Help me learn Mandarin Chinese

just tried ordering in chinese on my own for the first time ever, made an arse of myself

we get back on the 马 and we keep going

sigh

also this is what happens when the teacher scribbles a load of answers at breakneck pace and i scramble like a mad bastard to keep up (if anyone cares, probably not)

http://i.imgur.com/0S7D0fL.jpg

I care! Damn sight neater than me; had a tutorial-kinda thing where one of the exercises was to see how many times you could write a character in a minute, got v,ropey p.fast.

I think what I need to raise my rote character game is writing out sentences that use the characters, hmmn.

do it, again and again and again and again

i've just started carting around a cheap exercise book so i can just spontaneously scrawl out great wads of text and get my writing back on track

it's not bad!

one of the things that writing characters on character graph writing paper (do you know what i mean? the 'basic characters 4 kidz' chinese character teaching books use this too and it's what chinese kids practice characters on) trains you to do is more attractively size elements of each character. it also helps to develop the skill of consistent character sizing in general.

yeah you can download them online and print them out https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9627011/PRC-Character-Writing-Sheet.pdf

yeah i did some of that back in the day, and i bought 'er indoors a little griddy practising book just recently

i don't worry about it so much because 99% of all authentic chinese handwriting i've ever seen is messy as fuck

although having said that

i have a gridded moleskine for writing characters

its not meessy its 草写

yeah

they've started showing us completely irrelevant cultural videos this year. turnout has been poor, so i suspect the confucius institute is partially funding the course to keep it alive, hence all the sudden jarring 'now let's stop learning and watch this woman dance for 10 minutes'

also we have a ridiculous exam tomorrow and i will fail it so drinking wine atm

i do want to hear this story, too: just tried ordering in chinese on my own for the first time ever, made an arse of myself.

i'm not going to lie, i did this as a early student of chinese, but even now outside of no-english-menu places or alongside native speakers that have already initiated a conversation in china, i file this under innocuous things that make you irrationally embarrassed but that's crazy and defeats the purpose of learning a language and is actually fun, so don't listen to me.

the story was this: i went into a dessert place in chinatown (amusingly called 糖人街, geddit) and they had a numbered list of menu items (presumably top selling, idk) on the wall. #1 was 雪花冰. i thought okay, yeah, an iced snowflake would be cool. the lady came over and i ordered 雪花冰 in chinese. she looked at me like i was an idiot, so i said it again like three times thinking i was pronouncing it wrong. then she showed me a menu with six pages of desserts under the category '雪花冰'. egg on face, 不好意思 &c.

you are otm about innocuous embarrassment. that cock-up won't stop me doing it again obv, but thinking back i should at least have correlated it with what was in the menu before asking for anything. if i had ordered 巧克力雪花冰 (or even 巧克力冰淇淋) it would probably have been fine.

tomorrow's exam is reciting, in pairs, 20 lines of dialogue each that we've had a week to prepare. the problem isn't the chinese, it's learning wtf we're supposed to be saying. even in english that's a ridiculous undertaking (we're not trained actors ffs). at this point i can't remember one line let alone 20.

there's also a written component that they won't tell us about (which will probably be fine), but i'm sure they'll have 15 minutes of 舞龙 to distract us before we do any exams

i was taught french by reciting roch voisine songs from memory and learning about making maple syrup, so i sympathize.

lion dancing would not be part of any chinese language curriculum i would devise.

haha maple syrup

i listen to HEAPS of taiwanese electropop, and it helps with listening skills, but i keep using words that the chinese teachers don't know (e.g. 等待, which surprised me)

it's annoying that i have stacks of knowledge (words, grammar etc) but am too shitscared to put it to use, so i'm stagnating in that regard. what i really really want is time with a chinese learner/speaker who also drinks, so i can get tipsy/tanked and shake this inhibition that's blocking my progress. it feels like i'm one blockage away from being conversant.

等待 is just the most formal everyday form of "wait." always those twin character clusters for modern written chinese, where older forms pare it down to single characters. maybe partly to negate the possible other interpretations of the single character forms (because 等 and 待 have lots of other meanings but can only mean one thing as 等待). in spoken chinese, 等 comes along outside of a pair but i feel it's just as often put in a pair ( 等着，稍等，等到？) or incorporated into a set phrase. they gotta know that one.

at the same time, there's lots of spoken chinese vocabulary that you should know that never pops up in class, i think. there's the example of 棒. i think i've used that example before on this thread: i never saw 好棒 in a textbook. maybe a more contemporary example would be trying to puzzle out 给力 from context.

