms for “drunk” compiled from various sources.
Even though excessive alcohol consumption may come with negative consequences, drunkenness is commonly discussed using a wide range of light-hearted linguistic means in English. Sanchez-Stockhammer observes: “The humorous effect of drunkonyms is often achieved through their indirectness”. What renders McIntyre’s examples “gazeboed” or “carparked” funny is that there is no obvious relation between the base (e.g. “gazebo”) and the meaning ‘drunk’. Indirectness is also present in other types of playful language, like Cockney rhyming slang, which provides the model for English drunkonyms like “Brahms” or “Schindler’s” (short for “Brahms and Liszt” and “Schindler’s list”, both of which rhyme with the target word “pissed”). “The English language also expresses drunkenness indirectly by shortening phrases like “blind drunk” and “nicely drunk” to the corresponding drunkonyms “blind” and “nicely”. All this suggests that drunkonyms fit in well with English linguistic and humorous traditions”, says Sanchez-Stockhammer.
Here is the scientific paper:
“I’m gonna get totally and utterly X-ed.” Constructing drunkenness
By Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer and Peter Uhrig, from the journal Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association; published by De Gruyter Mouton February 19, 2024 https://doi.org/10.1515/gcla-2023-0007 Abstract
The English language is famous for its large number of drunkonyms, i.e. words that can be used to refer to the state of drunkenness – from blind and hammered to pissed, smashed and wasted. Various lists of words have been compiled in the past (e.g. Levine 1981). However, most of the terms seem to be relatively infrequent, and they also appear to fall out of use relatively quickly. In view of Michael McIntyre’s (2009) claim that it is possible to use any word to mean ‘drunk’ in English, this contribution therefore approaches the issue from a constructionist perspective. In a corpus-based study, we tested whether it is possible to model the expression of drunkenness in English as a more or less schematic (set of) construction(s). Our study shows that while corpus evidence for truly creative uses is scarce, we can nonetheless identify constructional and collostructional properties shared by certain patterns that are used to express drunkenness in English. For instance, the pattern be/get + ADV + drunkonym is strongly associated with premodifying (and often strongly intensifying) adverbs such as completely, totally and absolutely. A manual analysis of a large wordlist of English drunkonyms reveals further interesting patterns that can be modelled constructionally.
I find this study quite compelling. It is also amusing, especially the Appendix of hundreds of words expressing the state of drunkenness. Many of them are picturesque and downright funny. English-speaking people certainly have a rich, humorous imagination when it comes to expressing the state of inebriation. They have far more words for it than the xxxx do for snow. Ahem! Selected readings
* "Drunkenness at the LSA" (1/11/10)
* "Another 'words for X' competition" (1/1/09)
[Thanks to Klaus Nuber]
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Idiom of the Day
be losing it
To start becoming crazy, insane, or mentally unstable. Watch the video
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Word of the Day
smidgen
Definition: (noun) A very small quantity or portion; a bit or mite.
Synonyms: whit, iota, scintilla, shred, tittle.
Usage: He did not possess even a smidgen of courage and readily yielded his sandwich to an irate squirrel.
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: dwindle
This word has appeared in 76 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Word of the Day
condescending
Definition: (adjective) Displaying a patronizingly superior attitude.
Synonyms: patronizing, arch.
Usage: Sir William, no doubt, meant to be kind, but he was cold and condescending, and not a little pompous and conceited.
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Idiom of the Day
(one) figures (that)
One presumes or anticipates (that); one reckons or thinks (that). Watch the video
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Language Log
"Our digital god is a CSV file?"
Barry Collins, "The 5 Weirdest Things Elon Musk Told Britain’s Prime Minister About AI", Forbes 11/3/2023:
5. Our New Digital Gods Are Giant Spreadsheets
Musk and Sunak spent some time discussing the difficulties of regulating AI and how it differs from other branches of technology. And that led to a rather strange discussion about the nature of large language models and what they actually are.
Musk described AI models as a “gigantic data file” with “billions of weights and parameters.”
“You can’t just read it and see what it’s going to do. It’s a gigantic file of inscrutable numbers,” he said.
“It sort of ends up being a giant comma-separated value file,” Musk added, describing the kind of file you might open with Microsoft Excel. “Our digital god is a CSV file? Really? OK.”
Or maybe "Not really"?
