Help me learn Mandarin Chinese

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

It's something produced by the Centre for Adult Education here in Melbourne. I like my teacher but the course leaves a little to be desired. Given I'm not working, I can study more than others so I could hack something a bit more intense.

I'll check out those links, Thanks.

Keepin' on keepin' on; still around the lower half of the class re: language (still not putting enough time in actual conversation or writing characters) but doing really well in the lit paper - while I've got the worst Mandarin in the class, having read more modernist novels/plays/poetry than the rest of the class combined gives me an edge in the "into English" part of things compared to the Taiwanese exchange students looking for a blowoff class; it's given me a lot of practise looking characters up by stroke order. Idioms are p.rough, though.

Might be able to get a CI scholarship to head to Xiamen for a semester next year, if I play my cards right.

AA, how hard was HSK L3 compared to what you'd been learning in yr classes?

Just signed up for HSK L1. Feeling pretty good about my skills relative to others in my class but still at a really really basic level.

I was in a chinese supermarket the other day looking for some 甜面酱 and realised I don't even know how to say 'Where is the...' or 'Can you help me find...'. I have now learnt 这儿有没有....

So many things to learn.

etc what sort of works are you reading for class? i was in the same situation too when it came to 400level chinese lang classes - content was modern chinese lit where we had a discussion at the start of class, paper to write etc. i struggled hard in the language part of it, preparing my supposedly off-the-cuff remarks for the discussion, but being familiar with literary language in engl and having contemporary literature as something i knew about made it easier and less awkward and easier to predict what questions the prof would toss out.

go to xiamen, too.

Translation from Chinese workshop stuff: Lu Xun's preface to Call To Arms & Kong Yiji, Cao Yu's Thunderstorm, and we'll be doing Mu Shiying's Ye; stuff already translated to English has been Yu Dafu's Sinking (which ... whoa), Ling Shuhua's The Night of Mid‐autumn Festival, a bunch of poetry from the era (Wen Yiduo's "Dead Water" is the only one I already knew), and we've got stuff from Shi Zhicun, Mao Dun, Lao She, Ding Ling and Zhang Ailing coming up (+ general coverage of May 4th writing). First assignment was translating some poetry which I was pretty happy to do; currently finishing off translating the last part of Kong Yiji which has been pretty rough re: my poor Mandarin + figuring out idioms/etc; last time I read the story in English was two or three months ago and I'm not going back to look at it again so as not to defeat the purpose, but I'm often going through multiple dictionaries trying to suss out character combinations/idioms (or figuring out, uh, spatial stuff - IIRC at the end he's below the counter w/his legs wrecked, but does 门槛 mean he's in the doorway, or near the sill of the counter, etc ...). Not being familiar w/frequently used stuff like 便 is a pain, too.

The uni's Chinese Language Club organised this "Cheers Chinese" thing on Fri where a bunch of us (students of Chinese and Chinese students, as it were) sat around talking for 10mins in Mandarin and 10mins in English; a little bit musical chairs-y but really good for actually forcing conversation (or at least drinking), which I'm in p.dire need of. Talked to a rad dude from 福州市 who also recommended heading to Xiamen while getting teased by the northerners for his accent. Also talked a little bit about music (I'd interviewed 唐朝乐队 via a translator a few months back); one of the girls was excited that I knew about G-Dragon and, uh, the Cranberries.

Dreading the mid-terms that start tomorrow. This year's 京剧 equivalent seems to be 兵马俑.

word. when i got to more advanced authentic literature, it was past the point of having someone explain small grammatical elements, so things that crop up in earlier (esp early vernacular works, anything written before the 40s on the mainland-- and lots of taiwanese or diaspora work or cod-classical writing or stuff that tries to go for a classical tone). so yeah stuff like 便, you end up learning how it works only by reading.

spatial stuff is still an issue, too. it can be skimmed over usually in reading but translating things makes it especially hard because maybe writing in english it's more common to be more specific about where things are in space or something....

English is definitely prepositionally more diverse imo - things are always in, on of, about, under, over, out, etc

That NYT article about how languages affect our brains (sorry that was really vague - think Sapir-whorf style analysis) confirmed this I think. It was from a few years ago

门槛 i think right away of the threshold step-over thing in chinese doorways, so if he's on 门槛上, i feel like he's on the thing. but not always.

