Help me learn Mandarin Chinese

although mandarin is fine and you can continue just speaking mandarin in guangzhou and communicate with everyone and soak up compliments about having a northern accent and standard mandarin,
it's 1) a good opportunity to learn another language, 2) definitely opens up new friendships and social opportunities, 3) shows that you care about the city and i definitely care about the city, 4) a vote of confidence no matter how inconsequential for the idea of linguistic diversity and what preserving local languages means-- and lots of cantonese feel passionately about their language/culture, 5) makes everyday life a bit easier.

my first goal is no longer whining to my friends when they switch to cantonese and i lose track of the conversation and have to say, "do you guys mind speaking MANDARIN????" and i feel like a boorish northerner.

Just done my second class of Intro Mandarin, I feel at the bottom of a very tall mountain. I'm trying to back up the classroom learning with Flashcards (Anki) and Pleco, downloading skritter right now. I'm trying to do a lot of listen and repeat right now, really trying to get comfortable with the tones, it seems to be pretty unforgiving if you don't get them right or at least close and just getting the ear settled into them is hard.

I feel its pretty daunting, when I've learnt european languages reading has always been the skill that has led the other ones, that doesn't seem to be an option in Chinese.

Teacher seems good though, native chinese speaker, firm on drilling the tones.

are you in melbourne now? where are you studying?

At the UniMelbourne CAE. I guess I should have asked for some advice before I picked it but it seems reasonable although at two hours a week I think I'll be learning this till doomsday.

hey, if you want to ilxmail me i can give you some fairly useful melb-related information re studying

...really trying to get comfortable with the tones, it seems to be pretty unforgiving if you don't get them right or at least close and just getting the ear settled into them is hard.

this might be me contradicting things i've said above but:

i hear foreigners and native speakers of other chinese languages speaking mandarin everyday with very lax attitude toward tones or speaking mandarin with tones realized in odd ways or with consistently "wrong" tones and they manage to be understood quite well and any misunderstanding is usually caused by non-standard pronunciation (or unusual word choice/grammar in rare cases).

the thing about "if you get the tones wrong, you might be telling your chinese friend to molest a camel instead of wishing him a happy birthday!" is not really true. you can get deep, deep in the chinese game without being able to tag words with tones.

it's good to know the tones and it is a tonal language goddamnit and don't forget it but even if you drill those tones into your head, it's a different world when you're trying to use the language and produce legit fresh language in your head rather than just reading a page of tonemarked pinyin.

this might contradict the above paragraphs again: correctly deploying tones when you get to the point of speaking chinese is fucking tough and it starts with grinding into your brain the correct tone for each word/character you learn. 我/wǒ/i needs to be carved in your mind as wǒ and not wo with a third tone-- if that makes sense! i think part of the reason that foreigners have a weird approach to tones has to do with standard pinyin romanization! i think it's cool that other romanization forms have different romanization for different toned syllables, like gwoyeu romatzyh!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwoyeu_Romatzyh

Most learners of Chinese now start with Hanyu Pinyin, which Chao himself believed easier to learn than GR. Chao believed that the benefit of GR was to make tonal differences more salient to learners: “GR makes the spelling more complicated, but gives an individuality to the physiognomy of words, with which it is possible to associate meaning … As an instrument of teaching, tonal spelling has proved in practice to be a most powerful aid in enabling the student to grasp the material with precision and clearness.”

that's what i wanted to say: tones are hard to learn working with pinyin and it takes a lot of work to overcome that. and i still struggle with deploying correct tones and attaching tones to words, even after half a decade learning chinese.

correctly deploying tones when you get to the point of speaking chinese is fucking tough and it starts with grinding into your brain the correct tone for each word/character you learn.

indeed, but over time you can also adapt pretty well to hearing and remembering tones. brains are incredible that way.

ed, you won't get it in a week or a month, but with persistence it'll come. having the tones ground into you now is an excellent starting point imo.

i have a load of chinese-learner friends who pick up a lot of their tones by just saying certain words the way they've always heard them, rather than trying to consciously break down the tones.

Oh hey, had the final test for my Chinese paper today & I think I managed to not fail the course after a rough run w/things mid-semester; cramming in the library for 8-10 hours per day for a week giving myself blisters writing out characters paid off and you start to get that giddy feeling when you can figure things out from phonetic or semantic components or w/e (+ the "why haven't I been writing characters on the regular w/a decent daily routine zzz" etc).

Anyway, glad this thread exists; helped me through some pretty bleak wtf-am-I-doing moments.

excellent!

i guess i overlooked a big part of tones, which is learning to hear tones
that's a big thing

listen to double A

if any of you learners are keeping at this, get yourself on a scholarship. i'm in tianjin having the best and most rewarding time of my life. dooo eeet.

You enjoying some 狗不理包子 mate

i almost went there yesterday! going back late next week though (to beijing/qianmen)

It's not a place it's a food

oh! because there's a place called 狗不理 that sells 包子

Yeah it's named after the 狗不理包子　

The food

oh crap i just worked out what you're talking about. a friend was even 'oh you're going to tianjin! 狗不理 is a thing there, you must try it' and i've since got my wires crossed

cheers for uncrossing my wires, and for planning tomorrow's delicious dinner

Yeah I bet you don't need to go to that place to have delicious 狗不理包子

Just go to any stall on the street

this is good, AA. how long are you going to be in china?

how's the air? how long have you been there? have you stumbled on any underground 相声 clubs? how's your language level improved?

Oh, nice, AA! Who's the scholarship through / how long are you there for?

I didn't fail the course, though I got the fourth worst mark in the class on the oral exam, hue. Keeping on w/it next year + doing a 20thC Chinese lit paper involving translation, guessing there's a bunch of Lu Xun in my future. Hopefully the rest of my marks keep me in the running for any potential scholarship things.

