Help me learn Mandarin Chinese

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.

Challenge now is creating a baidu account so I can download the text file. I've got as far as having to do a verification using a text message and can't get it to and to either my Australian or US numbers.

They might charge you money to download the document even if you do get registered

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/05/23/what-its-like-to-live-in-china-and-speak-the-devil-language/

Not sure if this has been discussed before. The Nation piece has given me a bit more impetus to start learning traditional characters. I have been thinking that trad characters might be easier a lot of the logic of the characters seems to get lost when simplified.

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/17/u-s-professors-call-on-colleges-to-re-evaluate-confucius-institutes/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

http://www.thenation.com/print/article/176888/china-u

eh leaving aside the way that character simplification is discussed in the china u piece.

if you know enough simplified characters to be able to sit down and read a text comfortably, you will probably be able to figure out a similar text written in traditional characters. the more obscure characters you'd have to look up probably weren't simplified.

i never made a serious attempt to learn traditional characters and i'd still rather read a text in simplified characters and write simplified characters but i can read traditional characters just fine.

Unable to read the classics except in versions translated and interpreted in the PRC, cut off from the dissident and popular literature of other Chinese communities, students in CI courses cannot even access “the large and growing corpus of material on Communist Party history, infighting, and factionalism written by mainlanders but published exclusively in Hong Kong and Taiwan,” Churchman argues. Rather, they are subject to the same policies of language standardization (Mandarin) and literacy (simplified characters) by which the regime seeks to control what can and cannot be discussed in China.

this is very wrong.

9 GREAT REASONS NEVER TO FOCUS ON LEARNING TRADITIONAL CHARACTERS

1. you'll end up learning all the traditional characters you need from movie subtitles, karaoke subtitles, old books-- end up learning enough to read them, and there's no reason to learn to write them.
2. traditional characters are hard to read on a computer or phone screen and we should just stop using them online.
3. if you're in a chinese program of some sort, you'll probably be learning simplified characters anyway, whether your teacher is a confucius institute cadre or not. are you planning on going to school in taiwan? maybe it's worth it then.
4. if you're in a chinese program of some sort, you're going to be writing a lot by hand and it's a bitch writing traditional characters by hand, and you're going to forget everything you learn anyways but you'll forget less if you're trying not to forget 书写 instead of 書寫.
5. the same people that don't use simplified characters also won't use pinyin, so i tend not to trust them and i won't ever use bopomofo or cangjie or whatever it is they're doing.
6. how about you just go all the way back to oracle bone script? the world has moved on.
7. taiwan BANNED simplified characters until, like, a few years ago-- but the prc never banned traditional characters, they just started using simplified characters because they're better for most things.
8. knowing enough to read texts in traditional characters if you already have a good knowledge of simplified characters is a snap. by the time you learn enough characters in simplified or traditional that it will matter, you'll be able to figure things out.
9. whatever, even if you learn simplified characters and all of a sudden you're only reading rare early texts or taiwanese literature or hong kong menus or something, you'll pick it up fast enough.

10. when taiwan is liberated, the whole issue will be moot

To be frank, Chinese texts about Tiananmen/CCP skeletons/infighting/factionalism etc. is also among the texts most likely to be translated into English

Haven't heard of Chinese classics being censored, are the versions of Plum in the Golden Vase more licentious and racy down in HK and Taiwan?

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

― etc, Wednesday, 9 April 2014 12:45 (2 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it was about level because that's where my classes were at that point. hsk 3 is more words and faster speaking, but not overwhelmingly complex. best way to know for sure is to do a practice exam. did you end up sitting hsk 3?

re traditional characters: i could not be arsed with them until i went to taiwan last month. going from china (where i could read most things) to taiwan (where i could read bugger-all) convinced me to at least learn some basic traditional so i wouldn't be so confused by everything (and as a bonus taiwan publishes loads of decent comic books and ~uncensored~ everything else). if you narrow down the list to just those characters which don't merely have a different radical it's not that big an undertaking, but imo you should be comfortable with simplified first.

I passed my HSK Level 1

Can't sit HSK until ... December? They only run the tests twice per year here, April & Nov/Dec. Wouldn't have been prepared to have sat it earlier, but I've got a lighter courseload coming up, will be looking to head to China next year (Xiamen? Tianjin? Wuhan? Need to get onto applications &c once I've had my final exam on the 30th) , and felt like I salvaged the first half of the year after doing p.badly in the midterms - ended up falling asleep to visions of writing 懂 &c. Trying to make more of an effort to grab some Mandarin-only children's books from the local library, watch some random TV shows a language buddy has given me.

