Spanish in perspective and Stephen Hawking in Santiago de Compostela

My schedule is again back to something approximating sanity, with the Spanish course having finished today. We managed to fit a three month course into two and a half weeks of lessons. During this time I felt frustrated at the lack of practice I was getting while in the classroom, but as it comes to an end I see that I have actually got something valuable out of these three weeks.

We 'learned' a great deal of grammar in the class, a lot of structures and syntactical constructions. My frustration came about because it was just too much and I can't don't remember to use very much of this in my conversation. However, what I have gained is a set of points which I can look out for in other people's conversations and gradually, through immersion can start to put in my own speech. It's going to take time and effort on my part, but I think this awareness of what to look for in conversation is key. I now have some ideas for exercises that I can try out with the television, a rich resource which I rarely use. I'm going to attempt to watch the TV for around 20 minutes a day and, with paper and pen in front of me, look out for specific constructions, jotting them down when I hear them. This will give me a good familiarity with them and also should help me understand the frequency with which they are used in everyday life. Anyway, I'll let you know how that goes.

In other news...Stephen Hawking is in town and this is huge. It's especially important for a relatively small city which has gone crazy over his visit. Saturday will be the big day, but he has so far taken part in many events, including the last 150 or so meters of the Camino, a major press conference, and a talk in our department on inflation in the early universe.

The talk (based on this paper with Hartle and Hertog) focused on the reason that we started at the top of a potential, which has been conjectured to give rise to slow roll inflation, and not in a minimum. The claim is that using the appropriate weighting for calculating the probability of starting at a maximum, using the Hartle-Hawking wavefunction of the universe, you are led to a high probability for such a 'boundary condition'.

Anyway, the talk was just 20 minutes and the room was absolutely rammed. I've seen Hawking give a couple of talks now, and the media circus which follows him around is fairly crazy. He seems to have pretty good control over what he will and won't allow, and when enough was enough, with the cameras and film crews, he asked them to leave at which point they shut up shop. The audience was warned that it was indeed going to be a technical talk but almost none of the members (mostly made up of non-physicists) budged, leaving many of those who were actually there to hear what he had to say, without a seat. Still, it was an interesting talk, on a subject I haven't studied myself, but was pretty understandable in the short seminar.

For a video of some of the things he's been up to here in Santiago, I've embedded this short video:


On a Hawking related note, I'll also add this video of the chronophage, which has recently been inaugurated in Corpus Cristi, in Cambridge, and is a wonderful time keeping device/steam punk engineering

Wedding, Galicia style

I've finally had a few moments to process the photos from two weeks back when I went to the wedding of my Spanish teacher and one of my colleagues. Apart from the whole getting married bit, a Galician wedding focuses mostly around seafood, and this one was no exception, with course after course of stunning lobster, crab, langoustine, clams and more, all washed down with a rather fine white wine from the region of the Ribeira Sacra.

As with all things Spanish, retiring early is simply not on the cards and the wedding crowd finally dispersed into the early morning drizzle at around 7am. A very enjoyable evening and I'll certainly be heading back to Ourense, the closest city to the village where the wedding was held, for some sightseeing.

As an aside I discovered that confetti is not the Italian for bits of paper thrown at weddings. Confetti, in Italian means small sweets (usually sugar coated almonds) which are eaten at weddings - but certainly not thrown! The Italian for confetti is coriandoli. It appears that this word came into the English language via a confusion of meanings along with pepperoni/peperone (sausage in English, bell pepper in Italian) and bimbo (derogatory term for an apparently unintelligent woman in English, boy in Italian)

A billion monkeys

A trillion words, a billion five-word sequences, 13 million unique words appearing over 40 times! This is what has been accumulated from a Google research team in their project on n-grams.

Several aspects of this project have occurred to me before and I can see some more areas in which the research could be extended.

Google has been trawling the web for the fabric with which it is made - words - looking for the frequency with which words occur and, perhaps more interestingly, combinations of words.

This has many obvious uses - in particular in automatic error detection and in translation. It's a crude method, but if a machine can learn the structure of a language through a huge database of its current uses the chances of more natural translations increases greatly.