listen, just go to class drunk

considering it tbh

等待 is just the most formal everyday form of "wait."

i thought so too, but the 中国人的老外 was all 'whaaat what is that word'

in spoken chinese, 等 comes along outside of a pair but i feel it's just as often put in a pair ( 等着，稍等，等到？) or incorporated into a set phrase. they gotta know that one.

you'd think so. 待 is in tomorrow night's dialogue (maybe because my speech partner's wife is taiwanese), so it'll be interesting to see whether the 中国人 teacher pulls us up

at the same time, there's lots of spoken chinese vocabulary that you should know that never pops up in class

i still don't have a clear view of what's meant to be spoken and what's meant to be written, so that's probably making me look a bit of a dildo

apropos of sod-all, i wonder how dog latin, etc et al are doing

Just hit a mid-semester break after a whole bunch of tests/etc - the listening one was more or less fine though I still have trouble distinguishing some initials/finals (+ whatever they were playing sounded like it was recorded on a boombox beside a motorway), written test wasn't aided by being on the same day as an essay was due so flubbed a bit on the more recent characters (语言学院的学生 is at a "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers" level for me atm), & the oral test was just a relief to get out've the way - my partner was busier than I was (deputy high commissioner of the C00k Islands, whoa) & the questions were fairly softball. We hadn't memorised our dialogue, though, which the people heading in after us had. OTOH they were sticking to the textbook while we'd gone a bit further out of bounds for vocab.

Really, really need to drill characters; shameful how disparate my recognition and ability to write have gotten in the past few weeks.

that disparity is a killer imo: my reading is decent but my listening is still way too patchy

whatever they were playing sounded like it was recorded on a boombox beside a motorway

that is the worst when you're still learning

妈了个屄的！

also we have a ridiculous exam tomorrow and i will fail it so drinking wine atm

some magic happened at some point (probably the wine) because this happened:

1. we knew there would be a 'written' exam first, but we didn't know what was in it, what we had to do, how long &c. it turned out to be 80 minutes long, all chinese questions (no pinyin) and handwritten answers about stuff we haven't even seen since last year. smashed it.

2. that 10 minutes of dialogue i couldn't remember last night somehow became me delivering ~the whole thing~ without a script or cue cards or ANYTHING. smashed it.

two reasons i'm ditching ios skritter:

1. the guided stroke writing (which you can't turn off) always tells you what the character is, even when you're getting it wrong. the consequence is that you don't learn it using your own brain because there's training wheels are in your face the whole time. (i think this has also damaged the neatness of my handwriting btw.)

2. if i go off and do, you know, ~actual language~ instead of just flashcards for a few weeks, i come back to find 3,930 (i am not kidding) overdue flashcards. right now i could either (a) be wracked and assailed by guilt and hole up with this thing for like a month or (b) just ignore it completely and get on with doing language instead.

pleco's flashcard system is primitive by comparison, but it stays the hell out of my face. if i have no idea what a character is, it lets me make the entire mistake before correcting me (at which point i can open the scratchpad and freestyle the correct character).

what does "doing language" mean?

congratulations on the exam stuff, too!

are you done/almost done your first year/certificate now? what has the attrition rate of fellow students been?

thanks! it's actually my third year/certificate, although my complete lack of confidence in speaking/communicating is holding me back a bit.

this year we started (two months ago) with maybe 10 students and we're already down to six. tbh i'm amazed the demand is so flat for a city that's (a) basically in asia and (b) choc full of native chinese. it's not like there are a billion accredited courses running here.

by 'doing language' i meant reading, watching video, listening to podcasts/music &c., i.e. real chinese as opposed to flicking through a load of unconnected words on cards. these days i get far more out of reading 读者 than doing flashcard reps.

http://gbtimes.com/lifestyle/education/dial-beijing/challenging-chinese-language-myths

he's a bit glib about the writing system

kind of shooting fish in a barrel or 瓮中捉鳖 if you want

If you visit Spain, it can be easy to pick up common phrases on the street. Is it similar with Chinese?

No. The problem is the textbooks teach you certain things, but then maybe you go to Beijing and they speak with a certain kind of accent.

but why wouldnt that be true with spanish, too? and sure, you definitely can pick up common phrases on the street. why couldnt you? come on now.

If you go to Shanghai, for the most part they are going to be speaking ‘Shanghainese’, which is a dialect of Mandarin, but the words they use and the way they use them are very different. My spoken Chinese is okay, but if I go down to Shanghai and someone tries to speak Shanghainese to me then I will probably have no idea what they are saying.

the fact that these two languages are not mutually intelligible should be the first hint that one is not a dialect of the other, i think. theyre both from middle chinese, just like nearly every other sinitic language/dialect spoken in china, and shanghainese and wu dialects as they exist today are influenced by northern languages but shanghainese is not a dialect of mandarin, okay?

