title: NLTK 3 POS_TAG throws UnicodeDecodeError
body: <p>Hi I am trying to learn NLTK. I am new to Python as well. I am trying the following.</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;&gt;import nltk
  &gt;&gt;nltk.pos_tag(nltk.word_tokenize("John lived in China"))
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I get the following error message</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>Traceback (most recent call last):   File "", line 1, in
    
        nltk.pos_tag(nltk.word_tokenize("John lived in California"))   File "C:\Python34\lib\site-packages\nltk\tag__init__.py", line 100,
    in pos_tag
        tagger = load(_POS_TAGGER)   File "C:\Python34\lib\site-packages\nltk\data.py", line 779, in load
        resource_val = pickle.load(opened_resource) UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xcb in position 0: ordinal not in
    range(128)</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>I have downloaded all models available (including the maxent_treebank_pos_tagger) </p>
  
  <p>The default system encoding is UTF-8</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;&gt;sys.getdefaultencoding()
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I opened up the data.py file and this is the content available.</p>
  
  <pre><code>774# Load the resource.
  775    opened_resource = _open(resource_url)
  776if format == 'raw':
  777            resource_val = opened_resource.read()
  778        elif format == 'pickle':
  779            resource_val = pickle.load(opened_resource)
  780        elif format == 'json':
  781            import json
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>What am I doing wrong here? </p>