One idea I had while learning Chinese in Beijing came from the fact that while it's very simple to buy box sets with 'the thousand most common Chinese characters', actually, due to the structure of the language, what would be most useful would be lists of the most common character pairs, and combinations of four characters. The meaning usually comes from pairs of characters where each one individually can give only a vague idea of the meaning. This I would love to have and presumably could be quite easily be generated from an appropriate n-gram database. (If anyone already knows details about such a database, please tell me!)

And being Google, all of this data - around 24 Gigabytes, with the billions of combinations they've found is available for free which I can imagine will be of great use to linguistics departments around the world.

(*Note that the Google post shows that this news is not new, coming as it does from 2006*)

Thanks to the Google Operating system blog.

Spanish update - three months in

I've just come back from my first Spanish language exchange so I thought I'd give a bit of an update on how things are coming on with the language.

After what felt like a blistering start, working very hard and late into the evenings on learning Spanish vocab, things felt like they've hit a bit of a brick wall. I learnt around 1000 words in my first month but I'm not sure that that has increased much in the following two. With such a gradual process it's rather hard to monitor my own progress, but certainly with recent conferences and winter schools, there have been some big breaks in getting into the language.

Things look relatively clear ahead and I'm managing around 4 hours a week of lessons in the evenings, one-on-one. My teacher speaks no English during the lessons and I use almost none. With my work currently moving along reasonably well I'm working solidly in the day and then usually for a while after dinner. The idea of then going through flash cards of vocab and drilling myself on the grammar seems to become less and less appealing.

So, as an incentive to get another mode of language input I went along tonight to a bar in the old town which hosts a weekly language exchange. I turned up late but was still able to find a Spaniard to torture for a while and language was indeed exchanged. I'll certainly be going back as I'm finding the biggest hurdle at the moment is actually using what I know.

As with Chinese I'm going through the Pimsleur course which is a great addition. In the case of Chinese it was the best method I found for picking up the correct sounds, whereas for Spanish, the sounds are less of a problem and the grammar (which is in some senses non-existent in Chinese) is much trickier.

In fact I find it much more relaxing to listen to Chinese podcasts (Chinesepod) these days and am probably picking up more Chinese than I reasonably should be - they have hundreds of lessons at all different levels, highly recommended. As I've said before, having put a modicum of effort into the Mandarin before, I really don't want to lose it.

I thought that watching Spanish television would help but the programs seem to be so mindless that I simply turn my brain off and let it wash over me - not a terribly good solution. Radio is slightly better but harder to understand due to lack of context

Anyway, three months into Spain and I can converse on a pretty basic level. Not quite where I wanted to be by now, but definitely heading in the right direction.

In the mean time

All is currently well for me in Santiago. There's just no time now for serious blogging. I've been going non-stop every day from 10 am until 2 am, what with Spanish lessons, starting new projects, continuing with current ones, reviewing old ones, writing talks, planning trips (Cambridge, CERN and Dublin are coming up on the academic front) and getting the admin polished off.

Perhaps this weekend I may have a few spare minutes, but that's not guaranteed. Anyway, an informal talk to give tomorrow has to be prepared now.

Language in a new light

Working, can't stop, a post from a couple of days back:

About a month ago I finished the 90 half hour lesson series of Pimsleur's Mandarin Chinese. It is without a doubt the most valuable language resource I've found and makes learning Chinese much much easier than anything else I've tried. It's uses interval repetition, such that you will hear a word first slowly and it will be repeated several times over the first minute. Then you may not hear it for a five minutes, and then 20 and then there will be a gap of a few lessons until it will pop up again in context. This format seems to work extremely well. The other technique which is used is that you are prompted to say words and phrases, not with an exact queue but with a hint of the sort of response you should give.

You won't learn a huge amount of vocabulary (just 400 or so words in the 45 hours) but you will learn them well and be able to get the pronunciation and tones accurate by the end of this. This is no small feat in my book.

Anyway, highly recommended - I just wish there were a further 90 lessons with another 400 words.

