Help me learn Mandarin 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.

As mentioned above, Jin preserves the entering tone category from Late Middle Chinese. In addition to this feature, Jin dialects tend to have a tone-sandhi system that differs significantly from that of Standard Mandarin. This is one reason given to support the position of Chen (2004) in classifying Jin as a separate language. Specifically, the Jin dialects have a sandhi system that depends on the grammatical structure of the phrase. Typically, there are three possible types: Subject-predicate or verb-object forms as one, reduplication as another and everything else taking a third form.

http://phonemica.net/page?name=recordings&sub=languages&fy=jin

if the glottal stops aren't enough, here's TONE SANDHI THAT CHANGES BASED ON THE GRAMMATICAL STRUCTURE OF THE SENTENCE

here's TONE SANDHI THAT CHANGES BASED ON THE GRAMMATICAL STRUCTURE OF THE SENTENCE

x_x

i'm going back with 'er indoors in april, and hopefully again later in the year for a summer or winter 4–6 week course (the current plan is for tjnu but i'm open to options). by the end i had hooked up with all my tjnu friends on wechat (utterly utterly indispensable, wechat), and even though i've gone back home we're still talking for hours every day.

re accents, tones, dialects &c.: that hurts, even where i was in the northeast. in beijing i could have a perfectly normal and reasonably detailed discussion with one person (e.g. the time i had a cold and spoke to a pharmacist about my symptoms) and completely fail with another (e.g. one time i bought meat on a stick, of all things) due to the heaps strong beijing accent. because i'm not used to 北京话 it's still all 'warrarr-arr-arrarr' to my ears.

tianjin was generally a bit harder for me because a lot of people just stuck with the local dialect. one day in a park an old bloke came up to us and talked for like 10 minutes, but even my tianjin-born tjnu friends couldn't really understand what he was saying, so there seems to be some generational breadth in the dialect as well.

perhaps a lot of the successful exchanges were down to people leaning into 普通话 for my sake, so the unsuccessful ones were probably down to people who weren't up to that or couldn't be bothered.

also, we ate literally sixty eight billion 狗不理包子, and i did stumble on a handful of 相声 clubs but didn't go in.

tone sandhi that changes based on etc etc: oh god. like standard chinese isn't hard enough already.

http://blog.angryasianman.com/2013/12/that-funny-chinese-homework-assignment.html

Can anyone recommend a good mandarin grammar reference? Book, App, website whatever.

The texts I have from my course don't really cut it when I want to remind myself of sentence construction.

chinese grammar wiki?
http://resources.allsetlearning.com/chinese/grammar/

what text are you using, out of curiosity

http://resources.allsetlearning.com/chinese/grammar/Yale_Chinese_Usage_Dictionary

cgw also includes an index to the yale chinese usage dictionary