What does an avocado have in common with an alligator?

The other day I looked up the Chinese word for avocado, which is 鱷梨 (èlí). As I stared at the first character (shown in large size above), I felt that from its component parts (the left side of the character is the fish radical) that it just didn't seem to be a "normal" character for a veg..., I mean, a fruit. Popular Internet answers indicate the avocado is a fruit, although I had long thought of it as a vegetable. Being mildly allergic to avocados, I never had much interest in them, until now (linguistically!).

I wondered if that 鱷 character was the same one which I could remember phonetically, but not visually, for alligator (鱷魚; èyú), and indeed it is. I was told that the avocado skin resembles alligator skin, which is understandable. I later realized that the right side of the character might be a stylized rendering of what an alligator's skin looks like.

The second character in avocado, 梨 (lí), means pear. Apparently "alligator pear" is a common enough name for an avocado, although that was new(s) to me.

9/22/13: In Taiwan, avocado is also apparently translated as 洛梨 (luòlí).

Tape cartridge case given new life by iPod

This old plastic tape cartridge case holds earphones nicely.

The case serves quite functionally as a landscape orientation iPod holder, facilitating video entertainment.

The case also works as a portrait orientation stand. Perhaps I should say it works as a "lean", since the angle of leaning can vary not insignificantly in this orientation. At least you can still press the Home button, which you couldn't do with a freebie smartphone stand I recently saw. The Safari page below is self-referential, but the Google news was a little too negative to use.

I have extra cases, if folks who know me want one/some.

The proper Chinese pronunciation of Chen (陳)

Note that the proper spelling of pronunciation has no o before the u; pronounciation is incorrect. Pro - 嫩 (nèn in Pinyin) - ci - a - tion...

陳 (Pinyin: Chén）is a common Chinese last name, often spelled in English as Chen. The way that spelling is typically pronounced in English led me to pronounce 陳 incorrectly in Chinese for quite some time. In English, the "en" portion of Chen, is pronounced like "en" in ten, but that's not the way it's pronounced in Chinese, despite the English spelling being the same as the Pinyin spelling, save for the addition of the 2nd tone.

The "en" portion of 陳 is pronounced more like "un" in sun, as I tested with CED. That "un"-like English sound is the sound of most occurrences of "en" at the end of a Pinyin syllable, e.g., in 分 （fēn; to separate），門 （mén; door）, 很 (hěn; very), and 笨（bèn; foolish).

The only exception is when r precedes "en" in the Pinyin, as in 人 (rén, person). There the "en" portion is pronounced like "en" in ten. That R in Pinyin can be quite a tricky letter, another case of which I wrote about here.

I stumbled upon this 陳 pronunciation issue when a native Chinese speaker asked me if I was saying 陳 or 錢 (qián; money, but also a last name), making me aware of my having improperly carried over an English sound into Chinese.

Free Chinese language lunar calendar app

One of my coworkers told me about this free Chinese language lunar calendar app (has ads):

万年历免费版 (wànniánlì miǎnfèibǎn; 10,000 year calendar - free edition)
（萬年曆免費版 in traditional characters)

You can find it at the App Store by searching for "Chinese calendar".

Although the app's name is in simplified characters, it has a setting for traditional characters, which is what I use (although the "quality control" on simplified versus traditional characters is not always perfect). I also chose holiday and vacation settings for Taiwan; China (the default), Hong Kong, Singapore, and USA are other choices.

Now, I cannot read Chinese quickly enough to rapidly absorb all the Chinese text that introduces the app.  However, aside from the fact that my coworker was already using it, I felt "safe enough" that Apple is a "large enough" company   :-)   to have reviewed the app, including its instructions, before making it available in the App Store, and I installed it. While certainly some bad apples (pun intended) could get through their review process, there should at least be more supervision there than at the Android Market, about which news stories like this 6/13/11 one already seem a bit too common.

As my coworker said, this app provides yet another opportunity to learn a little more Chinese, even if you are not big on consulting the lunar calendar for, e.g., good days to get married or what have you.

iPod RAM

Apple does not advertise the amount of RAM (Random Access Memory) in the iPod (or iPhone or iPad). On computers, memory normally refers to RAM. However, common (Apple-promoted) usage of the word memory in the iOS device context refers to what is typically known as storage on computers (hard drive or solid state drive capacity).

Some folks typically take apart each new Apple device to find out how much RAM it has, then post their findings on the web. Based on that information, my 3rd generation iPod has 256 MB. In practice the question of whether your iOS device has enough RAM probably boils down to, "Does it do what you need it to do?"

In my earlier experimentation, I was loading 4 Chinese dictionary apps. That, plus being in the midst of watching a movie on Netflix and loading multiple pages in Safari may have been the most demanding usage I was making on my iPod's RAM. In any case, I began experiencing performance delays.

Entering my Passcode, there would be a delay between when I tapped the screen and the (normal) black dots showed up. When I wrote Chinese characters using strokes, there would be a delay before the strokes actually appeared on screen.

I also started experiencing crashes in Safari. On the iPod, restarting Safari is pretty quick, so that didn't really put me into a tizzy. I also experienced one crash in Notespark while editing a note that was entirely in Chinese.

I eventually concluded which of the 4 Chinese dictionary apps met my needs best, so I no longer needed to access the others with any frequency. After 2 longish "intermissions", I also finally finished watching The Curious Case of Benjamin Button on Netflix. That allowed me to release the RAM those apps might have been holding.

