Help me learn Mandarin Chinese

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..." ?

http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2013/03/27/chinese-grammar-funnies old jokezzz

先／在 "先..., 再..." ?

haha yeah, sorry, i didn't check my typing

When it comes to outside influences, if you look at the actual language, Chinese is the mother language… it came before Japanese and Korean.

this is completely wrong

the claims the author makes regarding the statuses of various languages in china, the relationship between sinitic languages and nonsinitic languages in china, the history of the chinese language, the relationship between chinese and foreign languages, the history of mandarin as the official language-- very few of them stand up to common sense, the most lazy cursory googling, or godforbid actual research, but they've been repeated so many times in the service of nationalist mythmaking that i guess they sound like fact.

today i asked someone a question in chinese without thinking about it or even consciously language switching. i don't think that's ever happened before.

also i learned how wechat works (asynchronous voice chat that lets you play each message repeatedly until you understand it) and am so getting on that bus. not wholly keen on giving my phone number to tencent but whatever.

my favorite feature of wechat is the find people near you function! good way to make friends.

i also want to say something about the use of weixin for meeting potential sexual partners without being crass.

my favorite feature of wechat is the find people near you function! good way to make friends.

omggggg i had no idea about this

i'm away from home and my qq user/pass is at home which is driving me insane atm

things i like about wechat:

1. proximity list. it's most useful in mainland china but if you're ever out and about and wonder, "hey how close is the nearest chinese person (that also uses wechat)?"

2. the group messaging feature.

3. qq mobile is pretty good now-- i've run it on the most basic phones available and i've run it on new age smartphones, and it works. but wechat is streamlined and built for mobile devices.

4. i have international text messaging in my phone plan but i like wechat because it's easier and cheaper and i don't need phone service to talk to people.

signed up again. good range of people nearby because melbourne has a decent sinosphere/abc population. not contacting strangers yet because i don't know where the crepey line falls.

there's an account name and a name and a wechat it and a qq id and a qq name and a qq account name (some of which can only be set once, i don't even remember which) and the qq/wechat values don't match up and i have nfi what i am doing with all this crap

chinese social media in general seems to have way too many settings and multiple things that sort of do the same thing and just dumb shit going on

right. with most of the chinese blogging platforms, the social networking sites there's a perfect storm of poor design and infinite user customization. qq's qzone is the worst example.

whoa that's just waterfalls of garbage

it's p much a generation of users who grew up on pirated copies of windows xp

starting to forget the basics now. i'm sitting there tonight, talking to a guy, forming like 对…感兴趣 sentences without a problem, and then he asks me how many people are in my class and i have nfi how to form the sentence. so dispiriting.

obv i should have spent 20% less time learning new words and more time just using the god damned language

http://www.failpix.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/bowling_balls_juggle.gif

me learning chinese

i'm not sure how helpful this advice is. with elementary conversations, answering those types of questions, the point is to work with your conversation partner's feedback and work off their grammar. so, if the question is "你们班有多少个学生?" go ahead and use that sentence patter, turn it into a statement formulate your response from that sentence pattern, "我们班有三十个学生." or! simply say "三十个"! that works just as well.

when talking to nonnative speakers, there's often the echo response that repeats and corrects your grammar without grinding the conversation to a halt. so, if you said, "三十," you'll likely get back, "哦, 三十个, 好多呀"/"三十个学生!" + leading question. your grammar or phrasing is corrected and the conversation moves on. even if you put your response into a sentence, you'll still get back something like, "啊, 你们班有三十个学生, 不少呀!" and that response will give you a polished, native model, with correct tones, etc.

the value of conversation with a native speaker is 1) hearing back the echo and working from their grammatical structures, 2) developing a feel for how the language is actually used.

thanks heaps for those tips, dylannn. it's an incredible blessing that chinese grammar is usually identical in question and answer form, because as a learner that thinking has already already done for you.

