Help me learn Mandarin Chinese

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

advice for learners

1. don't

advice for learners

1. move to china :(

fuck

like, i expect that by now when someone says 'are you learning chinese' in chinese that i can do more than stare back like a gormless fucking bell-end

if she had written down the finer details of last week's eye surgery i'd be sound as a pound

i have more to say but not out in the open like this

but it's probably more helpful to reflect on what you've learned after four years and what your longterm goals are. understanding cafe ladies might be part of the 5 year plan but it's not the whole package.

this is thin advice but i think the best way to advance is to:
-- quickly move from instruction in the language to instruction in the language. i like the idea of having a second year chinese course that's not CHINESE 201: YOUR SECOND INTRO TO ABSTRACT GRAMMAR RULES AND MORE LISTS OF VOCABULARY and more like... in my second year of chinese at school, we had a class that was an intro to chinese folk tales, where the goal wasn't the peking opera masks learn about chinese culture but more about choosing a neutral peripheral topic that just became the stimulus as much as chinese folk tales can be stimulating and the theme and vocab/grammar was something that students were pointed toward and even better encouraged to seek out for themselves to approach the topic. instruction started at 70/30 chinese-english slowly moving to 90/10, which is frustrating but helpful. in the third year, the topic advanced to, like, modern chinese short stories... international business? stuff like that.

the years at university i advanced most in spoken/written chinese was when we moved to what were simply undergraduate courses taught in chinese. so, the discussion at the start of class-- say, we were discussing yellow earth, chen kaige movie--became a moment of supreme personal anxiety. i'd carefully write out my talking points and work to come up with answers to potential questions lobbed into the group by the prof. i spent hours working on just the opening discussion, just to produce 2-3 minutes put together of cogent thought/reasonable responses.

-- move from instruction to use of the language. when i finally got a friend to translate my resume into chinese and scammed my way into a job where the people hired me thought i could read and write and speak chinese at a level that wouldn't embarrass their company and might make them money, i was in a daily panic and i was forced to do a lot of: 1) last minute research into a topic so that i would have the vocabulary to talk about, say, brake pads, 2) bluffing and learning the talent of bluffing. but if that's not possible, you could come up with some sort of personal project in one of your areas of interest. my interest was literary translation, modern literature, so deciding to sit down and translate abandoned capital (the great work of modern chinese literature, untranslated!) and just work through it and hope that i'd finish even a single chapter of it. that was crucial.

my chinese activated out of the blue is pretty weak, though. if you aren't speaking chinese every single day, hours a day, your language is going to be shakey mo collier.

just chalk it up to her nonmainstream accent. she's probably a primary school graduate from a village in guangdong, right? haughtily demand that she speak standard mandarin and then walk out of her shabby little cafe.

http://www.hdpth.com/upload/image/ubfkCr70.jpg

haha brilliant.

my chinese (listening and speaking) does improve after a warm-up, so i'm probably being too hard on myself tbh.

your lengthy advice is ace. thanks heaps. i must owe you at least 12 beers by now.

i've ramped up the learning pretty sharply just recently (going to way more language groups, going to way more chinese cafes, have started weekly (2 hr session) one-on-ones with a proper teacher) and might be being a bit impatient. also, this might be my last year in the course for a number of reasons raging from (a) it's shit now to (b) they're losing funding to (c) my ~grand plans~ re the language (that i really can't discuss until/unless something real happens).

re practising answers to questions &c.: that's a thing i plan to do alone in the form of drills, then roll out when i feel confident enough to freeball my way through a broad range of relatively simple constructions. doubly so in my field of work.

lengthy/detailed posting on a phone is still pants btw

http://i.imgur.com/sF77BKh.png

这张专辑献给所有告诉我我将一无所成的老师
献给所有住在我楼上的，因为我为了挣钱养我的女儿而作违法的事叫警察来的那些人
献给所有正在挣扎中的兄弟们，你们懂得？

http://rudb.org/img/2010_04/i4bc56a1dbde8a.jpg

http://ohverlycritical.com/news/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/tumblr_luzr7x2ZlQ1r5blq2o1_400.jpg

it sounds like you're taking all the right steps. learning a language isn't a four year process, especially a language that offers you the following challenges:

1) completely unrelated to your mother tongue + tonal,

2) a writing system that requires years of study and maintenance-study of already learned material in order to approach even simple texts (as i think dyao said the fact is that study of written and spoken chinese are "separate disciplines" but to learn the language, you have to grind away at both of them),

3) there are lots of materials for studying mandarin compared to other languages but opportunities for exposure to and use of the language are few and far between and require dedicated seeking-out,

4) teaching of chinese as a foreign language is a relatively new thing and your teachers/tutors won't have much idea about acquisition of the language by foreign speakers and will mostly be flying blind/teaching the language to you like it was taught to them,

5) "chinese culture," and i mean the real difficulty of approaching a language esp the written language that's tied to a different culture and there's lots of necessary background study to grasp shit sometimes and also the emphasis placed on the chineseness of chinese, teachers trying to instruct you in the crazy bullshit idea of/glory of 5000 years of chinese history instead of things you actually need to know to communicate in mandarin chinese to normal people in 2013.

if you want something concrete to direct your energies toward, you could think about doing the hsk. it's easy to study for-- okay, not easy to study for but easy to know what to study, i mean, because there's lots of hsk material online. the hsk level 1 is probably too basic for you; level 2 is the last test that has pinyin for everything, so level 3 is probably what you'd want to shoot for unless you're feeling really ambitious: it has no romanization and it's the first level that has a writing component but it's still very approachable. the writing component is made up of short questions, rather than a lengthy composition. i think hsk 3 is doable with, i don't know, minimum 300-400 characters?

you are so great with the lengthy advice. beer/beer substitute forthcoming. i'm on a tram (out every night studying like a mad bastard atm) so can't reply fully but will chuck in these for now:

- i have hsk 2 and am going for 3 in september (and possibly 4 in china in april) – i can do around 1,300 chars and have maybe another 100 to make up for hsk 3

- the newness/immaturity of chinese instruction to laowai intersects nicely with the thing i can't talk about yet (if only this were ~secret borad~)

- two languages otm, and every single learner i have ever spoken to about this has excelled in one and lagged in the other

- i knew this language would be a slog when i embarked; occasionally i have a mini-meltdown but dust myself off pretty quickly

also just throwing in quickly that the single best thing about learning chinese is dealing with unbelievably friendly and warm and wonderful chinese/chinese-descended people who seem to be in abundance (even the apparently taciturn people open up like a flower when they know i'm learning 中文)

broke through the conversational wall in malaysia of all places. now i'm starting conversations like a trooper. i suspected it'd be a sudden jump and that's pretty much what it was, even though my speech is hacky in places. tonight in class i was ahead of a classmate whose ability left me flat-out intimidated last year.

it also helps to know that i can't understand some people merely because (a) they've got like a guangdong accent or something or (b) they talk too damn quickly, and that it's fine to just ask them to say it again.

cctv declares a crisis in chinese characters/fills their summer schedule with a 中国汉字听写大会/chinese character spelling bee.

only 30% of adults could correctly write "toad"/"癞蛤蟆" and even more excitement: http://news.china.com.cn/live/2013-08/01/content_21430735.htm

the contestants are kids... the 30% came from people playing along in the audience...

mark your calendars, august 2nd:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh7Arjm52Cw

http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XNTg5NDUxMzQ4.html

Oh god, measure words. This trimester's class is half the size of the last one, which is a lil' bleak, but I guess it's better to have smaller classes?

i'm not sure how i feel about teaching measure words. it usually teaches into an exam-focused exercise in drilling a list, without teaching how they actually function in spoken chinese/how they actually function in written chinese.

for spoken chinese at an informal + basic level, five or six tops are sorta necessary, and knowing how they work. they're easy to learn, though, and they look and sound nice in formalish spoken chinese and written stuff.