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On the subject of languages I had a small, retrospectively obvious epiphany this weekend as I was getting on with learning Spanish. I've spoken in the past about my struggle with Russian and it's only just clicked why this was.

I didn't enjoy learning Russian because I didn't have any motivation.

This has only occurred to me a decade after I scraped a C grade at GCSE. I had always claimed that the language, even after 5 years of learning it, simply never clicked. I only realised yesterday quite what why this was.

Around a year and a half ago I wrote a rant of a post about the fact that some schools in England were going to make pupils learn Chinese. I thought that this would simply be a waste of the kid's time and effort for the great majority who would never use it (unless China has its way in another two decades). This thought was largely because I was struggling with the language at the time and had struggled at school with Russian (having been forced to learn it) and achieved only passable French. I now see the reason for these outcomes in a clearer light.

When I arrived here and started learning Chinese it was hard work. It's hard for just about everyone (Japanese and Koreans seem to have a slightly easier time of it). When I arrived in Beijing I had around 100 Chinese words to my name and could actually get by most of the time, I could go into a shop and get what I wanted, if I had a dictionary. I could get around in a taxi and if anything tough came up I could usually blag my way through with a stranger's assistance or by phoning a friend. Frankly I didn't need any more Chinese than that and so my motivation was low. I also didn't like the language very much. The Beijing dialect can sound like a man coughing up a rusty bicycle chain and the women don't sound much better.

OK, so a year and a half on from that I know perhaps a little over a thousand words, at a guess. I can have a basic conversation with most strangers and have spent on occasion a few hours with Chinese people speaking nothing but. My Chinese is still really, really bad but I actually love to use it. Having got used to it I actually rather like the sounds (sometimes, the radio shows and real locals still grate my eardrums when I'm not in the mood). And suddenly there's the motivation: the motivation is because I can see that my life is improved by learning the language, being able to communicate with people and I like listening to it.

The part about it making my life better is something that I NEVER KNEW AT SCHOOL! I knew that if I learnt French then I could go to France on a French exchange and speak with my host family, but why would I want to do that? I could go to France with my family and there were plenty of people in England I still had to meet. From a cultural point of view I didn't see that I was going to be gaining much (this isn't something I contemplated but I can see now that it didn't register at all). The motivation for learning Russian, so we were told, was that Russia was soon going to be taking off as a genuine superpower and we would be set for life if we could do business in the language - what sort of motivation is that for a 10 year old? I learnt to read Hebrew so that I could duplicate the sounds from the Torah. Something which I soon became bored with and gave up on. So, it seems that my past experience at learning foreign languages was marred by the fact that I didn't see a good reason why I should make the effort.

I got myself into a bit of an awkward position with my arguments about English kids learning Chinese at the beginning of my stay here because on the one hand I had spoken about how much I enjoyed the nature of language and reading great literature and on the other hand was saying that I really didn't want to bother with the hassle when I could do perfectly well without. I think that the point is, I think it's difficult to grasp how much joy can be gained from reading great works in another language or talking with the locals on an even footing until you've done so. The fact is that it opens up such a new dimension to your life. I don't claim to be able to read literature in Chinese, nor even the local papers but I can get a sense from having spoken with people about the depths of great Chinese works that it would be wonderful to be able to read them.

I've just started learning Spanish while keeping up with the Chinese and I so look forward to the day that I can sit in a restaurant in Santiago de Compostela and talk with those around me naturally. I'm smiling now thinking of the first time I will be able to open up a Marquez and read the words in their untouched form.

By all this I don't mean that suddenly language is easy or that I will pick up Spanish in just a few weeks but now I actually want to learn it, not just because I think I should, or I'm told to, but because I'm excited about the prospects of it.

This minor epiphany begs the question: could I have been shown this earlier? Could someone have given me good reasons for learning Russian and French and Hebrew and allowed me to explore the enjoyable parts of learning a language (speaking with the people and reading the literature) to a greater extent. Twice I went to France on French exchanges and enjoyed both occasions, but it rather felt that this was a treat so that I would keep learning the grammar and the vocab lists, rather than the whole reason for learning the language.