the big problem i had last night (apart from not being good enough at listening to keep up with whole sentences) is that he asked me in english 'how many people are in your class?' and i could not think of the correct word to use. i was struggling rather ineptly with 是 for a minute before he jumped in and said 'it's 有'. i mean obviously it's 有 in hindsight, but it's at this very basic level that i'm stuffing up.

another problem is asking someone to repeat what they said and getting a whole new sentence instead, but wechat should address that.

your second point (developing a feel) is something that will only come if i barrel on through all this ill-confidence and learn through my own mistakes. i don't think there's any other way.

verbal communication has a lot of room for quirky expression, grammatical indecisiveness and inexactness. i feel that in chinese, this is especially true.

there's a lot of room for mixing up word order, especially. "我们班学生有三十个" + "学生我们班有三十个" work in this situation. they might not be what you would find in a textbook and they don't even look great in text but in the flow of conversation, neither pattern would strike me as really strange.

even if you had fumbled out "我们班是三十个学生": it sounds a bit strange, if you take the time to consider it, and it isn't strictly correct grammar, but it also wouldn't bring the conversation to an abrupt halt, especially if spoken with some confidence. and there's the immediate echo effect to correct your phrasing if your partner finds it odd.

one problem is that as a non-native speaker your grammar is listened to a little more closely. the person you're talking to will be struggling to figure out what the hell you're trying to say, listening through all those horrible tones and weird grammatical constructions, and even if they'd forgive it from a native speaker your grammatical quirks aren't immediately taken as linguistic flavor or personal choice but as fucking up in a foreign language.

i hate the rah rah BE CONFIDENT / WORK HARD selfesteem attitude of language learners on the internet but that advice is valid sometimes.

at the end of the day, you can't even say that 是x个学生 is incorrect.

it does tend to work better when referring to the class more specifically, if that makes sense.

“我们老师挺好的，他那个班有三十个学生。但王老师，我觉得他不怎么样，你看，他那个班才二十个学生。”

"wǒmen lǎoshī tínghǎode, tā nàge bān yǒu sānshí ge xuésheng. dàn wáng lǎoshī, wǒ juéde tā bù zěnmeyàng, nǐ kàn, tā nàge bān cái èrshíge xuésheng." / "our teacher is fuckin great. his class is thirty students. but that mr. wang, he ain't all that. his class only has twenty students."

or the character of the students in the class.

“我们班是十个本地人，三个留学生，还有一些ABC。” or “我们班是三个男生，四个女生。”

"wǒmen bān shì shíge běndìrén, sānge liúxuéshēng, háiyǒu yīxiē ABC" / "our class has ten locals, three foreign exchange students, and a few ABCs." or "wǒmen bān shì sānge nánshēng, sìge nǚshēng" / "my class has three boys and four girls"

or a group of classes.

“在我的学校每个班一般是四五十个学生，学生太多了。”

"zài wǒde xuéxiào měige bān yībān shì sìwǔshíge xuéshēng, xuéshēng tài duōle" / "at my school, every class is usually about forty or fifty students, too many goddamn kids"

yo what you got at your house

a pig

oh cool, me too. you gonna eat it soon?

yeah

neat

― dayo, Wednesday, May 4, 2011 12:48 AM (2 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is beautiful

fuck. i accidentally converted the first example from 是 to 有.

我们老师挺好的，他那个班是三十个学生。但王老师，我觉得他不怎么样，你看，他那个班才二十个学生。”

I often think about picking this back up; I bet I could relearn a lot of it really fast if I studied hard.