Skritter and eating at dainty Sichuan has enabled me to dazzle my class mates by ordering 干煸 四季豆 合 家乡 泡菜 合 尖椒 牛仔骨 during the class on restaurant ordering last night. I haven't actually tried this in a restaurant yet but probably should.

what is the 狗不理 in 狗不理包子?

You should definitely order the first one

Pro tip you don't need to have any spaces at all in between your character groups

Nobody really knows

It's like asking "why are snickerdoodles called snickerdoodles"

good tip, I was wondering about that.

What is the pinyin for 狗不理?

gǒu bù lǐ

based on my ham fisted translation best not to speculate.

乒乓: thx for tip. last night 10 of us went to a 狗不理 place near 和平路 station. bloody delicious.

dylannn: until the 15th. back to beijing this tuesday iirc. yesterday the air was up to 380 wotsits on the magic 污染 index but it's back below 100 now. not seen (or heard of tbh) underground 相声 places but some of the group ended up at a slightly terrifying massage parlour flat. my language level has exploded: on the second day (alone in beijing) i didn't speak a word of english (i.e. only chinese all day), and now i'm understanding some people some of the time. sometimes i find myself lapsing into chinese because it's easier, which is a fantastic surprise. nobody has chronically misunderstood my chinese yet.

etc: i shat it in on that hsk 3 exam i thought i'd fail, and china hanban gave me this, with tjnu hosting the whole shebang. the scholarship lasts 10 days, but i added an extra few days to wing it alone.

oh and etc, don't let shit get you down. speaking/listening is a silent killer.

oh god, it's 10.45 pm and i'm still wandering and typing

oh, 'how long have you been there': since friday last week

such a short amount of time but good that you got your chance to employ mandarin in its native environment.

got a chance, i mean.

now you'll want to go back!

i already want to come back!

right now i'm on top of tianjin tower and i seem to have worn out a load of 25 year olds

fuck. that was one of the best days of my whole life. when i have to say goodbye to the tjnu friends i've made i am going to cry like a god damned baby.

i came to china with zero interest in the country, its history, nothin, and i've never been able to permanently leave.

what has the setup been for classes or whatever? how much chance for on-the-street improvisational speaking/listening have you gotten?

http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/language-difficulty

Lol Chinese is basically the hardest language you can learn as a native English speaker

japanese is the hardest -_-

dylannn: your story is fantastic. how long have you been there now?

we have classes in the mornings and solid mentor time in the afternoons. the classes are great but feel a bit token; it's the mentoring that has really made this worthwhile. all the mentors volunteered, and push us really hard (i even speak to a few of them on wechat until 11 pm/midnight every day). they take us to various places around the city, but where we're going almost doesn't matter at all.

on top of that stuff, some of us spend all our spare time (which is usually after 7 pm, and skipping the odd tjnu-provided lunch/dinner) going out and finding as many opportunities as we can to speak to people. almost everyone in tianjin seems to know no english at all, so every encounter is a learning experience. i've been going out alone heaps, too; my only downtime is sleep, which is about 6 hrs a night atm.

my first time in china was 2006 and i've lived four years outside china since then, i think-- something like that.

based on this visit, could you ever see yourself living in china?

'er indoors has plans in aus so it's not likely, but otherwise i'd do it in a heartbeat. i'll definitely come back for months at a time, work/study here for extended periods, etc.

i.e. i've a feeling tjnu is about to flog us some language courses, which would be just brilliant for say 1–3 months.

i think i'll probably make the leap to beijing early next year. i don't really want to but every reasonable job offer i've received in the last six months has been beijing-based. come back soon.

i'll say something about learning mandarin:

outside of the northeast, dialect and local language and indigenous weirdness with regard to the pronunciation of mandarin has always been an issue. in guangzhou, it was less of an issue than i thought it would be. maybe because everyone treats cantonese as very distinct from mandarin, mutually intelligible and when people switch into mandarin, there's less of a tendency to borrow in cantonese phrases or pronunciation. so, you get a lot of young people codeswitching between pure cantonese and an actually really textbook mandarin that sounds cctv quality minus rhotacization. and even with older people that might function in cantonese 99% of the time and consume mainly cantonese-language media, it's easy to catch the pattern of grammatical quirks and nonstandard pronunciation that native cantonese speakers slip into when speaking mandarin. maybe it has to do with a lot of internal migration to guangdong and mandarin always acting as the lingua franca of people with their own local and mutually unintelligible languages.

back in my new home of shanxi right now, the local language might be as distinct as cantonese is from mandarin, but the jin language is never described as anything but a dialect of mandarin. cantonese is rightfully treated as a language separate from and mutually unintelligible with modern standard mandarin, while jin is usually treated as a dialect of mandarin. and geographically, the south is far away from the lands where modern standard mandarin is treated as the local language, while jin is spoken right on the doorstep of beijing and the northeast.

in shanxi now, you've got people speaking a mandarin-influenced version of jin that's basically removed the entering tone (marked by syllables with a consonant final, still a major feature of cantonese and min and other languages but not present in any dialects of mandarin) and phonological differences like split up single syllable words, and then some people speaking straight jin with its consonant finals and profoundly distinct from mandarin tonal character preserved.

anyways, unlike cantonese, jin is not really treated by locals as a language that's distinct from and mutually unintelligible with mandarin, and there's nothing like the same pride in or interest in preserving or producing media in jin.

what i'm saying is, it's startling to arrive in a city five hours away from beijing by train and discovering that everyone is still speaking a language mutally unintelligible with mandarin and i often have no idea what the hell people are saying to me.