10: Ziwei Shares His Journey Learning English In China

In this episode we talk to Ziwei, who is originally from China’s Hunan Province. He is hands down one of the most intelligent, motivated, and hard working people I have ever known. We met in a Natural Language Processing class (taught by Sowmya, guest on the Virtual Expat Podcast, episode 63 ) in Iowa State University’s PhD in Applied Linguistics and Technology Program.
​I always admired Ziwei's kind, determined and focused demeanor. Since I left the program in December 2016, he has gotten married, had a child and taken on a Statistics Degree along with this already challenging PhD research. I am in awe with him and I think you will be too when you hear his views on the differences in learning Mandarin Chinese versus English, French and German.

Links:
-Ziwei’s Iowa State University Profile (last one on the page)
-Mandarin Chinese stroke order (here is a video showing you what we were talking about)
-An interesting Quora thread on the stroke order strictness with regards to the English alphabet
-Short video of Bart Simpson writing English sentences on the board as punishment (If anyone has an example of this with writing Mandarin Chinese on a blackboard in school, please send it to me and I will add it here).
-Phoneme, Grapheme connection: Here is a short video explaining these two concepts and here is a written explanation
-Elena Cotos, who Ziwei is working with right now. She is at the forefront of move-step analysis AND AWE’s, Automated Writing Evaluations with respect to academic writing genres.  
-R programming language

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Music courtesy of Damon Castillo,"I Hope You Figured It Out" song on the "Mess of Me" album

This episode was created with:

• My microphones, Samson Q2U
• Remote video software, Zoom
• Auphonic, free online leveling software
• Podbean hosting site: Get 1 month free, https://www.podbean.com/virtualexpats