Help me learn Mandarin Chinese

i think my course is ending this year

angry baby dot jpg

learning with other learners is actively horrible, especially when they don't even fucking bother with the tones

i get loads more out of going to conversation meetups because native speakers don't stream a lifeless shitpile of monotone bullshit

here i am smashing the tones from day one and i have to listen to WOJUEDEWODEZHONGWENNENGLIHENHAO in middle c all god damned night

i am seriously on the warpath against people who claim to know chinese but (a) cbf with tones (b) pull that 'gah i don't need to learn how to read' garbage

you learn ~the whole language~ or you gtfo imo

it's a difficult language fuckers, harden the fuck up

i was lucky because i started learning chinese before i knew that each chinese character had a tone or several possible tones attached to it or even that tonal languages existed. it was just mimicry and then my friend karl from ohio--an american guy that i first took to be a missionary because he always wore stiff white missionary shirts and leather shoes and smart slacks and spoke great chinese--explained tones.

it does hurt to hear people speak toneless chinese but it's taken me years to get beyond the point of very intentionally attaching tones to words as i remember them and getting to where:

i can speak without paying attention to tones because the sound of a word is just the sound of that word and happens to include a tonal character in its pronunciation... meaning, i see, read, hear 我 as just 我... i mean, how do i even explain this? 我 is 我 and it sounds like 我, rather than a toneless wo and an attached packet of information that includes a dipping tone.

i have to consider for a few seconds, when asked, what tone is attached to which character, "hey, what tone is 棕???" it usually involves saying aloud, "zóngsè... zǒngsè... zōngsè... zōngsè! first tone." i know what 棕色 zōngsè sounds like as a compound but it takes a second to even attach a number to it.

producing the tones isn't the hard part for me--it's definitely hearing them. at the end of the day, if you're not raised speaking a tonal language, it's an uphill battle and i feel like even if i speak chinese that can pass for native speakerish (native speaker with a thick shaanxi accent, maybe), the tones will always haunt me because i'm missing a tiny lump of left temporal lobe that tonal language speakers grew in toddlerhood.

mispronunciation of tones by native speakers that elicit giggles from native speakers will often pass me by completely. didn't notice, didn't notice at all. but it makes comprehending those tonally shifted dialects easier because i'm listening far more closely to other things.

it's not even that i rely on the tones, it's that the language has a vital cadence that just isn't there when some lazy 老外 is halfarsing his/her way through speech.

i don't need 我 to be explicitly third tone either, but the language centre of my brain has developed an expectation that a full sentence will sound like chinese, and monotone delivery simply doesn't. it's sort of like reading without my glasses, in that the extra effort slows me down and wears me out.

re tones: i'm mishearing them all the time, but my brain seems to cope better with misheard tones than none at all.

wtf 're: tones', of course re tones

in northern jiangsu, there's a general rule that the second tone becomes the first tone and the third tone becomes the second tone, and the first tone becomes the third tone. hearing 北京 běijīng pronounced as béijǐng sounds weird, if i think about it, but i'm just not listening for it, usually.

videos of guys on youtube speaking chinese :(

"CRIMS0nHexAgON advanced polyglot speaks ARAMAIC, YORUBA, CREE, AND MANDARIN CHINESE"

in northern jiangsu, there's a general rule that the second tone becomes the first tone and the third tone becomes the second tone, and the first tone becomes the third tone.

oh jesus

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ep_II02ZZM4

:( fair enough buddy 2 months, but don't make youtube videos it you cunt

LET'S KEEP IT POSITIVE

http://tindeck.com/listen/gnff

no more negativity!

lol, the "fluent in three months" guy

"nī zhìdāo nī zhìdāo"

i actually want to kill that guy

tonight i was working with a learner who was doing all the right tones with her hand but *saying* the wrong tones, over and over again

bless

the three types by which i'm constantly surrounded are

1. those who genuinely think they're saying the right tones but are not
2. those who don't even try
3. people like that 3 month guy who make up tones like it's all just fucking decoration, "hey look at me i can speak ~chinese~ because i'm all Doing Tones and shit"

Not studying Mandarin but I'm down with
1) Thinking the hyper-correcting teacher who interrupts after the first word is spoken is a bad teacher
2) Being irritated by other students who babble and don't even try to get it anything close to what it is supposed to be.

this week i asked the coordinator of the whole course to be strict as hell on first year students' tones, because i am sick to death of dealing with their disgusting habits two years later

oh and i complained about hyper-correcto and was told that i'm several people deep in the queue to make the same complaint, so

Are these corrections made in English?

yeah

Yeesh.

