THE EAGLE Articles
Adventures in Chinese Dr Silas Brown read Computer Science at St John’s from 1997 to 2000 and was a recipient of the Larmor Award. He returned to the College to read for his PhD on the conversion of notations.
ARTICLES
When I arrived at St John’s in 1997 as a Computer Science student with an unusual disability, I had been granted a medical exemption to the foreignlanguage requirement, so I never imagined that the events of the next few years would lead to my editing a Chinese literary dictionary. I have a disability called Cortical Visual Impairment, which means my brain does not correctly process visual signals but I do see some things some of the time. I use a white stick for navigation but as someone once joked, I can’t always make up my mind whether I’m blind or not. Partly due to my inability to make eye contact and lack of other visual skills, I did not fit in too well with most of my fellow western students, but I was pleased to find I could befriend Asian students more easily as eye contact is not as important in Asian cultures. During my second year I got involved with a small student society called Cambridge University Chinese Education Committee (CUCEC), which gave free language lessons in an effort to promote interest in all things Chinese. I didn’t think I could learn much, but I wanted to help them out, and was able to book the College Library seminar room for their classes. Given my disability it was clear that any method of language learning that required visual input would be a struggle, even if I could cope with the other aspects (which I doubted). In the event I was not able to learn much from these classes as most of the learners were Cantonese-speaking students from Hong Kong wishing to learn Mandarin (which had only become the standard after 1997). As such the class tended to use Chinese characters as a lingua franca, which lost me completely. Because CUCEC was run by student volunteers I felt it would be unfair to insist they somehow adapt, so I looked for a way to study by myself. I didn’t get anywhere until I met someone who had worked for a missionary society, which had enjoyed success with an audio-only method of language learning called Pimsleur. The full Pimsleur courses are aimed at commercial high-flyers, with a price tag to match. They are way beyond the pocket of the average student, and were not at the time available in any Cambridge library. However, the College had awarded me book tokens in the past, which I had not needed because I’d been making good use of the College Library, so I put them towards 60 lessons of Pimsleur on cassette tape (which was becoming obsolete and was therefore
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