It's so annoying that there's this extra dimension to learn. Like you can read and pronounce French; you just have to know what the words mean. But you have to learn symbols AND pronunciation AND definition, ugh

fwiw dylannn i don't want to render your efforts wasted, so am stockpiling it for the weekend when i can think straight and reply properly

alright!

i think lots of contact with native speakers develops not only a feel for the grammar + reinforcement of the rules of the language but ALSO gives one a feel for how far you can stretch grammar, word order and why you would want to do that.

my whole point beyond the grammatical distraction of that specific sentence is that the 1) chinese grammar has a great plasticity that forgives a lot, and once you know how to work with it allows an amazing range of expression and tone, 2) opportunities for informal contact with native speakers, especially if you live outside of a sinophone community are valuable.

it's funny you should mention that now, because i was out with a load of chinese speakers (natives and learners) yesterday, and after about four hours of pushing myself relentlessly i was having consistent and ~reasonably~ complex conversations with people for the following three hours. that block in my head that's been holding me back for ~18 months FINALLY started to disintegrate; i could (for the most part) follow people's speech and reply properly. i was making silly mistakes and nobody cared, but the point is (coming back to your point) that a lot of the time there were frequently a number of different ways to say the same thing, but it didn't matter so much because (a) they knew what i was ~trying to say~ and (b) i wasn't even technically wrong some of the time.

fwiw i'm having an easier time with native chinese speakers because they don't flub the tones. it's actually more work for me to converse with a particular subset of learners because they either lazily flatline their speech or just get all the tones completely wrong, and i find myself mentally translating what they're saying in 'chinese' into chinese before i can reply to it.

even if you had fumbled out "我们班是三十个学生": it sounds a bit strange, if you take the time to consider it, and it isn't strictly correct grammar, but it also wouldn't bring the conversation to an abrupt halt, especially if spoken with some confidence.

yeah, and the important thing is to just push through it and get better in time, rather than being a 普通话 master right from the start. i'm really seeing that now.

re your example: english is quite similar in this regard (the parallels between english and chinese are sometimes staggering imo), in that you can smash out a bit of a '30 people in my class' or '30 in the class' sentence fragment and the meaning is clear (again, this is a relatively new realisation for me). i found last night that chinese (here i mean wrt native speakers, not learners) breaks a load of its own rules in informal speech.

and even if they'd forgive it from a native speaker your grammatical quirks aren't immediately taken as linguistic flavor or personal choice but as fucking up in a foreign language.

another parallel b/n english & chinese is that we do the same when we encounter new english learners, probably because we want to help them form better english—we pick up on the uneasiness/lack of confidence and encourage them to learn/use better sentence structures. now i can see what a roadblock that can be when you just want to barrel through a paragraph of speech and worry about the mistakes later.

one of our teachers has so taken to assuming we're all going to fuck up that she actively interrupts us all the time. she'll ask us to answer a question/translate a sentence/correct some dodgy grammar, and we'll get literally a single word into our answer before she's butting in for some reason that isn't even helpful most of the time. it's so bad that we're all apprehensive when we try to answer anything, and she takes that apprehension to mean we can't answer the question. i've tried explaining why this is a problem several times but she just keeps talking over me. (one insane example: last week i pronounced 机会 as 'jīhuà', purely because i said the syllable wrong (i know the word ffs), but she assumed i meant '计划' and banged on for seriously five minutes about the difference between plan and opportunity, and just steamrolled me every time i tried to explain that i know the fucking difference.)

i hate the rah rah BE CONFIDENT / WORK HARD selfesteem attitude of language learners on the internet but that advice is valid sometimes.

p sure this sentence helped me yesterday, so basically i owe you a drink at some point

“我们老师挺好的，他那个班有三十个学生。但王老师，我觉得他不怎么样，你看，他那个班才二十个学生。”

“我们班是十个本地人，三个留学生，还有一些ABC。”

i'm popping these in the bank (esp. 不怎么样 which i don't think i've seen/paid attention to before now). also i need to be more familiar with stuff like '四五十个...' meaning 'forty or fifty'.

fuck. i accidentally converted the first example from 是 to 有.

interesting you should mention that, because using 是 instead of 有 in that context is exactly what led me to write my anguish post three days ago.

机会 as 'jīhuà'

actually you mean jīhuì

:>

gaagh

fwiw that's what i meant by 'i know the word' (机 jī and 会 huì are pretty basic), the wrong sound just came out of my face