Perhaps we just need more enthusiastic teachers but with teachers of all calibers running rather low, at least in the UK, there's little room for such requests I presume.

Anyway, some random thoughts after almost 2 years in a foreign land.

Expatois

Sometimes it's hard to tell the ratio of irony to Chinglish in signs here in Beijing. I'm sitting in a cafe at the moment finishing off a talk for tomorrow and tidying up a paper. The cafe is very quiet with comfy chairs and tables and a few students sitting round working hard (we're next to Qinghua university - the top university in China). The sign on the stairs on the way up to the cafe states boldly that: "A climax a day keeps the doctor away". I'm not sure if this is a tongue in cheek statement talking of eureka moments, or simply the obvious interpretation. These days I simply don't know.

On the topic of language. Today's Wikipedia article (not viewable in China where Wikipedia has again been blocked) is on the Gwoyeu Romatzyh Latinisation of Chinese, in particular an alternative recipe for showing the tonal system. It looks far more complicated than Pinyin, which is relatively straight forward once you are able to reproduce the tones. I'll be discussing learning Mandarin soon as I've just reached a bit of a personal goal.

Over at the Scitalks blog I have given a series of suggestions for more advanced string theory lectures, mostly on AdS/CFT, but on other topics too. I've been watching lots of the TASI courses which are excellent.

Language exchange

The summer cold is disappearing, work is going in the right direction, a host of new Couchsurfers are about to turn up and things are as non-stop as ever.

In my not so spare, spare time I've been doing some audio recording work for a publishing company out here which produces teaching material for schools. I have, give or take, a reasonably 'standard' British-English accent and this is rather sought after out here where the majority of English speaking expats are from the US, Australia or Canada.

For a couple of early mornings over the last week I've spent around 3 hours sat in a recording studio reading at varying speeds from very, very slowly to a reasonably fast, but clearly annunciated, rate on a variety of topics from Sherlock Holmes to cross-species animals (I've learnt a great deal about zonies, ligers (the largest cats in the world) and wolphins) and from World domination by China in 2057 to the history of global discovery. I've read poems and taught unknown millions of Chinese children how to say 'I love you' in Indonesian, Spanish, French and a variety of other badly pronounced languages.

I'll try and find out just how many Chinese children will be speaking with my accent over the next few years and should be able to get hold of a set of the language courses when they are published.

It's been another interesting experience, although I've found that talking almost non-stop for two and a half hours, at a very slow pace, can be exhausting. This has also meant some very long days, but the pay that one can get to do this sort of work is hard to turn down when you spend most of your time on a local wage - not that a local wage is hard to live on when accommodation is heavily subsidised.

I read recently that Beijing is one of the most expensive cities in the world. I can only imagine that this is almost entirely down to the cost of housing, which can be extortionate. One could easily live on a dollar a day out here if it were necessary.

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Anyway, later today I'm picking up a Couchsurfer from Malaysia who will be staying at my flat until next week. Couchsurfers from the States, Russia and the UK will be staying over the next couple of months.

Chinese lessons are back on this evening after a short hiatus and though I've been steadily working through the audio courses, I need to find some hidden minutes to go through the characters. Spare minutes are hiding from me more and more these days.

...Mathematica has finished spitting out numbers, I'd better find out what it all means.

Reflections

Five months to go here in Beijing, and that thought makes me rather sad. Perhaps just two months ago I would have said that I thought it was the right time to be moving on. My plans are still firmly set and I am very much looking forward to making my way to Galicia to experience a new culture, pick up a new language and work in a different environment.

So, what has changed in the last couple of months? Nothing of any discrete alteration, just a gradual change which means that I feel more and more at home here and the comfortable, easy life of both a physicist doing what he loves and an expat living a semi-expat life makes for a fine existence. I still get an itch every few months and Beijing just gets a bit too much, the shouting, the spitting, the pushing and the pollution can get you down when you're feeling edgy or vulnerable, but I've been lucky to be able to escape, if only for a day on such occasions.

Now summer is here and Beijing becomes an altogether different beast. The chilled edge of winter cutting through to your core has vanished and this makes life infinitely easier. If only to be replaced by hungry mozzies and hot nights, I much prefer the latter.