'我对老师烦死了' probably wouldn't have cut it tbh

oh wait you said 'corrections' gah

yes, all made in english except the word she's correcting

they tell us what's in the exam, and then they send us off to prepare (which i spent seriously 40 hrs doing), and we get in there and it's suddenly OH THIS IS OPEN BOOK YOU JUST WASTED YOUR TIME WITH ALL THAT STUDY LOL and we basically just copy the course notes. then there's a whole surprise second part of the exam which is reading a load of junk about the spring festival (this is year 3 and we're STILL doing the fucking spring festival but they haven't told us what a chair or an elbow is) but FULL and i mean FULL of words nobody in the course has ever seen (i can pick up any old book and get the gist but this crap might as well have been greek, so much so that at one point the invigilator was suddenly and without provocation all 'oh no this might be too hard oh no sorry') and we had to answer the questions in chinese ON THE BACK OF THE SAME SHEET OF PAPER, so everyone spent the whole time constantly flipping the page back and forth trying desperately to copy stroke-for-stroke a pile of brand new characters. it didn't help that someone in the room had death breath. one question (a) didn't make sense (i put the whole thing into google translate and google couldn't even work out what it said) and (b) didn't seem to be addressed by the text. at all. i have never written I DON'T UNDERSTAND THIS QUESTION on a test paper before today. that was seriously the second stupidest exam i have ever sat in my entire life (and i probably passed tbh)

Yeesh, sounds brutal; fingers crossed my character exam on Thurs doesn't spring anything like that on me. Been spending a lot of time up at the library w/characters and wishing I'd started doing that a few months ago. Fingers crossed yr 40hrs of study isn't wasted time in terms of general proficiency, I guess?

oh it's definitely paid off in terms of proficiency, like a billion times

what's in your exam?

http://i39.tinypic.com/14m9rb8.jpg

Nothing fancy; the whole "create a dialogue" thing can wrong-foot me if it has to be done on a topic I've blanked (hai @ 京剧) or about some of the NPCR textbook characters whose, uh, characters I shouldn't have neglected.

ah yeah, it's easy to forget topics/chars when there's so much to absorb

sad lol @ 京剧

haha yeah

we did all that in first year too. too much chinese language instruction is backward looking imo.

slightly apropos of that: at the weekend i got trapped in a conversation with a guy about the 三国. on and on and on. that's all nice etc, really, but dude, my exams are about finding a job in network engineering in ~this millennium~

speaking of which, apparently i did all right in last night's exam (although why they're telling other students how i went i've no idea)

A few years ago, a few other translators and I were talking with employees of a Chinese publishing house who said that they had some books that they wanted to translate into English — things that they said would show foreigners the real China. There was a brief and intense period of excitement, until the publishers said that these were coffee-table books about Peking Opera masks and different varieties of tea. Ever since then, I’ve used “Peking Opera masks” as mental shorthand for the Chinese habit of attempting to interest the world in aspects of itself that most Chinese people don’t give two-tenths of a rat’s ass about. (This same thing affects Chinese-language instruction, but I’ll save that rant for another post.) Even just a couple of years ago, almost all officially backed Chinese cultural offerings were of this sort — books about tea and opera masks, yes, or Foreign Languages Press translations by non-native English speakers, or poorly subtitled documentaries about the Potato Festival in some godforsaken corner of the Shandong peninsula. (“Since late Ming dynasty, the town of Pirang is acclaimed as ‘hometown of potato!’”)

http://www.rectified.name/2012/04/30/peking-opera-masks-and-the-london-book-fair/

yes!! i use that term to describe the hideous bloody chop suey english fonts and ancient scroll backgrounds in every second piece of chinese language software

i spend like 80% of my mandarin exposure time listening to electropop and 0% of it studying the qin dynasty

2000 years of history
DOWN THE DRAIN

oh hey there's a baby down here

haha oh god

Bleak laughter, etc.

I feel you re: "Peking Opera masks" but I'm not sure if any culture really escapes that in the language-instruction field (based on my uh limited exposure to learning Dutch/German in NZ before my stint in Europe).

Got talking about 三国 w/a girl in my class who got into it via Dynasty Warriors. I wonder if I've still got my old PSX copy of Suikoden & if so whether I'd recognise any bits of 水浒传.

Wld be keen for an electropop YT/Spotify playlist or links to a mix or w/e, AA.

here's a few mainly taiwanese things to get you going (i love the crap out of all of these):

elva hsiao - super girl (disc 1 is great, disc 2 is all hideous ballads)

http://lightyearsofcy.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/elva-hsiao-super-girl.jpg

jamaster a - dong fang shen mi

http://mjchip.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/00-jamaster_a-dong_fang_shen_mi-front.jpg

da mouth - influenza

http://i.eimg.com.tw/d/alb/17/321917.300.jpg

da mouth (again) - one two three

http://music.yule.tom.com/uimg/2010/1/30/caiyingzhe/1264832880300_35468.jpg

girl and the robots - parallel universe

http://img001.photo.21cn.com/photos/album/20121202/o/29B53DC6BA0EC5214B1CCE179969EE35.jpg

a couple more that i love for some reason but might be difficult to find:

mosaic (马赛克) - self titled

http://www.mask9.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/thumbnail_150x150/mt0x0001/info_thumbnail/57713/57713_event-mosaic-chian-tour-bt-mask9.jpg

郭易yodai - if there was a time machine

http://m.yyq.cn/upload/avatar/504849657cdf8772903.jpg

no point in me looking for any of this on spotify etc because geoblocking is shit

nearly four years in, i go into a cafe and the lady asks me a question in chinese and i have not got any idea what she is saying

one day i am going to flip a table and walk the hell away from this fucking language