After double-pressing the Home button to show recently used apps, tap-hold any of the app icons until a red "minus" circle appears in the left corner of each icon (the icons also start jiggling). Tapping on the red minus circle of one of those recently used apps should release any RAM it has been holding onto.

Reducing the number of apps in that recently used set, and keeping fewer pages open in Safari seem to have largely eliminated my iPod RAM issues. It would be swell if my iPod had the 512 MB RAM that the iPhone 4 and iPad 2 have, but managing my app usage a little more tightly seems to have eliminated practical issues.

Someday I may go back to using apps with wild abandon, without explicitly freeing RAM as described above, to see if any issues surface, now that I'm largely done testing those 4 Chinese dictionary apps. After all, ideally a consumer need not concern himself overly much with RAM issues. If I find anything of interest, I will try to update this entry.
4/27/11: Forget that wild abandon. Slow performance in Safari showed up almost immediately.

8/26/12: On my (now) 4th generation iPod running iOS 5.1.1, I had more apps open than I realized, and was surprised to discover that it was so low on available RAM that it couldn't send Camera Roll pictures out via e-mail, and within the Mail app, the Outbox messages did not even show the images.

10/22/12: Once again, I had more apps open than I realized, and found that the Mail app could update neither the iPod's mail message counts, nor mail messages for activity (e.g., deletion) that had already occurred on the multiple mail servers I use. Because of my 8/26/12 experience, I quickly realized what the problem likely was, and quit other apps to free up RAM, and things worked again as desired.

Brought to you by the letter R

I find it interesting that the general sound associated with the letter R in English, when present in any of the languages which I've studied, is qualitatively different from the English sound.

• Chinese: Something of a cross between R and a very light G as in rouge (a word which itself has French origins), an example being 日 (rì; sun, day). The sole exception I know of is when the R is followed by UI (Pinyin) in, e.g., 瑞 (ruì; lucky, auspicious), when there is no very light rouge-G sound; in this specific Pinyin context only, it seems very much like an English R to me.
• French: Comes with an "airy" H sound, i.e., R is aspirated, as in rural (rural), one of the French words I find most difficult to pronounce smoothly (though the U doesn't make it any easier!). When double-checking on "aspirated", I saw that P in pie is given as an example of an aspirated letter; I wasn't particularly aware of that aspiration as a native speaker.
• Japanese: A cross between an R and an L, e.g., in this romaji (Roman letter) rendering: arigato (thank you).
• Spanish: R is "rolling" (along the tongue), and there is also RR, which is even more rolling, as in borrador (chalkboard eraser). Keep those two sounds straight for pero (but) and perro (dog)....
• Taiwanese: There is no R-type sound, as my former Taiwanese teacher confirmed. (A Cantonese-speaking friend also said Cantonese has no R-type sound.)

Calculator on iPod and Palm

One thing I was very pleased to see on the iPod Calculator was the fact that if you entered, e.g., 2 + 3, the + button would have an "illuminated" border around it after being pressed. I like having an indicator that shows if the last button you pressed was an arithmetic operator. This may be more important to me since I normally set the iPod to not make any sound when I tap a key, so I get no auditory confirmation. Along with that, Apple chose to not let multiple consecutive presses of the same arithmetic operator change the running total. If you were entering, e.g., 5 + 5, on the iPod, you could never do inadvertent additions by hitting the + key more than once in a row (e.g., if you couldn't remember whether you had last pressed 5 or +, you might press + a second time), as would occur in the Palm Calc application.

In Palm's defense, if you hide the Graffiti section of the screen, you can see a display of entries like you might see on an adding machine, which could help you prevent inadvertently changing your running total (I just learned this now, as I am leaving the Palm platform!). As far as I can remember, in all my years of (periodic) usage of the Palm Calc application, I always had the Graffiti section of the screen visible, because I normally had it visible when doing other things, so it remained visible when I invoked Calc. Perhaps Palm should have hidden the Graffiti section of the screen by default when the Calc application was started. What user is going to prefer to use Graffiti software to enter digits when Calc already gives you nice big buttons for each?

The iPod Calculator's "clear" button's label is AC initially (All Clear, i.e., reset running total to zero), which is the same function as C on the Palm. After you enter a number, it changes to C (clear entry), which is done by the CE button on the Palm. It changes back to AC after you press C. After mistyping a digit on a multi-digit number which was not the first in a sequence of numbers I was adding, I was briefly put out when, looking at the C button, I mistakenly thought there was no clear entry functionality -- I hadn't noticed that that same button was labeled AC at the start.

Note also that after entering a sequence like 6 + 7 + 8, if you press C to clear the entry of 8, the + sign remains illuminated as a helpful indicator about what you've pressed. So in that case, your running total of 13 is still active, although 0 is displayed because it's waiting for you to enter the next addend.

The iPod Calculator has an m- (memory minus) button which Palm lacks, which might be useful. It will probably be more useful than the % and √ (square root) keys the Palm has but which the iPod lacks.

Winner: iPod.

The Android calculator apparently shows math operations horizontally in the display, e.g., 1+2+3 shows exactly like that, not just as 1, then 2, then 3, as would be the case on iPod or Palm. Press = to see the total. Presumably it follows My Dear Aunt Sally's rule of Multiplication & Division operations first, then Addition & Subtraction operations, if there were a mix of the two types.