No doubt you could stuff the parameters for various deep-learning model architectures into a (set of?) spreadsheets. But though I'm no Excel code-monkey, I'm somewhat skeptical that you could program Excel to run (even simple variants of) such models, and even more skeptical that you could program Excel to train them. At least, I'll be interested to learn if anyone has ever done either of these things.
Perhaps Musk just wanted to describe tensors in a way that his audience would understand — but other phrases, starting with something like "a bunch of tables of numbers", would have been just as accessible but less misleading. So I'm led to wonder whether his own understanding is limited.
And there's at least one other odd idea in this section of the Sunak/Musk conversation. The relevant audio is below, followed by a transcript.
Your browser does not support the audio element.
Sunak: Look it's- it's a trick- there's probably no perfect answer
and there's a
tricky balance
I d- what are your thought on how we should approach this open source question or
you know where should we be targeting
whatever regulatory or monitoring that we're going to do.
Musk: well- the open source
um algorithms and data
tend to lag the closed source
by six to twelve months
um
but so that- so that-
th- b-
given the rate of improvement that there's actually
therefore
quite a big difference between the c- the closed source and the-
and the open
um
if things are improving by a factor of let's say five
or more
um then being a year behind is- you're five times worse
so it's- it's ((a)) pretty big difference
and that might actually be an ok situation
um
but it- it certainly would- is more- get to the point where you've got open source
um AI that can do-
that- that will start to approach human level intelligence ((perhaps)) exceed it-
um
I don't know quite what to do about it
I- I- I think it's somewhat inevitable-
inevitable that they'll be some amount of open source and I-
I-
I guess I would have a slight bias towards
open source
uh cause at least you can see what's going on
uh whereas closed source you don't know what's going on. Now
it should be said with AI that even if it's open source
do you actually know what's going on because
if you've got a gigantic data file
and um
you know it-
sort of
billions of da- of- of data points or-
weights and parameters
uh
you can't just read it and see what it's going to do
uh it's a gigantic file of inscrutable numbers
um
you- you can test it when you ((it-) when you run it you can test it ag-
you- you can run a bunch of tests to see what it's going to do but
it- it's probabilistic it-
as opposed to
um
deterministic it's not-
it's not like traditional programming where you've got a-
((?))
you've got
((ver-)) discrete logic
and- and- and the outcome is very predictable and you can look-
read each line and see what each line's gonna do
um
uh
a- a neural net is
uh just a whole bunch of probabilities
[...]
Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
put back (2)
to change the time or date of something to a later time
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Idiom of the Day
I take it
I imagine this is the case; I presume it to be true (that); it is my understanding (that). Watch the video
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Language Log
La francophonie triomphe
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/EnglishDoesntExist.jpg …by virtue of the global spread of English. At least, that's what we can conclude from the click-bait title of a book recently published in France, "La langue anglaise n'existe pas". C'est du français mal prononcé (= "The English language doesn't exist". It's badly-pronounced French).
The author, Bernard Cerquiglini, has some serious credentials, to which he's now added a verified sense of humor. The book opens with a (slightly modified) quote from Montaigne:
« C'est icy un Livre de mauvaise foy, Lecteur.» Il faut de l'audace pour citer Montaigne à rebours; nous aurons cet aplomb: la mauvaise foi est ici proclamée, assumée, réflechie.
"Here is a book in bad faith, reader." It requires boldness to cite Montaigne backwards; we will have this confidence: bad faith is here proclaimed, assumed, and considered.
The initial quote (with mauvaise swapped for bonne) comes from the note "Au Lecteur" at the start of Montaigne's Essais. Montaigne goes on to explain
C’est icy vn Liure de bonne foy, Lecteur.
Il t’aduertit dés l’entrée, que ie ne m’y suis proposé aucune fin, que domestique et priuee : ie n’y ay eu nulle considération de ton seruice, ny de ma gloire : mes forces ne sont pas capables d’vn tel dessein.
Here is a book in good faith, Reader.
It warns you, from the start, that my only goals are domestic and private: I have no consideration for your benefit, nor for my fame: my abilities are not adequate for such a plan.
So perhaps the "mauvaise foy" switch means that Cerquiglini aims his book at our benefit and his fame?
For more information about its contents, see this brief (French language) review in Fabula, or Tom Barfield's (English language) review in Barron's.
Cerquiglini's book has no English translation yet, as far as I know — though we just need to pronounce the French version badly, n'est-ce pas?
