Help me learn Mandarin Chinese

I actually kinda lol that mandarin was chosen as the national language of china, it's actually got some pretty major defects, like being very sound poor compared to some of the other dialects

鬻

Anyway, so ages ago, some Warring States period Einstein decides that what the world needs is another 22-stroke character, and so he goes and smacks 粥 into 鬲 and produces 鬻. He writes it down and goes to show it off to all his literatus friends, all, “Yo Scholar Danqiu, you know how you and Master Cen thought that you were pretty cool with that seven-stroke expansion of 畺 the other week? Well, check this out, bi-atch!” And then Scholar Danqiu was like, “Yo, only losers still say ‘bi-atch,’ so why don’t you get your loser ass and your loser new character out of my face?” And so the scholar goes home, tail between his legs, and vows to find a use for this awesome new character that he’s created.

And he finds one! See, today, 粥 and 鬻 are pronounced pretty differently – zhōu and yù respectively — but back in the day, they sounded the same, or more or less the same. (Karlgren reconstructs the pronunciations as *tiuk and *diuk respectively.) Over time, the pronunciations and meanings diverged, and so the meaning of 鬻 evolves from “tasteless glop with the consistency of snot that nobody with functioning tastebuds could ever conceivably enjoy eating” to “to nourish” to “to sell food” to “to sell, particularly as an act of desperation in trying times” to “to sell one’s own child.”

That’s right, there is a single-syllable word in Chinese that means “to sell e.g. one’s own child during e.g. a famine,” and in a delicious little irony, it’s derived from 粥 “gruel” which makes it cognate to 育, “bear/raise children.” It occurs in words like 鬻子 “a trader in children,” 卖妻鬻子 “to sell off one’s wife and son [in a famine],” and, most interestingly to me for personal reasons, 鬻文, or “to write for pay.”

Man, I love Chinese.

it's weird... you know, being able to speak "chinese" better than chinese people is a reasonable goal. since, like you said, mandarin is still the 2nd language of millions (hundred of millions, maybe!) of chinese people (shit, look at how many speaker wu has!!!)

actually, you didn't say that but you know what i mean.

i get depressed as shit by the pinyin.info gang and their eliminate characters rhetoric.

Yeah this is garbage. Pinyin is a stopgap imo. Also good luck getting like two billion people to give up their writing system.

haha that's actually a concern, a lot of chinese kids are being raised with cell phones and THE INTERNET and are forgetting how to write characters

xp they would say: look at vietnam! and then chinese kids won't be wasting time studying useless characters and will have more time for play!

xxp yeah, text has ruined me for handwriting characters. jeez. i whip out my phone all the time in a way i didn't when i had to be writing high level shit by hand (ie academic whatnot)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den

One of the omg things about having an iphone is being able to write characters all the time if you like. I pull out the pinyin kb occasionally (e.g. if I really can't be fkd getting the hwr to recognise some moderately complex/ambiguous character) but mainly it's all strokes.

pleco has a full screen HWR software it's awesome

pleco is my life iirc

i'd recommend trying wenlin if you haven't already, as a general allpurpose piece of software for learning chinese, translating chinese, etc. it just received its first update in a decade and famously looks like you're still using windows 3.1 but it's dope.

in fact yesterday my teacher spotted me running off some stroke order animation on the ipad and was all "WHAT is THAT" xp

mmm, I had a look at the wenlin website a couple of times, saw the price and lost interest. I'm sure it's excellent but I have so many effective tools on the go that I don't need something that extensive atm. Will probably go back to it one day though.

yeah wenlin is gonna be my next big purchase

hmm, the way the $au—$us exchange rate is atm maybe i should just do it

One day when I get my shit together I'll fill this thread with links to every book and resource that I find invaluable.

So we are now doing time and I am fucking shithouse at it.

Geez I know China's regime is oppresive but I didn't think studying it would get you into THAT much trouble.

HAR

Teacher keeps asking me stuff and I keep having to ask him to repeat it fifty times.

"现在几点吗?"
"I DON'T FUCKING KNOW"

Just bought this fucko --> http://mandarinposter.com/

wow!