One thing that has definitely changed is, as is so often the case, a matter of the language. On arrival in Beijing I knew perhaps 100 words and could use just a fraction with any comfort. One of the hardest things to understand was people's attitude to becoming my friend. I've had the same reaction from every expat I've met who arrived in China with a similarly small Chinese vocabulary.

I met many people in the first few months here who I would chat with for a few minutes or perhaps a few hours, on the street, in a bar or cafe or a friend's friend. On many occasions they would hook onto me as a best friend, and this frequently felt uncomfortable. Sadly it often felt like they wanted to be my friend because either I spoke good English and could help them, or they wanted to know about English culture, or they wanted me to help them to get a job. Of course this was not always the case and there is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to know somebody for these reasons. It just felt uncomfortable and I found myself making promises to ring people or go to dinner with people and never did. I still feel bad about that and I also feel bad because there were genuinely interesting individuals who got bundled into the same mass of mobile numbers and name cards.

What has changed is unexpected but a real pleasure. At first I met people who were interested in me because I could speak English, I was rather unusual and almost like a new toy (part of this may be tied in with the one child policy but I'm not sure how speculative that guess is). As of the last few weeks I've started bumping into people in various situations and have spoken Chinese with them. Although it's bad, broken Chinese and about fairly basic subjects, the smile that I'm received with for being an expat who has made an effort and is interested in the people and culture is a very different smile from that which greets the expat who can help with English practice.

When I was taking photos of the strange metallic sculpture I posted last week I met another photographer there, from Anhui province, in the East of China. I told him I thought the sculpture was beautiful and and interesting piece to have on the street and we started talking about our backgrounds and life in our home towns. We must have spoken for half an hour, but it felt like a true two-way exchange, and I left feeling elated by having met an interesting person on the same level that I would in an English speaking country.

This has happened a few times now, on the street, in taxis and bars and it seems, naturally, that the warmth of the welcome to a foreigner who can speak the language is far greater than I had known before.

As I say I have several, though not a great many, Chinese friends and those in the department who I've got to know, I do not put in the same category as those who have latched onto me in the past after a few minutes of talking English. I would still like to build stronger friendships with those in the department.

Anyway, that, I'm sure is a great part of my increased comfort of living here. When I return to see my friends they should not expect me to be speaking fluent Chinese but simply enough to get by and have a basic chat with a stranger.

Of course I'm going to miss the food greatly, anyone who has read more than a few posts of this blog will know that it's a great obsession of mine, but I hear that the food in Santiago is excellent too and I shall continue to explore whatever I can get my hands on. (See here for a rather fuzzy photo of the Hunan bee pupae and bamboo worms I had last week - pretty tasty!)

The mix of Western and Eastern culture in the arts also makes for a fascinating time out here and a trip last week to see the first 3 hours or so of the Kunqu opera, The Peony Pavilion was in stark contrast to the experimental electronica, Chinese punk and techno which I'd seen throughout the previous week. It doesn't have quite the finesse and simplicity which so attracts me to Kabuki but the movement, the poetry of the lyrics (translated very well on subtitle screens) and the exuberant colours of the costumes make it a fascinating art form.


The voices are not easy for most Westerners but I find it substantially better than the Beijing opera, three hours of which would definitely be too much.

Anyway, a few reflections on recent changes. I would really recommend any expat who comes out here for any length of time to make as much of an effort with the language as possible. You will have a great time out here without any Chinese but you will love the place if you can truly integrate. I just wish I had learned this sooner and had more time to put these lessons into practice.

Basic resources for learning Chinese

I mentioned to a fellow blogger who is learning Mandarin that I would pass on the language resources I've found useful, but it seems sensible to make this list available to all.

I have a two hour lesson once per week, when work allows, and we use a book called Chinese Conversation 301. I have little to compare this book to but my impressions are that although it covers all the grammar needed and introduces about 15 new words per lesson, it's a bit drier that it needs to be. I tend to be rather fickle about these things and so without discipline I would simply flick from book to book, being a little dissatisfied with them all.

