“故学然后知不足，教然后知困。知不足，然后能自反也；知困，然后能自强也，故曰：教学相长也。”
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This page includes teaching notes, language-learning resources, and materials developed through my teaching and community-based documentation work, for audiences from students encountering linguistics for the first time to teachers looking for materials to adapt.
For instructors
Find classroom activities, lecture materials, and teaching guides.
Teaching Materials · Tools & Guides · More · Using These Materials
By topic: Language variation · Word formation and language change · Languages of East Asia · Writing systems · Literature search
For learners
Explore languages, try introductory linguistics activities, and discover resources for independent learning.
For Anyuan Hakka learners and speakers
Listen to recordings, look up words and sentences, and explore community language resources.
A perceptual dialectology activity: students and a consultant each draw where they believe people speak differently on a blank map, label and explain each area with a linguistic example, then compare the two maps in a short reflection on language variation.
Students write six mini-dictionary entries, three for slang expressions found online and three for expressions they create, analyzing origin, word formation, and use in context, followed by a reflection on language change, word formation, and identity.
Guest lecture slides covering language families of Eastern Asia, languages in China and Chinese (Sinitic) languages, Chinese dialects, and a case study of Anyuan Hakka and the AYHAK documentation project.
About this version: these are the slides as presented in October 2025. Some slides rely on audio, video, and in-class explanation; the overview of language families and Chinese dialect groups (slides 3–24) reads best on its own. Anyuan Hakka transcriptions in the slides predate the current AYHAK conventions; see AYHAK for current forms.
Writing systems of Chinese languages: intelligibility, literacy, and language policy in Mainland China, Hong Kong and Macao, and Taiwan.
A listening and viewing list: songs and films in Tibetan, Mandarin, Hakka, a Taiwanese Indigenous language, Taiwan Mandarin, Jin, Cantonese, and Shanghai Wu.
Resources from AYHAK, the Anyuan Hakka Documentation Project, including online meetups for people from Anyuan to keep speaking Anyuan Hakka and an edible-plant photo book with local names and audio (Plants of Anyuan, in progress).
Guidelines for students on using LLM-based tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini to find literature: what they may and may not be used for, rules for prompting and verifying every citation, the tools' limitations, a workflow, and six prompt templates.
Course-specific guidance for LIN 207; other courses may have different rules on AI use, but the steps for verifying citations apply to any course.
Resources I have used for teaching and learning about Chinese languages and language documentation.
A dictionary of six Taiwan Hakka varieties in traditional Chinese characters (Ministry of Education, Taiwan), for looking up words, standardized characters, and pronunciations.
A corpus of Taiwan Hakka (Hakka Affairs Council), for finding real examples of written Hakka in context.
Dictionaries of 16 Indigenous languages of Taiwan (Council of Indigenous Peoples), for looking up words in each language.
A database of recordings and data from the national language resources project in Mainland China, for hearing and comparing local varieties of Chinese and minority languages.
现代汉语方言大词典, a multi-volume series of local Chinese dialect dictionaries (Li Rong, chief ed.), for looking up words and pronunciations in individual local varieties.
I have taught linguistics at the University at Buffalo, including as instructor of record for Language, Society, and the Individual and Introduction to Linguistic Analysis, and Chinese at Columbia University and Beijing Foreign Studies University. See the full list of courses and my CV.