Heck. I'd put that on the loo wall myself! Great way to do rote learning btw - my old housemate/bff Ange used to have a TCP layers/networking layout poster on the back of the loo door at ours when she was doing CS/multimedia. I think I learned more from it than she did, staring at it every day... cos it became 100% relevant in my job, and now shes a cook in the Navy, so erm.

It is definitely great for that, but my use will be marking off the characters I've learnt with the lol included whiteboard marker. I'm guessing I've picked up half those characters, so tracking my progress on this giant thing will help me get through the rest. btw there's a SECOND one of these coming soon, 3,000 chars in total.

How the heck did the Chinese get anywhere once typewriters/computers came about?

I need someone to explain a chinese typewriter to me. <-- :d

100% in the written exam. 100 fucking %. Going to treat myself.

Booyah! Go you! :)

aww thx <3

I'm trying to learn a little bit of Mandarin too, just for fun since I'm going to China for a couple of weeks in September. I'm not going to try to learn the written characters though - it'll just be spoken with a little bit of pinyin to help with memorization. Has anyone tried Chinesepod.com? I'm doing the free trial and so far the lessons seem pretty good.

this blog post saved my life today

http://robrohan.com/2007/02/03/typing-proper-pinyin-on-mac/

Brilliant, just what I need.

o. nate, I've not spent a great deal of time with ChinesePod but it gets a huge rap from loads of learners.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-07-19/news-corp-share-slump-murdoch/2799888

News Corp total value down 20%/US$9b since all this started. DELICIOUS.

(estimated)

shit, wrong thread

...or is it.

I just LAPSED into Chinese because I couldn't remember the English for something. Didn't realise until after I'd done it. First time ever.

NEXT:

1. learn some other sinitic language, start telling everyone how 吴语 has as many native speakers as german, decry the chinese govt 汉办 confucian institutes' destruction of minority languges and commitment to simplified characters which cut us off from chinese history and the greater sinosphere
2. get really into some weird obscure shit like 1950s land reform-era socialist realism sci-fi or bawdy errenzhuan from some specific neighborhood of a specific city in liaoning
3. carry a copy of 西夏旅馆 or 荒人手记 on the bus, meet literate taiwanese girls
4. smoke a blunt of tuna kush with david der-wei wang

I'm gonna have to start calling you Mal, Adam!

idgi

Mal from Firefly, you kno. They lapse into Chinese swearing and such.

nooo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYTM5H2IDSg

omg that's fantastic, I had no idea

Sir, you must watch all of Firefly forthwith! Its only one season. I can lend you my dvd if you like. Its bloody awesome.

Thx for offer but I can get my hands on it pretty easily. Quite fascinated now, ha.

Yeah its not a pivotal thing in the show but it lends a great flavour to it. And Joss Whedon's stuff is great, so.

They have a course in Chinese in our ELEMENTARY school. I mean ffs I had a hard time learning french. Granted, it's for the gifted kids.

http://carlgene.com/blog/2011/07/110-diseases-disabilities-and-disorders-in-english-and-chinese/

thank you forvo.com for allowing me to enjoy dyao's username:
http://www.forvo.com/word/%E6%88%91%E7%88%B1%E4%BD%A0/#zh
(things everyone who actually posts on this thread already knew)

Adam's link reminds me that I recently spent some time googling the Chinese for smallpox on account of the image linked and partially explained herein:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1678

now feeling creepy for accidentally using dayo's old username and calling Schlafsack his real name when neither of you know who I am, sorry both

forvo is pretty handy though in my experience of learning languages which are not Chinese

the school I went to now makes the kids learn Mandarin, was kind of envious when I read this in the alumni newsletter, but also felt a frisson of shame and panic that I would not have been smart enough to learn something so radically different as Chinese, and now other kids are

(but the thought of doing a tonal language in school with all the mean kids listening is pretty horrifying to those of us who can't even sing or manage a convincing French accent)

yeah theyre pronounced differently

thanks! for some reason i hadn't encountered "can" in my ANKI decks yet and the audio on the cards (sounds like AI) is kind of crappy, i played it over and over trying to hear the difference between that and "kan" and couldn't hear it.

this kind of thing makes me wish i could just take an actual course with a teacher and a curriculum.

and this pimsleur chinese audio course sounds very dated (do people still say "xie xie ni"?) and the audio quality is awful. what are some better resources for self study?