User:Philipmerrill

August 4, 2016 update: I just created a page for Zong-qi Cai. It's great to be back to Wikipedia. The page describes what we've been doing together in between. I hope to contribute to other Chinese poetry articles if Prof. Cai finds more time to supervise me. It probably won't be soon though because he's probably jumping into a HTRCP-follow-up book series! Philipmerrill (talk) 06:52, 5 August 2016 (UTC)

First signed up October 22, 2011, hoping to get involved in pages having to do with Chinese poetry.

More about myself on Nov. 5, 2011: I'm 53 and work as a Web Coordinator for The Recording Academy, helping with the site and writing a weekly news-roundup column called ArtsWatch (at GRAMMY.com). In college at Columbia, NYC, I did 2-1/2 years of Chinese. Two of my teachers were Irene Liu and Donald Chang, who were later two of the authors of the book "David and Helen in China: Simplified Character Edition: An Intermediate Course in Modern Chinese." In 1993, I found myself newly single with my two young children to raise. As teens in 2006 they got on my case that I needed something besides my music that would be for me. I would point out tediously that it needed to be something I could do in spite of their sometimes continuous interruptions - and from that I/we decided that I would return to learning Chinese, studying on my own. It's been a wonderful luxury, and a decided contrast with the academic pressure I went through studying as a student. For now, I'm no good at speaking. It's not like I can understand spoken Mandarin except for simple and obvious phrases or sentences. But my character knowledge is doing pretty well and the luxury includes being able to afford a lot of great used books. I have read up a storm since 2006, and watched a whole lot of Chinese movie DVDs I was able to buy. It was all very cheap compared to feeding the kids. And when the work+family pressures got too hard, I could always just stop and come back to it.

My reason for focusing on Chinese poetry has everything to do with when I bought the book "How To Read Chinese Poetry" in 2009. When I started reading the introduction and found out there were accompanying MP3 files I freaked trying to find them. Since I had bought it used, I thought maybe I was missing a CD. Searching the web, I emailed the author/editor Zong-qi Cai before I even finished reading the two-page introduction. I was distraught. Then I finally finished reading the introduction and there was the URL for the web page (that hadn't come up from my searching). It was very embarrassing. Clearly, I am sometimes impractically swept away with emotion. Zong-qi Cai answered my email and encouraged me to communicate about the book with him as I read it. I took my time and finished it in 2010. Along the way, I took 26 poems that I now had three versions of - because they were in "How To Read Chinese Poetry" as well as the Sinolingua titles "Interactive Chinese" and "100 Ancient Chinese Poems" - and made careful line-by-line web versions of them with characters, pinyin, and my own translations. I suggested to Zong-qi Cai that what would really be helpful to learners/students like myself would be something that handled the poems more like that, and provided the sort of useful annotations I remembered from some Horace materials back when I did a year of Latin at Columbia. As a result, there is now a Workbook to accompany the other text that will soon be published, and I helped copyedit it. So in some ways I want to get the word out - even though I don't really get anything out of it - but also I figure getting to know the Wikipedia editing world is a good thing and going through the process in the Chinese poetry section will help cement things in my mind better. Also, there is room for improvement on those pages, I kind of know what I'm doing both in terms of the web and Chinese, and Zong-qi Cai has offered to help from the sidelines if I need expert advice or just validation that I'm staying on the right track. So we'll see where this goes. I'm definitely writing this (as per the Wikipedia Help advice) so other editors can see where I'm coming from and judge my contributions accordingly.