you know, even on the hsk, i believe, 玩儿 wánr is, like, given as the correct form. i've never really heard anyone, at least inside china (except in written form, where it does seem unusual to add the 儿 to words except when it's necessary or in literary works to show pronunciation, whatever), do without the rhotacization. so, it's really vexing to be corrected when i say
"你玩儿得开心吗？"
"玩."
"啊？"
"你玩得开心吗?"

same issue has happened with 聊天儿. i mean, first, it's in the damn rulebook of standard mandarin to add it! and it's not a local dialect quirk or something. adding an 儿 can change the meaning or tone of a word or a whole sentence. it's so strange to do away with it. southerners are barbarians.

i am going to defend my use of 儿 to the death.

Additionally, some words may sound unnatural without rhotacization....

otm, southerners give me a headache

there was a weird incident today, just bullshitting with someone, and they asked me something about learning chinese. i said, "i mean, it's all good but i find southern accents pretty hard to decipher. like, for example, i always have to remember that the pinyin initial n will be pronounced as l... like, bù kěnéng becomes bù kěléng." dude was just like, "nah, never heard of that" and pulled the same consonant switch in that very sentence.

and goddamnit, it still confuses me to have sh, zh, ch, etc. sounds elided to s, z, c. 那个，我不能吃 "nàge, wǒ bùnéng chī" suddenly becomes "làge, wǒ sì bùléng cī de la"

but that is mostly my perspective as a 2nd lang chinese speaker that has a hard time understanding unfamiliar deviations from standard mandarin. and the deviations are different if the speaker is from hunan or jiangxi or guizhou or guangdong and it can be hard to figure out what rules to listen by.

it's impressive and comforting that most people in the entire south, even if they got instruction in mandarin at school (and depending on where you are, the teacher will still be using either local dialect or something far from standard mandarin), mandarin is still a second language, which they didn't use at home, very likely don't use among friends, and don't necessarily use at work.

i can use mandarin to order in a restaurant and make small talk at a bus stop but both of us will be doing it in our second language. walking down the street, sitting in a restaurant listening to the conversations around me, i can only understand 40, 50% of what's being said, whereas in nanjing or beijing or even, say, xi'an, or, hey, even shanghai, it floats 75-90%, depending on the city.

what i'm saying is: years of studying chinese, a complete waste.

wow

fwiw i agree with you completely about the s/z/c thing. kills me, even though i know it's coming. the 'bù kěléng; thing i've not picked but will listen for it now.

'bù kěléng', even

Really wish my motivation to practice characters was higher // I wasn't taking so many other papers atm.

http://cantonese.ca/tonechart.gif

learning mandarin at first without a textbook and just picking it up and not knowing anything about tonal languages, it was quite obvious that certain words had a tonal quality in spoken chinese. or, like, i could hear that 你是哪国家的？nǐ shì nǎ guójiā de? even if i didn't know exactly what tones looked like on a graph, i could hear that 你 sounded like nǐ all the time and the 的 was spoken in a neutral tone and after hearing the sentence repeated and other common words from the sentence repeated, i had a good idea of what each tone sounded like, before ever being sat down and having māmámǎmà explained to me.

and when i've explained the four tones of mandarin to people new to the language, they pick it up quite quick and can produce the tones correctly in isolation, even if using tones while speaking eludes them maybe forever. with cantonese, for the life of me, i cannot distinguish between most of the tones, even when someone is speaking them to me in isolation, in order, very slowly. and in spoken conversation, i have even less hope.

for a speaker of a nontonal language, i feel like mandarin is approachable and it's a language that's easy or as easy as any other language to attain fluency in... but cantonese, i don't know.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/02/Cantonese_tones.svg/400px-Cantonese_tones.svg.png

w/ cantonese 6 and 4 are the hardest to distinguish between imo

real heads will tell you there's actually 9 cantonese tones

but it's actually the three flat tones (1, 3, 6) w/ some kind of clipped consonant ending i think