[Addition: Kevin mentioned his more extensive list of resources in the comments, which are definitely worth checking out here]

I would definitely advise getting a book on Chinese radicals if you're going to learn to read and/or write. A great deal of the complexity of the written language can be broken down when you understand the roots of many words and learning the 100 or so most often used radicals will give a good boost to the seemingly impossible task of learning characters. I have this book, and have found it to be very useful.

I haven't bought any yet but there are many kids books with lots of pictures of objects, animals, foods etc. with the Pinyin written by them. This is probably also a very good source for learning vocab by getting a rather more colourful image in your head.

ZDT is the best flashcard program I've found which allows the user to define several different modes to test yourself on Pinyin, English definitions and Hanzi (characters). There are also audio plugins so you can hear the words read by a Chinese reader. Importantly the format allows you to use word lists from several sources and there are a few which are well worth using, certainly for beginners, here.

Included in the word lists above is mention of the Pimsleur language lessons which I still use regularly and these are probably my best and, importantly, most hassle-free resource. The lessons are half and hour each and highly repetitive. I try and get through 5 or 6 of these lessons a week, though it wouldn't be a stretch to do much more as I potter around the flat or walk to work. I imagine this is the sort of thing you can get in most libraries in the UK and, I guess, in the US.

The Chinese pod lessons are also a useful resource though Pimsleur has taken over on the i-pod for me.

For Chinese dictionaries online I tend to use Zhongwen.com mostly because it has a useful interface for understanding the links between and roots of words. If it's not in this rather small dictionary then it usually gives an option to check several other dictionaries.

I added Laowai Chinese to my feed reader as soon as it started and although he tends not to post very frequently, this blog has had many interesting articles on different aspects of learning the language and I recommend taking a look and picking up a few words there.

Any other invaluable resources are welcomed in the comments section!

Every cloud...

Sometimes you need a bit of shock treatment (no pun intended) to push you in the right direction. My last post may have sounded a little negative and, perhaps, defeatist but writing my thoughts down and considering it more has motivated me to start talking with the professors in Chinese. Since Thursday I've been attempting as much as possible to speak Mandarin with them and although it's messy and there's a lot of English in there when I don't know the Chinese, it's a big step and after a year and a bit here, it's about time.

Hopefully I'll be able to keep this up over the final months of my stay in Beijing and look forward to seeing what possible opportunities this presents. The main moment of enlightenment was seeing just what doors can be opened by showing willing and an interest in the culture and language (witnessing the melee around my German friend). This may seem obvious from the outside but when you're sitting in the midst of the system, struggling with the confusion around you it's easy to give in and withdraw to your own isolated world.

OK, here goes!

Lost for words

My lack of blogging is perhaps as indicative of my current state as when I'm posting regularly. This week has been non-stop but on the whole enjoyable. I have a friend here from Germany doing some work with me and we're all too aware that a week is a short time in physics, so we're trying to make the most of it. On top of a rather last minute seminar that I will be giving on Friday, continuing Chinese lessons and several other projects on the middle burner there isn't much time for anything else other than the current calculation.

In fact my collaborator coming out here has bought something rather starkly home to me, which highlights a concern I had only been partly aware of.

I enjoy Beijing a great deal. The city is an amazing place with so many things to go and see if you make the effort, the night life is variable but often spectacular and the food has been mentioned in this blog enough to last a blogging lifetime, my life as a physicist is also, for me, an extremely enjoyable one, but...

my Chinese is still not up to much. This isn't because I'm awful at languages, though I'm not great, but I just don't have the time (or motivation, if I'm honest) on top of long hours in the office and occasional attempts to explore the city to practice reading and writing - which is how I will actually increase my vocabulary. If I have a conversation and somebody just tells me a word without me concentrating for some time on remembering it, quickly the memory of the sound fades and the new word is gone. My hope is that the less alien nature of Spanish will make this sort of learning more possible.

I'm at the stage that I can listen in on a conversation and perhaps 80% of the time I have a good idea what they're talking about. That's because picking up one in five words usually gives a good clue. However, one in five words isn't enough to answer a one sentence question, unless it's something very familiar. So my part in conversations is generally a passive one.