Our textbooks show traditional characters alongside simplified in the vocal lists, which is nice. Ran across Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora while browsing in the library; looks interesting + covers a bunch of Malaysian-Chinese writers I know v.little about.

excellent

this new utterly essential site appeared the other day: http://characterpop.com/

Hey dylannn, you know anything about the Guangdong University of Foreign Studies as a place to study Mandarin / in general?

Got to blag my way into this this conference due to a friend speaking at it; had no idea about Gu Cheng in NZ - written out of local literary history.

That site's really fun, AA!

That site is great, I've actually been thinking a lot recently about how characters break down and wondering with the was a neat way of exploring characters. Now there is.

i know people that went/go there but i don't know anything about it!

i'm of the belief that studying chinese as a foreign language anywhere in china will suck pretty much equally.

by that i mean i don't think a lot of study in china programmes are useful and have effective committed teachers that understand teaching chinese and most of the benefit would be from just being in china and immersed for a while.

so instead of saying they equally suck, i should have said they are all of about equal value but choose based on what city you will have the most fun in.

but yeah go study mandarin in china. for sure. even if the actual school situation might not be ideal.

the thing is miss about living in china most is being able to speak in chinese. i miss the feel of it, the interesting situations it led to and all that but also just the feel of speaking it, the way things can be expressed in chinese but not english sometimes or the way you work toward the same expression in another language and the way it seemed like i was talking from a different part of my brain, the feel of my mouth while speaking it. i just agreed tto some serious translation work, a story in a clt anthology and a novel so i'm looking at chinese all day all day but i do miss speaking it.

if you want to see characters broken down get WENLIN

for the main example from characterpop

你

you get to learn that 你 is

From 亻(人 rén) 'person' and 尔 ěr 'you'.
Etymologically 你 nǐ is a "colloquial variation" of 尔(爾) ěr; the two sounds nǐ and ěr both derive from ancient nzie (--Karlgren).

which you can follow through to learn more about 尔/爾

Which came first, 尔 or 爾?
Wieger cites this explanation for 尔:
“从入丨八, 会意。八者气之分也。”
Then 爾 came from 尔 (phonetic), 巾 ( = 两 a balance) and 爻爻 weights on both sides, to give the meaning "symmetry, harmony of proportions".
Karlgren(1923) says of the form 爾, "...original sense and hence explanation of character uncertain", and considers 尔 an abbreviation.
The pronunciation was once something like nzie. This produced both ěr and nǐ, the latter written 你 nǐ, which is the modern word for 'you'. Now 尔 is only used in a few adverbs and archaic expressions, and in foreign loan words.

and 好 shows the same notes and has pictures of pre standardized writings of the character

and you can also click through to characters containing 你 as a component (您 obv) and 孬 for characters containing 好 as a component

and you can check for words/compounds containing 你 or 好 ex.:

重修旧好[--舊-] chóngxiūjiùhǎo f.e. renew cordial relations; become reconciled
创三好[創--] chuàng sānhǎo v.o. 〈PRC〉 achieve the three goods of ideology, academics, and work
六好职工[--職-] liù hǎo zhígōng n. 〈PRC〉 a worker in the commercial sector who has done well in six key areas M:ge/¹míng/²wèi
绿林好汉[綠--漢] lùlínhǎohàn n. ①forest outlaws ②bandits entrenched in a mountain stronghold M:ge/¹míng/²wèi
结秦晋之好[結-晉--] jié Qín-Jìnzhīhǎo v.p. marriage between two families
干你屁事 gān nǐ pìshì 〈derog.〉 v.p. It's none of your business; What has that got to do with you?
真有你的 zhēn yǒu nǐ de intj. 〈coll.〉 You're really something!

Deadline for exchange applications in tomorrow; going to pick a destination for six months then decide whether to stay put or relocate (also depending on CI scholarships). Main value is getting over there and hopefully immersing myself / not getting stuck in an expat bubble while getting the NZ govt to pay for things, tbh. Dropped a math paper this semester to give myself more time to spent on Mandarin, spending more time reading/writing so far but need to get speaking.

Grabbed some random TV shows (+ uh ChineseP0d stuff) to practice listening w/Mandarin subs assuming I can get into a routine - 北京青年, 爱情公寓, & 魔幻手机. IDK, picked pretty much at random. My 2002 Nokia brick is starting to fritz out; guess I shld investigate smartphones for pleco/Skritter or w/e.

My lecturer wrote something on 小时代 ... can't tell from the article whether the vibe is more Gossip Girl or Tao Lin.