Bob Lee: Apparently I'm not alone in my switch to Google Reader. Now that it started reporting subscriber counts, I see 34% of my subscribers use Google Reader while only 25% use Bloglines. Good news travels fast.

I took a look at my log files and found out that Bloglines and Google Reader are not the only service that reports subscriber counts. Here's a breakdown:

So the number of people who use Google Reader to read my blog has indeed surpassed the the number of people who use Bloglines.

Considering that my Bloglines subscriber count hasn't increased that much in the last couple of years, it indeed looks like Google Reader is rolling over everybody else on its way to becoming the number one RSS aggregator.

I'm somewhat surprised by the relative popularity of RSS against Atom. This simply doesn't jive with all the talkings about Atom on the various high volume blogs.

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Posted by Weiqi Gao on February 18, 2007 12:02:36 PM CST #

Today, Sunday February 18, 2007, is Chinese New Year. The Year of the Dog ends and The Year of the Pig begins.

恭喜发财! 过年好!

In keeping with my tradition of explaining something Chinese to my non-Chinese readers (2006, 2005), I'll tell you something about the Chinese language.

But first, a quiz:

1. In traditional Chinese age counting, a baby born on Chinese New Year Eve will be how many years old after the Chinese New Year?
   1. 0 year old
   2. 1 year old
   3. 2 years old
2. The Chinese New Year is always on
   1. The second new moon after the winter solstice
   2. Falls between January 23rd and February 22nd
   3. 354 days or 383 days from the previous one
   4. All of the above

Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese

For thousands of years, the written Chinese has used a consistent set of characters. They were written in different styles, but structurally little has changed. These are the traditional Chinese characters. It was used in China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam.

Here is my last name in traditional Chinese:

One thing about these traditional Chinese characters is that they contain many strokes. The above Gao character contains 11 strokes.

Then people start to get clever. They said, "Hmm, these characters are so hard to learn. Let's simplify it." And they did. The first batch was announced in 1956. The second batch in 1964. They did a third batch in 1978. But it was so ridiculous that people can't stop laughing at them. That batch was withdrawn quickly.

The idea of the simplification is to keep the rough structure of each character, and reduce the number of strokes required to write each character.

Here is my last name in simplified Chinese:

This is the mildest kind of simplification. The two characters look very similar. You probably can't tell, but the simplified version contains only 10 strokes.

As you can guess, the simplification drive did not make written Chinese easier to learn. It still takes about five years to learn basic reading and writing. And people who learned the simplified characters still have to learn all the traditional characters, or they won't be able to read books written before the simplification drive, and books published in Taiwan, who do not recognize the simplified characters. As a matter of fact, they even refuse to call the traditional characters Traditional. They call them Canonical.

The Pinyin

The Pinyin, or the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet, began its life as an attempt at a whole sale romanization of the Chinese language. It didn't work. There were simply too many Chinese characters that have the same pronunciation. And you simply cannot make out the meaning of a sentence from its sound. Someone even composed a 92 character story all of whose characters are of the "shi" sound.

It evolved into a system that helps the pupil learn the pronunciation of characters. It is standardized in the 1950's. When I went to school, the teaching of Pinyin was optional. The school wanted to teach it, but there just were not enough teachers who knew it well to teach it.

The standard is very simple as the Mandarin Chinese has very regular phonetic characteristics. It uses the 26 Latin alphabets, with the letter 'v' being marked as for use only for foreign words and dialects. That leaves us with 18 single letter consonants and 5 single letter vowels. There are three double letter consonants: zh, ch, sh, and a whole bunch of compound vowels or vowel-nasal combinations. There is also the ü (u umlaut). Each Chinese syllable begins with a consonant and ends with a vowel, a compound vowel, or a vowel-nasal combination. There are only two nasal sounds in Chinese: n and ng.

Since the Pinyin was envisioned as a teaching aid for the Chinese pupil at the time of adoption, some of the consonants were assigned phonetic values that's quite different from English or other Latin languages. This was not a problem until in the late 1970's when Pinyin was also adopted as the standard romanization mechanism for transliterating Chinese names into Western languages. That was when in Peking was changed to Beijing, and Chou En-lai became Zhou Enlai.

The problem with forcing the Pinyin onto English and other Western languages is that certain consonants were not easily and faithfully pronounced. For English speakers, x, q, c, zh, and z poses particular challenges since their Pinyin value is totally different from their English value.

The following is typical of my first encounters with a new colleague:

Me: Hello, Tom. It's nice to meet you.
Tom: Hello. Excuse me, but how do you pronounce your name?
Me: It's pronounced Wei-Chee. The q has a ch sound.
Tom: Hi, Wei-Chee. Nice to meet you.

I'm lucky in that the typical English speaker don't know how to pronounce qi (so they just ask). The story is different for all the Caos, the Xings, the Hes and the Es. They don't stand a chance of ever hearing their name pronounced correctly while in an English speaking country. (Except when they make an appearance in the Olympics, where I understand all the broadcasters are trained to pronounce the athlete' name correctly.) These names were translated as Ts'ao, Hsing, Ho, and Ê in the older Wade-Giles convention superseded by the Pinyin.

Like the situation for simplified characters, Taiwan disagrees with China. They still use the older convention.

Pinyin As Input Method

One use of Pinyin in the computer age is as an input method for Simplified Chinese on a computer with a regular English keyboard. Since more than half of the Chinese population (almost all of the young people) know Pinyin, it is naturally the most popular input method.

There are some inefficiencies in Pinyin as an input method when compared with other "professional" input methods because Pinyin was not designed for the economy of keystrokes. The learning curve for other methods are very high.

Another shortcoming of Pinyin is that it is useless when you don't know for sure how a character is pronounced.

But for the casual user, Pinyin gets the job done. Here is a little screencast of me self-googling (It's in Ogg Theora format, and you need Linux or Video Lan Client (VLC) to watch it):

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Posted by Weiqi Gao on February 18, 2007 8:58:42 AM CST #