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Language Log
"Famous authors asking you out"
This post links to three shorts by ElleCordova">@ellecordova — "This is what I think it would be like if famous authors asked you out".
The first one features Kurt Vonnegut, Emily Dickinson, Dr. Seuss, Jane Austen, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Ernest Hemingway:
In the second one, we get we get Edgar Allen Poe, Agatha Christie, Tolkien, (an interruption by) J.D. Salinger, Oscar Wilde, Tolkien con't, Charlotte Brontë, and e.e. cummings:
The third one features Franz Kafka, Henry David Thoreau, Emily Brontë, and George R.R. Martin:
Beyond the evocative parodies of writing styles, it's interesting to consider what she does with performance styles — accent, facial expressions, voice quality. Compare the dialect approximations that she adopts for Agatha Christie and Tolkien:
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Your browser does not support the audio element.
…with the use of something close to her native American English for Charlotte Brontë and Oscar Wilde:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
Your browser does not support the audio element.
Perhaps this is because of differences in how strongly she feels the association between authors and speech varieties? Or because of differences in how easily she imagines herself in the authors' roles?
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
junkie | junky
a drug addict; a person obsessed with something
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
wear in
If you wear in something like a pair of shoes, you wear them for short periods until they fit properly and feel comfortable.
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Language Log
Plastered and potted: a steinful of drunkonyms
I've often wondered why we use such seemingly random, yet colorful, terms to describe a state of drunkenness. The list of words for drunkenness goes on and on and on:
stoned; tipsy; bashed; befuddled; buzzed; crocked; flushed; flying; fuddled; glazed; high; inebriate; inebriated; laced; lit; muddled; plastered; potted; sloshed; stewed; tanked; totaled; wasted; boozed up; feeling no pain; groggy; juiced; liquored up; seeing double; three sheets to the wind; tight; under the influence; under-the-table
(source)
And there are so many others, such as pickled and soused and bombed and high as a kite, which make immediate and obvious sense — to an English speaker.
Lately, I've been seeing official illuminated signs by the roadside that say "BUZZED DRIVING IS DRUNK DRIVING", which I take to be directed at people who are high on drugs or the response of law enforcement officers to people who are obviously in an alcoholic stupor and say to the police, "I'm fine, just a little bit buzzed."
When I see drivers going 90+ miles an hour weaving left and right across 2, 3, and 4 lanes of traffic, I know for sure that they are out of their mind.
Once, going with a friend to his home outside of New Haven, we encountered a driver who was slouched down in his seat so far that you couldn't really see him as he sped by so fast on an entrance ramp that he made us feel we were standing still, knocking off our rearview mirror as he squeezed by, and then repeated the same idiotic stunt with several other cars before exploding like a bullet and disappearing down the highway.
Whatever you call such homicidal DUI behavior, there's always room for one more descriptor. Now we have a scientific study that convincingly accounts for the plethora of such terms in English.
The weekend edition (Samstag/Sonntag 24./25. Februar 2024) of the Süddeutsche Zeitung has an editorial on the front page.
Im Wortrausch [In a Frenzy of Words]
Linguists find more then 500 synonyms in the English language for "drunk". And they found out why more are to be expected.
Here's the press release (2/19/24) of the Chemnitz University of Technology:
“I’m gonna get totally and utterly X-ed.” OR: Can you really use any English word to mean ‘drunk’?
Linguistic study by Chemnitz University of Technology and ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig investigates over 500 English synonyms for “drunk”
—–
The English language is famous for the large number of words that express the idea of being drunk in a humorous way – so-called drunkonyms like “pissed”, “hammered” or “wasted”. British comedian Michael McIntyre even argues in a comedy routine that posh people can use any word to mean ‘drunk’ in English, e.g. “I was utterly gazeboed” or “I’m gonna get totally carparked”. Is this possibly even true? And how can people understand new drunkonyms then?
Two German linguists, Prof. Dr. Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer (Chemnitz University of Technology) and Prof. Dr. Peter Uhrig (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg & ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig), took Michael McIntyre’s claim seriously and tested it in a linguistic study. “We were curious to find out if the synonyms of “drunk” are used in similar contexts,” explains Sanchez-Stockhammer. If that were the case, new word formations might inherit the meaning ‘drunk’ automatically from the context.
