crash and burn
You know how I moan from time to time about my PhD? (Ahem.) Well it's generally because I feel inadequate. My mum recently pointed out to me that I'm not happy unless I'm doing better than the vast majority of people around me - which pissed me off, but only really because it's true.
Anyway, on Fridays we have classes on how to be a PhD student. Sounds hokey? Well maybe, but they're also fun, and in my opinion quite helpful. We've been learning how to write abstracts for conferences and present our work succinctly so far.
This Friday, the last remaining classmate had to give her mock presentation. She decided (unwisely) to present her PhD topic. (I say unwisely because 4 months into a 3/4 year PhD you don't generally know what you're talking about.)
It was like watching a car crash.
The poor girl has some serious problems. She's working on Chinese tones (she's a native speaker), and how they can be equated with musical notes. Interesting. However, she's using a system that was designed for intonation (different to tone - intonation happens at the sentence level and tone at the syllable level), and hasn't adapted it to fit either the musical notes or the language. Fair enough: early days and all ...
What is not fair enough, however, is that she has entirely ignored a tone! There are 4 pitch tones in Mandarin Chinese and one neutral. The neutral one might not be of interest to her, but it is a fifth of the tonal system. You can't just ignore it! Not only that, but she has also got one of the tones wrong - she has decided it's a fixed tone instead of the rising tone it should be.
I won't go on. I'm sure it's pretty dull stuff for you non-linguists. But I had to show the depth of crash and burn that I witnessed on Friday. And report that, at this moment in time, I am feeling goooood about my research. I am going to hell ...
Anyway, on Fridays we have classes on how to be a PhD student. Sounds hokey? Well maybe, but they're also fun, and in my opinion quite helpful. We've been learning how to write abstracts for conferences and present our work succinctly so far.
This Friday, the last remaining classmate had to give her mock presentation. She decided (unwisely) to present her PhD topic. (I say unwisely because 4 months into a 3/4 year PhD you don't generally know what you're talking about.)
It was like watching a car crash.
The poor girl has some serious problems. She's working on Chinese tones (she's a native speaker), and how they can be equated with musical notes. Interesting. However, she's using a system that was designed for intonation (different to tone - intonation happens at the sentence level and tone at the syllable level), and hasn't adapted it to fit either the musical notes or the language. Fair enough: early days and all ...
What is not fair enough, however, is that she has entirely ignored a tone! There are 4 pitch tones in Mandarin Chinese and one neutral. The neutral one might not be of interest to her, but it is a fifth of the tonal system. You can't just ignore it! Not only that, but she has also got one of the tones wrong - she has decided it's a fixed tone instead of the rising tone it should be.
I won't go on. I'm sure it's pretty dull stuff for you non-linguists. But I had to show the depth of crash and burn that I witnessed on Friday. And report that, at this moment in time, I am feeling goooood about my research. I am going to hell ...
