文通四海 Enthusiastic INTP Polyglot

A multilingual, computer-savvy teacher who can make difficult things seem easy and fun, I picked up languages as I grew up (born in France, lived in Spain, Morocco and the USA; emigrated to the US when I was 8). I especially enjoy finding and creating minimalist graphics.

Where-Childhood [adapted from a Creative Commons map, CC - - BY-SA San Jose]

As an INTP, I have a wide range of interests, and I have always been passionate about learning, teaching and helping others, and Steemit seems like the perfect place to continue doing so.

In my free time, I read on a wide range of subjects, including cultural history, biology, medicine, gastronomy, ethics, and applied linguistics. My main interest is China, but I am also interested in Western and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, and Southeast Asia.

Knowing several languages and meeting other people gives me a great chance to sample their food, such as jackfruit in Malaysia and Mexican plantains (like giant bananas that need to be fried before eating), two kinds of fruit I’m crazy about:

[pictures taken in my mother's kitchen in Acapulco, Mexico]

In my second year of high school in New York, I immersed myself in a sea of Russian and achieved quite respectable results: although rusty after years of disuse, I still feel comfortable reading Russian web sites and chatting with Russian friends. I use my Russian for entertainment (I enjoy Russian songs and movies) and to learn about useful things, such as Steemit and its Russian version, Голос.

For four glorious years (while studying at Hunter College), I worked in the Oriental and Slavonic Divisions of the New York Public Library on 5th Avenue and 42nd Street, a bibliophile’s dream. During my lunch hour, I would gobble down a sandwich and spend the rest of the hour browsing in the stacks. Many of the books had no titles on their spines, only a call number (they were arranged by size to save space). I would thus pick out books at random and enjoy myself immensely reading about all sorts of totally unexpected, esoteric subjects.

New York Public Library Reading Room (not the area I worked in, but for financial reasons, my two divisions no longer exist. Sigh ...)
CC--BY-NC-ND drocpsu

In my second year at university, reading Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilisation in China (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_and_technology_in_China) inspired me to plunge into the vast Chinese ocean with the goal of becoming just as fluent as a Chinese college graduate (I believe in aiming high: mediocre goals lead to mediocre results).

Because I worked in a research library, I was able to take a look at many modern Chinese dictionaries and textbooks published in the UK, the US, France, China, Taiwan and the USSR. I bought copies of the best of the lot and supplemented my books with recordings, movies in Chinatown and a language exchange I did with a sweet Taiwanese lady (I could talk circles around my Hong Kong friends, so they couldn’t help much).

My superior at the NYPL concentrated all her efforts on cataloging Japanese and Korean books. She totally ignored the small, but significant pile of uncatalogued and inaccessible Chinese books published from 1949~1965 (almost nothing came out during the Cultural Revolution), but I managed to persuade her to let me rescue some Chinese treasures from oblivion (I was a lowly technical assistant, not authorized to do any cataloging, but … wink, wink, nod, nod). Curating Steemit content thus seems very natural for me.

[Public Domain image] Page from Account of 814 Plants & Insects, Most of Which Are Reckoned Medicinal by the Chinese: Copy based on the 本草綱目 Bencao Gangmu / Beentsao Gangmuh of 李時珍 Li Shizhen / Lii Shyrjen (1518–1593), a definitive work on Chinese medicinal plants, animals and minerals. The original Chinese is fun to read if you understand Classical Chinese and have a background in biology.

I push myself very hard for the things I care about, so I achieved quite respectable results with my Chinese language studies: I have occasionally been taken for a Chinese native speaker over the telephone. After college, I went on to study graduate-level Chinese linguistics at National Taiwan University (1972 to 1974). 40+ years later, I am married to a Chinese wife and still enjoying life in Taiwan.

While teaching myself new languages, I have picked up many useful techniques which I enjoy sharing with others. The focus of my teaching career has been on helping students help themselves, especially by building their vocabulary through extensive reading, the use of monolingual learner's dictionaries and communication games to help relax.

[Here, I am using a game to give adult students a conversation test (plus a review session). Notice how students are enjoying themselves during my test: unheard of in many classrooms!]

My students react enthusiastically to my wide-ranging, eclectic approach to teaching. Their passion and new-found confidence in their ability to learn are my best proof of a job well-done. Some of my most heart-warming compliments have come from students who return to Taiwan after attending graduate school in the US or other countries: "I never met another teacher who could explain things as well as you do!" I've even had students come up to me and say "My parents were in your class twenty years ago and they still remember your classes!":

My students' passion and new-found confidence are my best proof of a job well-done. Nowadays on Quora, I often answer questions about Chinese, English and French: https://www.quora.com/profile/Robert-Matthews-%E9%A6%AC%E5%AD%B8%E9%80%B2

Just like the languages I have learned, my computer and audiovisual skills are also mostly self-taught. I have worked with computers (CP/M, OS/2, Linux etc.) since the mid-1980s. I also worked as an Internet instructor way back in prehistoric times when getting on line involved a command line interface.

How pleasant to use a word processor that lets you look at the underlying code. Using the keyboard is so much faster than wading through a sea of commands from a menu!
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar]

Although my joy at visiting well-stocked libraries has not diminished, thanks to the Internet, I can now do much of my reading on line or on my Kindle. I enjoy looking for obscure gems on the Internet and making them better known. The early days of the Internet were much more about sharing than today, but I hope to use Steemit to revive some of the idealism of the Internet's youth.

Chao Yuenren & Jacques-Yves Cousteau, two geniuses who deserve to be much better known [Chao photo is PD#Reserve Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Basse-Terre, Gouadeloupe, CC--BY-NC-SA]

I enjoy helping students/fellow teachers/friends become comfortable with and troubleshoot their own machines (tame quirky software, recover lost files, install security measures etc.). I have been involved with AV technology for most of my life (motion picture projectors, various codecs, compression, format conversion, file extraction etc.), so was in charge of running the multimedia labs in my university (2003~2015). I'm sure I can use my skills to help newcomers to Steemit make better posts.

Although I studied biology many years ago, whenever a friend or a family member has some medical problem, I like to visit PubMed to see what professional researchers have to say. I often share the medical knowledge I acquire with friends and family who cannot cope with the high-level English required to read research papers and shouldn’t have to wait decades for such knowledge to slowly trickle down to the masses.

Now I am here on Steemit, full of hope and enthusiasm for the building of a new community. Many years ago, I played with cryptography (I even used it to motivate and inspire EFL students) and I am curious about the possibilities of public/private keys and the block chain, so I am delighted to see brand new uses. I hope to use my talents (Internet, languages and medicine) to educate and persuade many other people to join the Steemit community.

文通四海 Enthusiastic INTP Polyglot

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