The study was recently published in the Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association. “We found that “drunk” mainly occurs in the combinations “too/so/very drunk”, but unexpectedly not with the kinds of adverb used by Michael McIntyre,” explains Uhrig. By contrast, the drunkonyms ending in ‑ed (e.g. “blasted” and “loaded”) preferably occur with the expected intensifiers “completely” or “totally” (e.g. “completely loaded”).
As expected, the combination of “[...]
Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
up the duff
pregnant
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
hold on (2)
to wait for a short time
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Language Log
Unnatural audibles
I'm so far behind the times with gadgets and trinkets and services that I have never listened to a single audiobook, and I never even heard of Audible until yesterday when Gene Hill told me that his wife, Marri, listens to tons of Audibles because she writes reviews, and as a result they give her lots of free stories to read. Of late, the publishers of Audibles are using narration by AI.
No way to overemphasize the importance of the quality of narration in an Audible. Marri most often prefers to have the author do the narration. Only the author knows how to express the precise emotional quality to a line. Or deliver the right touch of sarcasm.
In a tech work, precision of words and grammar are a must and there is no requirement for emotional expression. But in the art of storytelling, it is required to stimulate the reader's empathy, You can't share the trials or triumphs of a protagonist without the energy of all those emotional stimulants.
Marri described the AI narrations as like listening to a six-year-old read a story in a foreign language. In a monotonous drone that would cure insomnia.
No doubt the AI narration will improve over time, but I'm almost certain they will never be able to meet the demands of most listeners for emotive expression.
So says Gene, and I'm inclined to believe him, though I wonder how far AI narrators can go in capturing the nuances of a literary text. This should be another fun part of the AI humanization ride.
Selected readings
* "Sentence punctuation to indicate slowed speech rate" (5/25/08)
* "Storytelling: What’s it good for?" (1/14/19) — "stories are a shortcut to our emotions"; storytelling and science
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Language Log
English allophonies of the day
My original interest in the conversation behind yesterday's post "Our digital god is a CSV file?" was a sociophonetic one. As often noted, spontaneous speech often strays far from dictionary pronunciations, and Elon Musk's side of that conversation is full of interesting examples. A few are documented below.
Let's start with an aspect of this phrase:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
that- that will start to
approach human level intelligence
or perhaps exceed it
The sequence "or perhaps" can be approximately rendered in IPA as [opæps]:
Your browser does not support the audio element. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/MuskOrPerhaps.png …or in eye dialect as "oh paps"…
An r-less "or" is expected, as we can see and hear in his pronunciation of "source":
Your browser does not support the audio element. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/MuskSource.png And the loss of the first-syllable schwa in "perhaps" and the second-syllable /h/ is also common, yielding something like [præps]. But the elision of the /r/ is more puzzling — I wonder whether it was a slip of the tongue, or a standard feature of his dialect or ideolect, or just an extreme onset lenition in fast speech?
A bit later, we get this phrase:
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I think it's somewhat ((inevable))-
inevitable that there'll be some amount of open source
and I
And focusing in a bit:
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That phrase has three interesting reductions. In the first one, "that" reduces to [ət], so that "-ble that there'll be" turns into "bullet there'll be":
Your browser does not support the audio element. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/MuskSunakInterviewX1c1a.png Then the schwa in the first syllable of "amount" becomes a syllabic /m/, so that "some amount" becomes almost "some mount":
Your browser does not support the audio element. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/MuskSunakInterviewX1c1b.png Note also that the final /t/ of "amount" is flapped and voiced — I'm not sure whether that's a standard feature of South African English, or something Musk picked up in the U.S.
And finally, "and" in "and I" is reduced to /n/ (as often happens):
Your browser does not support the audio element. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/MuskSunakInterviewX1c1c.png Today's last lenition sample is perhaps the most fun:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
open source
uh because at least you can see what's going on
In the subsequence "because at least you can see what's going on", "at" survives only as a brief coronal approximant, and the final /st/ of "least" is palatalized by the onset of the following "you can", in which the initial /k/ of "can" becomes a weak velar aproximant.
So "because at least you" becomes something like [kʌzˈliʃ.jəɰən] ≅ "cuz leash yan". (Sorry, I can't find a useful eye-dialect version of the velar approximant…)
The reduced form "because" has been re-lexicalized to the point that people often write "cause" or "cuz". The rest of the reductions, however, are of the kind that are normal in spoken English but are rarely noticed, even by phoneticians:
Your browser does not support the audio element. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/MuskSunakInterviewX1becauseatleast.png I hasten to add that these observations are not any kind of criticism of Elon Musk's performance — we could find similar things in recordings of spontaneous speech from any of us, with similar implications for theories of allophonic variation, speech production and perception, and language variation and change.