This makes for an occasionally rather lonely existence in the office - note that I'm not writing this in a melodramatic flood of tears but feel that as I chronicle my time here the bad should be written up with the good. Thankfully there's generally a lot more of the latter.

Anyway, what has made me think about this a great deal this week is that my collaborator speaks extremely good Chinese, really remarkably so. Having learnt for 5 or 6 years, living in China for one and having a Chinese wife clearly helps and so I have no pretensions that I should be anywhere near his standard. We went for a coffee in the department coffee corner a couple of days ago and within a few minutes most of the staff were gathered around us, chatting away in wonder with him as I sat, passively listening, nodding whenever anyone looked at me and told me how good he was.

I realised that in perhaps an hour's conversation he had spoken with and found out more about my senior colleagues than I have in the year and a bit I've been here. I'd be lying if I said that this didn't make me feel pretty pathetic. They all speak very good English but I just haven't bonded with them as I would have liked. clearly they're all very friendly but my passable 'ni hao' as we meet in the corridor is a bit of a conversation stopper. Occasionally they will reply 'your Chinese isn't bad!' in Chinese, to which I make an appropriate response, and then I'm a bit stuck.

The point is that a) I need to learn more Chinese, which undoubtedly takes time and effort and isn't something which is simply absorbed passively. Time is something that has to be made, but other things must be sacrificed, and b) it would be nice if I could find a way to bond more with the professors here, who are all decent people, with a lot to say.

Anyway, that's what's on my mind at the moment so I shall go home now after 12 hours in the office and see if I can add a few more words to the vocabulary. Just six months to go here which seems crazy and I've had, without a doubt, a fantastic experience. Regret is an emotion I try and stay clear of, but I can certainly try and make the most of the short time I have left here.

Postings may continue to be infrequent for the moment, I'll do my best.

Conservation of Energy

I am become sumo, the eater of worlds. I am more sushi than man, more okonomiyaki than flesh. It transpires that brain work in the day and foot work at the weekends is not enough to counter the calorie intake from the stupendous food out here.

I should take note from the 24 hour a day food programs which fill most channels on the television. Whereas in the UK there are an uncountable infinity of programs related to cooking, most of the food programs in Japan are about eating, they are filled with slim men and women who populate every channel and clearly spend all of their time stuffing their faces. The key to how they stay svelte, however, is that they expend the same amount of energy gasping and wowing over the food as they take in, in Calories - this is truly over the top enthusing. Spend your meals jumping up and down excitedly, waving your chopsticks and you too can eat what you want as often as you want. Atkins et al, eat your heart out (err)!

This is another food post, mostly unrelated to Japanese cuisine but the science of food.

Ever since reading about Heston Blumenthal and his nitro green tea and lime mousse, I've been rather fascinated by molecular gastronomy; the idea of using science in the kitchen as a driving force rather than a way of explaining why something works after the fact. With practice we become pretty good at using our intuition to come up with combinations of flavours and tastes which will be complimentary, but this intuition is also clouded by prejudices, the likes of which are now being broken down. I can see that all of this may seem a little like the Emperor's New Clothes, and people are simply being cheated out of large sums of money just for the novelty of eating bacon and egg ice-cream but I buy into it - I've eaten enough weird combinations to know that most people live in a tiny corner of culinary parameter space and there's a lot more to be explored.

On somewhat less extreme notes the basic methods of cooking are being questioned. For instance, the lore which says that steak should be cooked quickly at a very high temperature to seal in the juices turns out to be fiction. The Maillard reaction does sear the outside and give a good flavour and colour, combining the proteins of the meat with the natural sugars, but in fact this method drives out the moisture, rather than sealing it in. A better way to prepare a steak is to put it in a sealed plastic bag, in water at around 60 degrees centigrade for an hour or so and then at the last minute, remove it from the bag and quickly sear the outside. The details of this and many other molecular gastronomy tips and tricks can be found at this site, which includes a rather fun blog.