Does the Chinese language have any influences from other languages, such as Japanese, Korean or English?

No, as far as I can tell. Historically speaking, both Japanese and Korean are derivatives of Chinese to different degrees. When it comes to outside influences, if you look at the actual language, Chinese is the mother language… it came before Japanese and Korean.

i dont know enough about the history of the korean or japanese languages to really go in on this but i korean and japanese fall outside of the sino-tibetan language family and to call them derivatives of chinese is even more than claiming shanghainese as a dialect of mandarin.

also, chinese doesnt have as many loanwords in popular use as english and unlike japanese the writing system and the deep history of the language renders the origins of loanwords opaque in most cases.

if you want to talk about words borrowed from japanese, var qing early republican intellectuals and writers either studied in japan or read japanese texts and took lots of words from japanese that didn't exist in chinese, esp literary , political , philosophical concepts that the japanese were exposed to because of japans intellectual climate and exposure to western philosophical etc works. so, 文化 民主 逻辑 资本主义 共产主义 革命 among many others were borrowed from japanese texts.

Do you think that young people will keep using the older, correct language?

Yes, they definitely will. Again, if you think about the role of education in Chinese people’s lives… in every public school in China they are all teaching the standard Mandarin, so that is definitely going to be a very strong force in the direction of the language. In the end, when you look at something other than internet slang, there’s really not that big of a difference in the way that the older generation and younger generations speak the language.

leaving aside the prescriptivist correct language line and leaving aside that he seems to be talking about both nonmandarin languages in china AND "slang," chinese is as dynamic as any other great big modern language-- there are hundreds of millions speaking modern standard mandarin-- the chinese language referring to modern standard mandarin has changed in major ways over the last eighty, ninety years....

MANDARIN CHINESE...
is over 6,000 years old
has over a billion native speakers
is China's official language
has over 20,000 characters

mandarin and most other sinitic languages spoken in china are from middle chinese, which isnt even 6000 years old by itself. its position as the standard chinese language is a relatively recent phenomenon.

it only has a billion native speakers if you really stretch the definition. if you run down the other languages spoken in china and assume and i think you can assume that speakers of those languages are native speakers... cantonese sitting at 50something million speakers, min chinese at 50something million speakers, wu / shanghainese at 80 million speakers and those are just the big ones, and then you have non-chinese languages like korean or uighur or uzbek. even if mandarin has a lot of native speakers, its wrong to position it as the native born language of every single citizen of the prc.

and wow, 20000 characters! jeez thats a lot.

brb going to burn down a confucius institute

expert who are not experts are the best

also lol @ shanghainese being a dialect of mandarin, whichever way you come at it

1. we knew there would be a 'written' exam first, but we didn't know what was in it, what we had to do, how long &c. it turned out to be 80 minutes long, all chinese questions (no pinyin) and handwritten answers about stuff we haven't even seen since last year.

2. that 10 minutes of dialogue i couldn't remember last night somehow became me delivering ~the whole thing~ without a script or cue cards or ANYTHING.

lol and to think i was going to defer this year because i didn't feel up to it

good work, big guy.

for written questions, what sort of material did they ask questions on?

i always felt envious of those students in my undergrad chinese classes that spoke another chinese language at home / went to school in canada and got around the rules about not racking up credits in lang courses for languages they were nearfluent in. but they had mostly evaporated, along with the business and international development students, by the final rounds.

i am really really really jealous of cantonese speakers

speaking of the beautiful linguistic diversity of china!

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/phonemica

this a site my friend kellen and other guys interested in chinese languages run (also involved w http://sinoglot.com/blog/): http://phonemica.net/

for written questions, what sort of material did they ask questions on?

• conversations (short answers/fill in the gaps): xmas holidays, food, day plan (先／在／然后／最后 structure), physical pain, working, meta stuff about studying chinese, buying gifts for a wedding, friends catching up
• direct translation from english: culture/arts/history, clothing (with 以防万一), opening hrs, visiting a place
• reading & answering questions about a chinese tourist brochure (a real one they picked up at the local visitors' centre), so stuff like how to get around, where to buy tram tickets &c.
• writing our own tourist brochure for a gold museum

but they had mostly evaporated, along with the business and international development students, by the final rounds.

yeah, we lost most of ours in the first year, probably because they couldn't write and were shitscared of trying

oh i know sinoglot and phonemica, they're great

先／在 "先..., 再..." ?