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
zero
a worthless person, someone who's done nothing worthwhile in life
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
put on (1)
to start wearing an item of clothing, a pair of shoes, a piece of jewellery, a pair of glasses, etc.
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um
I mean it- it sort of ends up being a giant Comma Separated Value file.
it's like
our digital god is a CSV file?
really?
{laughter}
OK
um
but that- that is kind of what it is.
Sunak: Yeah.
The second questionable idea comes up just before the CSV thing:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
um
uh
a- a neural net is
uh just a whole bunch of probabilities
um
I mean it- it sort of ends up being a giant Comma Separated Value file.
it's like
our digital god is a CSV file?
really?
Though "probabilistic neural nets" have existed, the (billions of) numbers in current "neural net" architectures are actually abstract weights, not probabilities. (Where appropriate, a few sets of outputs, typically at the output edge of the network, may be turned into pseudo-probabilities via "softmax" or similar activation functions. But that's not what's happening throughout the system.)
Note that Musk echoed the whole "CSV god" idea in a Xeet on 3/5/2024.
Video for the whole Sunak/Must interview is here.
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Language Log
Pinyin resurgent
Hopefully.
Some exciting news.
A member of the PRC's National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (the yearly meeting of which is taking place in Beijing right now) is urging schools to increase the time spent teaching Pinyin (currently 4-6 weeks) to a semester or even longer to help ensure more students have a solid foundation in this skill. Intriguingly, there's also a mention of using more "texts."
Here's an account of what's happening:
"Schools should spend more time teaching Pinyin: PRC politician", Pinyin News (3/7/24)
Xu Xudong (徐旭東/徐旭东), a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and a professor at Central China Normal University in Wuhan, is advocating that public schools in China allocate substantially more time to the teaching of Hanyu Pinyin.
“Gōnglì yòu’éryuán bù jiāo Hànyǔ Pīnyīn, ér xiǎoxué yī-niánjí Hànyǔ Pīnyīn zhī jiāo yī dào yī gè bànyuè, háizi nányǐ gēnshang. Zhè yī wèntí pǔbiàn cúnzài, fǎnyìng qiángliè,” he said.
(“Public kindergartens don’t teach Hanyu Pinyin, and the first grade of primary school teaches Hanyu Pinyin for only one to one and a half months, making it difficult for children to keep up. The problem is widespread and the repercussions are strong.”)
The article does not mention this being in part a class problem, probably because the PRC supposedly does not have such things. But what has been happening is that parents with money tend to send their kids to private preschools where they learn Pinyin and otherwise get a head start on the school curriculum. Or the parents simply teach their youngsters themselves.
Students who don’t get this early boost often fall behind, which is a real problem for something so fundamental. As a result, Xu is proposing that schools spend a semester or even longer teaching Pinyin. The article, which is from a CCP mouthpiece and so should be regarded as representing an official position by at least some influential figures, calls this an easily overlooked but very important issue in basic education.
Intriguingly, Xu also mentions interspersing the teaching of Pinyin with “texts” (kèwén jiàoxué jiāochā jìnxíng / 課文教學交叉進行). The greater use of Pinyin texts in schools — if that’s indeed what is meant — could be a great boon to Pinyin education.
source:
Xú Xùdōng wěiyuán: jiànlì gèng fúhé értóng tèdiǎn de Pīnyīn jiàoxué móshì (徐旭東委員：建立更符合兒童特點的拼音教學模式), People’s Daily, March 5, 2024.
Let’s hope that this presages a return to and expansion of the successful program called “Zhùyīn shízì tíqián dúxiě 注音識字提前讀寫” (“Phonetically Annotated Character Recognition Speeds Up Reading and Writing”), or “Z.T.” for short, that was carried out in scattered locations across the country (but mostly in the Northeast [Dongbei; Manchuria]) during the 80s and 90s. See the last paragraph of this early Language Log post: “How to learn to read Chinese” (5/25/08).
Selected readings
* "Dissension over the role of the alphabet in literacy acquisition in the PRC" (4/11/21) — with an extensive bibliography
* "Pinyin vs. English" (10/20/23)
[Thanks to Mark Swofford]
➖ @EngSkills ➖