One of the major bonuses of molecular gastronomy has been the study of the aromas and flavours in a large number of ingredients to see which will combine well. This often results in strange mixture, but I am promised that the outcomes can be spectacular - white chocolate and caviar, for instance both contain high levels of amines and compliment each other extremely well - I'm looking forward to trying this one. I've always enjoyed playing around in the kitchen with rather unusual combinations and it's great to understand some of the reasons behind why such odd mixtures work well.

Heston Blumenthal not only aims to please the taste and smell senses but has experimented with sounds and counterintuitive combinations of temperature. From this article:
"In doing work on the perception of crispness, we were looking at sound cues and the sound of food," says Spence. "The feel of the food in your mouth is determined largely by the sound of it in your ear. We looked at the particular sounds of food that give you that sense of crispness or crunchiness. Can we do things to the taste by manipulating the sound? We both worked on an idea for the restaurant in which headphones are used to pick up the sound of the food that you are eating, which is then played back to the customer by changing the sound subtly and thereby affecting the perception of the crispness."

I haven't had the chance to go to The Fat Duck but I am told by a friend who has that it is truly spectacular (T - please feel free to add your thoughts in the comments).

Living in Asia I'm regularly faced with tastes and textures which are out of the ordinary for Western pallets, for instance in Japan, chicken cartilage is regularly crunched on, grilled in a soy based sauce, and I'm coming to rather like this new addition. The list of new tastes and textures I've come across in China is almost endless.

In fact I was motivated to write the above having found out about El Bulli, voted in 2006 as The Best Restaurant in the World (The Fat Duck took top spot in 2005). El Bulli uses techniques from molecular gastronomy for its recipes and the head chef, Ferran Acosta, spends six months out of every year experimenting in his workshop, perfecting his recipes. The 30+ course meals are fully booked for 2007 but as I will not only be in the same continent but the same country (Spain) by this time next year, I'm highly tempted to see how to get on the waiting list.

and back to Japan where I'm beginning to learn how onomatopoeic the language is. Perhaps onomatopoeia isn't quite the right name because many of these words describe feelings as well as things which make a noise - if anyone can tell me if there's an alternative word for that, I would be grateful to find out.

I asked on the off-chance a few weeks ago if there was a specific word in Japanese for the feeling of wasabi going up your nose, and indeed there is. Tsunn, which I can't find in the dictionary but I have heard it from separate sources, describes the feeling as the wasabi wafts up into your nasal cavity and makes your eyes burn. This is in the same class of words as kyeen (spelling unknown) which is the Japanese for brain freeze - the icecream induced headache. In fact every thought or feeling I've asked about has a Japanese onomatopoeia to describe it. Today's was petti (pronounced like the French petit) as the sound of tobiko (flying fish roe) popping in your mouth. I'll leave it there for today. Happy eating!

Ruffled

In the language challenged state I frequently find myself in, one of the most difficult situations to confront is the hairdressers. It's mainly the unspoken staring from both staff and customers while I'm trying to gesticulate as to roughly what I'm after that makes me feel rather awkward. In my local in Beijing I'm now quite used to this and have enough vocab to speak a little, so that is not too much of a problem anymore. They still haven't managed quite what I'm after but I think we're going in the right direction.The other great thing in Beijing is that if you get it all horribly wrong then the hair catastrophe which ensues is a remarkably cheap disaster (about 70p for cut).

The difference here in Japan, as I've just discovered, is that for the price of one major hairtastrophe, I could have at least 30 bad cuts in Beijing. After finding a hairdressers near my apartment and establishing that there was no common language between us, I was given several magazines to peruse and choose which of the Japanese men with very straight hair I would most like to look like (for those who don't know, my hair has waves upon curls upon waves, as soon as it gets long enough). I gave up and pointed to something which looked plausible and half an hour later walked out of the shop, substantially poorer (about two days Chinese wages), looking nothing like the man in the photo but with some semblance of having been to a barbers rather than a wind tunnel.

This is always a difficult situation and I've only ended up with a few really bad haircuts due to communication problems. I'm not expecting this situation to change much in the few months I have left in China.