Author Archives: mike

Kevin Rudd – Brief Life Summary

This post is part of a series on Kevin Rudd – Australia’s Mandarin-speaking Prime Minister.

  1. Introduction
  2. Brief life summary (this page)
  3. Interest in China
  4. Mandarin in professional life (coming soon)
  5. Present day (coming soon)

Kevin Rudd was born in 1957 and raised in regional Queensland on a rented farm. His father died in a car accident when he was 12, resulting in their family being evicted from the farm and leaving his mother to raise him and his three other siblings by herself.

Just an average student up until this time, something ‘clicked’ and he excelled as his studies. He found himself doing a BA in Asian Studies (with honours) at ANU, where he met his soon-to-be-wife, Thérèse Rein.

After university in 1981, he worked in the Department of Foreign Affairs, assisting various diplomats in several countries (including China), until entering politics in 1988 as the Chief of Staff for the Queensland state opposition leader, who eventually became Premier. In 1998 he became a minister of federal parliament and in 2001 was promoted to the shadow cabinet as the shadow foreign minister.

In 2006 he became the federal opposition leader and was elected as Australia’s 26th Prime Minister in 2007. A progressive leader, he enjoyed some of the highest approval ratings of any Australian Prime Minister and helped Australia avoid recession during the Global Financial Crisis in the late 2000s (the only Western country to do so).

Kevin Rudd with Julia Gillard

Despite being popular with the public, he was unpopular within his own party. He was was replaced by his deputy (Julia Gillard, picture above) and demoted to Foreign Minister for a time, before being demoted again to the backbench after making a failed attempt to regain the leadership. However, he later successfully regained the leadership and became Prime Minister again, but lost in the subsequent election to the conservative opposition and retired from politics.

He is now a senior fellow at Harvard University, where he is part of a research group studying US-China relations, and a distinguished statesman at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Rudd (right) with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon

This very brief summary doesn’t even scratch the surface of his busy life and achievements. In the next post, I’ll focus in more detail on his interest and adventures with China and Chinese culture.

Next: Interest in China

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Kevin Rudd – Australia’s Mandarin-speaking Prime Minister

Kevin Rudd was Australia’s 26th Prime Minister and, notably, he’s fluent in Mandarin Chinese.

Here’s an interview done with him in Mandarin:

Kevin Rudd Interviewed on Mandarin News Australia

I was always curious about how he ended up with this skill, so I had a read through his biography and a number of other sources. His life and career makes for quite an amazing story! He started out as a farm boy in regional Australia, so it’s quite unexpected that he’d develop a keen interest in China, let alone become the leader of the country.

There’s a lot to fit into one post so I’ve split it up into several sections:

  1. Introduction (this page)
  2. Brief life summary
  3. Interest in China
  4. Mandarin in professional life (coming soon)
  5. Present day (coming soon)

I hope you find these posts as interesting to read as I found them to research!

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Bing’s surprisingly good Chinese dictionary

A friend of mine recently showed me a new Chinese dictionary web site that’s actually really good: Microsoft’s Bing Chinese dictionary (cn.bing.com/dict/).

I’m not a fan of Microsoft generally but they seem to have created a very slick and useful tool here. The stand-out features are:

  • sample sentences that use the word you’re searching for in context,
  • parts of speech identification, i.e. whether the word is a noun, verb, etc.,
  • support for (some) ‘slang’ words, and
  • pinyin support for the sample sentences.

For example, a search for “八卦” yields the following:

Searching Bing for "八卦".

 

(There were some more sample sentences but I’ve omitted them for brevity.)

I think the sample sentences are where it really shines. Quite often when using other dictionaries, I would end up getting the new word I found and searching for it on Jukuu.com to see if it’s used the way I expect (for example: to check it isn’t just literary). Bing includes sample sentences from many sources (including Jukuu). Some sample sentences have audio and/or video but these just read the sample sentence in English.

Another big gripe of mine that this dictionary addresses is the grammatical parts of speech that the word can be used as. For example, it’s easy to see whether a word can be used as both a noun and a verb or only one of these.

Note that this tool is a dictionary and not a translator. They do have a translator located at bing.com/translator but I don’t think I will use it much because it doesn’t show the pinyin like Google Translate does (Google’s text-to-speech is much better too). A proper review of all the major translators out there is probably a topic for another post 😉

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