狗尿苔怎么也不明白，他只是爬上柜盖要去墙上闻气味，木橛子上的油瓶竟然就掉了。

这可是青花瓷，一件老货呀!婆说她嫁到古炉村的时候，家里装豆油的就一直是这瓶子，这瓶子的成色是山上的窑场一百年来都再烧不出来了。狗尿苔是放稳了方几的，在方几上又放着个小板凳，才刚刚爬上柜盖，墙上的木橛咔嚓就断了，眼看着瓶子掉下去，成了一堆瓷片。

婆在门槛上梳头，她的头发还厚实，但全白了，梳一会就要从梳子上取下一些脱发，绕一绕，塞到门框边的墙缝里。墙缝里已经塞有一小团一小团的头发窝子，等着自行车上架着货筐的来声在村口的石狮子前一吆喝，他便能拿着去换炝锅糖了。哐啷一响，婆问：咋啦?狗尿苔说：油瓶掉啦。婆头上还别着梳子跑进来，顺手拿门后的笤帚打他。打了一笤帚，看见地上的一摊油，忙用勺子往碟子里拾，拾不净，拿手指头蘸，蘸上一点了便刮在碟沿上，直到刮得不能再刮了，油指头又在狗尿苔的嘴上一抹。狗尿苔伸舌头舔了。婆说：碎爷呀，就这点油了，你给我打碎了?狗尿苔说：我去闻气味，它就掉下来了。婆说：闻啥气味，哪儿有啥气闻?!狗尿苔说：有气味，我闻到着一种气味

他只是爬上柜盖要去墙上闻气味，木橛子上的油瓶竟然就掉了 = he'd only been searching for the scent, climbing to the top of the shelf to find it, when the bottle of oil hanging on the peg had suddenly fallen. but 去墙上 sort of makes no sense translated, so i skip it. how do you say he was climbing up the wall? was it a wall with a top, maybe? or just a regular wall that meets a ceiling. again, i get it but trying to actually break it down into english, it gets unclear.

and look another situation of 门槛上. 婆在门槛上梳头....

and 便! 他便能拿着去换炝锅糖了.

i hate chinese characters in italics

狗尿苔怎么也不明白，他只是爬上柜盖要去墙上闻气味，木橛子上的油瓶竟然就掉了。

　　这可是青花瓷，一件老货呀!婆说她嫁到古炉村的时候，家里装豆油的就一直是这瓶子，这瓶子的成色是山上的窑场一百年来都再烧不出来了。狗尿苔是放稳了方几的，在方几上又放着个小板凳，才刚刚爬上柜盖，墙上的木橛咔嚓就断了，眼看着瓶子掉下去，成了一堆瓷片。

　　婆在门槛上梳头，她的头发还厚实，但全白了，梳一会就要从梳子上取下一些脱发，绕一绕，塞到门框边的墙缝里。墙缝里已经塞有一小团一小团的头发窝子，等着自行车上架着货筐的来声在村口的石狮子前一吆喝，他便能拿着去换炝锅糖了。哐啷一响，婆问：咋啦?狗尿苔说：油瓶掉啦。婆头上还别着梳子跑进来，顺手拿门后的笤帚打他。打了一笤帚，看见地上的一摊油，忙用勺子往碟子里拾，拾不净，拿手指头蘸，蘸上一点了便刮在碟沿上，直到刮得不能再刮了，油指头又在狗尿苔的嘴上一抹。狗尿苔伸舌头舔了。婆说：碎爷呀，就这点油了，你给我打碎了?狗尿苔说：我去闻气味，它就掉下来了。婆说：闻啥气味，哪儿有啥气闻?!狗尿苔说：有气味，我闻到着一种气味。

Ooh, thanks. Which reminds me...

oh, i think this looks sort of interesting, too.

An Anatomy of Chinese:Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics

it could be terrible but perry link is reasonably trustworthy.

― dylannn, Thursday, 22 August 2013 17:14 (7 months ago)

Did you end up reading this?

perry link isn't trustworthy. what was i talking about.

it's good but clunky. he's good when he confines himself to tracing chinese literary or linguistic forms up to the present and the way they're still found in modern chinese. some of the analyses of modern political language in china are interesting-ish. his points about modern chinese as the result of a maoist restructuring are stupid but actually common among academics that came of academic age before the opening up of the country.

I have a strange request. I volunteer at a steam railway and we get a lot of chinese visitors. We often let them come into the cab and take photos, even ride in the cab sometimes. I'd love to be able to point out the controls and other parts of the loco in mandarin.

I'm looking fora diagram that labels the controls in mandarin so I can learn what they are. I've tried searching the chinese web but don't know enough terms to do so. To date I've been working with the dictionary to try and translate the terms but have no idea if Im getting them right.

I'm looking for diagrams like this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_locomotive#Basic_form
http://i59.tinypic.com/245lkph.png

any help finding an equivalent much appreciated

http://wenku.baidu.com/view/75f5c61714791711cc7917ed.html

33 pages of railway vocab

i'll keep looking for a diagram. but if that's the exact diagram you want, i'll translate those terms/look up those terms and give them to you to make your own diagram, if you want.

Wow, that is pretty much exactly what I wanted. Actually way more comprehensive than I wanted. A diagram would be helpful but don't sweat it.

I actually started looking at chinese second hand bookstores and found many copies of many editions of 蒸汽机车乘务员手册, presumably produced for chinese railways over the years. All for 10-20元 No idea how I would order up a copy and get it shipped.

googling for things like 铁路机车 驾驶室 图表 brings up results for similar diagrams in german, english... but no chinese language version of similar. so one might not exist on the internet, i dunno.