Before I travelled to China, Yinlin and I had already written each other numerous emails and chat messages, amounting to over 300 pages of text. That's over page per day on average, a book of writing in nine months. We discussed our histories, our hobbies and interests, our daily events and our moods, our happiness and sadness, our world views and beliefs, our works and studies, our books and magazines, our lunches and dinners... and our love. I might we have discussed topics wider and deeper than many local couples discuss during their first year.
There are advantages in getting to know each other well through writing before starting to live together. My experience is that when people are together and talking in their daily lives, they tend to talk about particular set of topics.When the same people are writing in chat, the different mode of communication tends to lead discussions to somewhat different topics. And finally writing long letters can bring up even more different topics. But with the lack of strong common language in the beginning - and still to some degree at the moment - such discussion would have been impossible without various great internet tools.
Baidu is produced by a Chinese company, served by servers located in China and therefore implicitly in control by the government. You cannot find any information critical of the Chinese government by searching Baidu.
I have been using Skype as my chat application of choice, but it is rarely used in China. Instead, Chinese people use QQ messenger. Never heard of that? Neither had I before getting to contact with Jinlin, but by it's user base of 800 million people, it's the most used messaging software on the planet. It's like Skype in its video and audio support. But it has also some cool extra features, like access to machine translation services. With QQ messenger Jinlin and my can have the communication in English which she can translate in real time in China. Or we can have the communication in Chinese and I can do the translations at my end with click of a button (Jinlin has nickname "fiona" in QQ):
Although I had decided to concentrate my Chinese learning efforts to speaking and we also practice that in our sessions, translating the text also contributes a bit to the language learning. Seeing so many examples of sentences in both languages makes brain start to identify simple cases at some point without translation.
Of course machine translation is never very accurate, so it is good idea to write small sentences and sometimes write the same idea in two or more different ways. Even then, occasional translations mistakes and corresponding misunderstandings cannot be avoided. But with a good attitude and sense of humour, we have managed to mostly laugh at them. When it comes to writing really important sentences or complex subtle text like poems, its best to use the king of translation software, Google translate. Google translate allows the result of the translation to be inspected before sending it to your friend. What's even better is to use "checking by round trip": copy the translated text to another translation window with translation to opposite direction. The result should something that is close enough in meaning the the original text. With this arrangement, it is quick to edit your original text until you get a version that makes the round trip without changing its meaning too much:
Google translate is extremely valuable learning tool as well, because it can show the pinyin phonetic form of the text and even speak the words out. For example "my girlfriend" translates to 我的女朋友 which in phonetic pinyin is "Wǒ de nǚ péngyǒu" (the accents on top of characters mark the tones or pitches).
For our longer emails, we used for the first months a web-based mail from the makers of QQ messenger: mail.qq.com. It has good support for attachments and the emails do not go through the censorship firewalls of the government:
QQ mail does not have automatic translation but with emails there is less of a hurry for real time translation, so Google translate (or Baidu translate in China) can be used nicely.
So nowadays when I post a set of new pictures to Facebook for my friends to see, I also post them to my QQ space for Jinlin to see.
I have only recently discovered that there are proxy services like http://www.facebookinchinaproxy.com/ that allow access to Facebook and some other blocked services from China. Perhaps soon we can get me and Jinlin to be friends in Facebook as well. Of course Chinese government is actively fighting to block such procies as well. So you must do the search for proxies outside China because searches of services that circumvent blocks are blocked :-) It's a funny game of cat and mouse and it will be interesting so see if in the long run the government will loose the game. Wikipedia has good article on the extent of Chinese government internet censorship. This of course means that Wikipedia itself is blocked by the Chinese government ;-)
There are advantages in getting to know each other well through writing before starting to live together. My experience is that when people are together and talking in their daily lives, they tend to talk about particular set of topics.When the same people are writing in chat, the different mode of communication tends to lead discussions to somewhat different topics. And finally writing long letters can bring up even more different topics. But with the lack of strong common language in the beginning - and still to some degree at the moment - such discussion would have been impossible without various great internet tools.
Software, Chinese way
In China, things are done in different way. This includes computer programs. For many common software packages used in the west, there is a similar but different Chinese software. Take for example the big and beautiful Google search engine. Google become politically incorrect in the eyes of the Chinese communist government by allowing all kinds of information on Tibet, Taiwan, democracy protesters and other hot issues to be found. So Chinese government blocked access to Google and all Google services (like Youtube) in China. Instead, China has local alternative called Baidu that looks and feels exactly like Google:
Baidu is produced by a Chinese company, served by servers located in China and therefore implicitly in control by the government. You cannot find any information critical of the Chinese government by searching Baidu.
I have been using Skype as my chat application of choice, but it is rarely used in China. Instead, Chinese people use QQ messenger. Never heard of that? Neither had I before getting to contact with Jinlin, but by it's user base of 800 million people, it's the most used messaging software on the planet. It's like Skype in its video and audio support. But it has also some cool extra features, like access to machine translation services. With QQ messenger Jinlin and my can have the communication in English which she can translate in real time in China. Or we can have the communication in Chinese and I can do the translations at my end with click of a button (Jinlin has nickname "fiona" in QQ):
Although I had decided to concentrate my Chinese learning efforts to speaking and we also practice that in our sessions, translating the text also contributes a bit to the language learning. Seeing so many examples of sentences in both languages makes brain start to identify simple cases at some point without translation.
Of course machine translation is never very accurate, so it is good idea to write small sentences and sometimes write the same idea in two or more different ways. Even then, occasional translations mistakes and corresponding misunderstandings cannot be avoided. But with a good attitude and sense of humour, we have managed to mostly laugh at them. When it comes to writing really important sentences or complex subtle text like poems, its best to use the king of translation software, Google translate. Google translate allows the result of the translation to be inspected before sending it to your friend. What's even better is to use "checking by round trip": copy the translated text to another translation window with translation to opposite direction. The result should something that is close enough in meaning the the original text. With this arrangement, it is quick to edit your original text until you get a version that makes the round trip without changing its meaning too much:
Google translate is extremely valuable learning tool as well, because it can show the pinyin phonetic form of the text and even speak the words out. For example "my girlfriend" translates to 我的女朋友 which in phonetic pinyin is "Wǒ de nǚ péngyǒu" (the accents on top of characters mark the tones or pitches).
For our longer emails, we used for the first months a web-based mail from the makers of QQ messenger: mail.qq.com. It has good support for attachments and the emails do not go through the censorship firewalls of the government:
QQ mail does not have automatic translation but with emails there is less of a hurry for real time translation, so Google translate (or Baidu translate in China) can be used nicely.
The Great Firewall of China
How about Facebook, the bread and butter of connected internet citizens of today? It's also blocked by the Chinese government with their "great firewall" on incoming cables. And the Chinese alternative? QQ web spaces. Customizable status update environment for you and your friends, complete with picture collections, links to videos and zillion funny flash games with furry animals:
So nowadays when I post a set of new pictures to Facebook for my friends to see, I also post them to my QQ space for Jinlin to see.
I have only recently discovered that there are proxy services like http://www.facebookinchinaproxy.com/ that allow access to Facebook and some other blocked services from China. Perhaps soon we can get me and Jinlin to be friends in Facebook as well. Of course Chinese government is actively fighting to block such procies as well. So you must do the search for proxies outside China because searches of services that circumvent blocks are blocked :-) It's a funny game of cat and mouse and it will be interesting so see if in the long run the government will loose the game. Wikipedia has good article on the extent of Chinese government internet censorship. This of course means that Wikipedia itself is blocked by the Chinese government ;-)
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