Help me learn Mandarin Chinese

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.

Backing away slowly from
"The cultural class is an optional course which is open once every two weeks. The topics include Kong-fu, Hands-on (e.g. calligraphy, making dumplins, tea ceremony, mahjong, Peking Opera Masks Painting), Chinese Idioms, Lecture Series (e.g. Culture behind Characters, History of Shanghai, Chinese Modern Society, Movie Industry, Traditional Customs, etc.). The students can select the courses in the first week. The cultural course with less than 15 applicants will not be opened."

小时代 is definitely more Gossip Girl than Tao Lin

I've been reading 'Brothers' by Yu Hua in translation, not sure how I feel about it yet but I'm getting the sense that Chinese literature doesn't translate that well into english. Anyway at some point during the narrative Song Gang looks for something in his 'dictionary of aphorisms'. A few questions

1) Aphorisms - 成语？
2) How relevant is learning 成语 to learning 汉语？

Some unrelated questions.

1) I can't seem to get a proper job right now some I'm thinking about an intensive mandarin course in China. Any thoughts or advice on where to go, who to do it with or what to look for?
2) What are chinese equivalent sites for tripadvisor and photo sharing sites such as flickr/instagram etc.?

Talking of TV shows, can you recommend anything with really basic or repetitive language? I occasionally watch 非诚勿扰 on SBS and I'm starting to pick things up because the themes and questions are really repetitive. Possibly I should just find dora the explorer, I picked up a fare amount of dutch from that when I was broadcasting Nickelodeon NL.

one of my univ chin100 classes was all about chengyu, so i have those couple dozen most common ones in my head, and they pop up all the time in all kinds of writing. unfamiliar chengyu are sometimes easy to decipher within context or they'll be a seemingly random grouping of four characters. i'd say... you'll remember some, guess some, google a few, and skim over a lot.

when i write in chinese, i never deploy chengyu, but when i let a native speaker edit my writing, they'll invariably insert a few in instances where a chengyu is commonly used to describe what i've spread across an entire sentence worth of characters.

Thanks, fancy sharing your dozen or so? There's a couple of skritter lists, one seems to be based on textual analysis of chinese newspapers and is a little on the large size. There's a few smaller ones; how does your mental list mesh with this one?

http://www.skritter.com/vocab/list?list=276970241

I guess I could just share the list:

//成语: some basic and easy to use chengyu /March 2013
心满意足	xīnmǎnyìzú	perfectly contented; perfectly satisfied
无论如何	wúlùn rúhé	no matter what; anyhow; anyway; in any case
苦尽甘来	kǔjìngānlái	sweetness comes after bitterness; the hard times are over and the good times are just beginning
不知不觉	bù zhī bù jué	unconsciously; unwittingly
丰富多彩	fēngfùduōcǎi	richly colorful; rich and varied
老马识途	lǎomǎshítú	lit. an old horse knows the way; an old hand knows the ropes; experience is valuable
骑虎难下	qíhǔnánxià	lit. if you ride a tiger, it's hard to get off; impossible to stop halfway
狗改不了吃屎	gǒugǎibùliǎochīshǐ	a leopard cannot change its spots
一路平安	yílùpíng'ān	have a safe journey; bon voyage
乱七八糟	luànqībāzāo	at sixes and sevens; everything in disorder (idiom); in an awful mess; in a hideous mess
一毛不拔	yìmáobùbá	(saying) stingy; miserly; parsimonious
礼尚往来	lǐshàngwǎnglái	courtesy requires reciprocity
生老病死	shēnglǎobìngsǐ	birth, age, illness, and death
孤掌难鸣	gūzhǎngnánmíng	(literally) a lone hand cannot clap; hard to achieve by oneself
入乡随俗	rùxiāng suísú	when in Rome, do as the Romans do; (literally) when you enter a village, follow the local customs
谈何容易	tánhéróngyì	easier said than done
胡说八道	húshuōbādào	to talk nonsense
虎头蛇尾	hǔtóushéwěi	a fine start and a poor finish
一分价钱一分货	yìfēnjiàqiányìfēnhuò	you get what you pay for
二话不说	èrhuàbùshuō	without delay
不由自主	bùyóuzìzhǔ	can't help (doing something); involuntarily; ;
愚公移山	yúgōngyíshān	old man moves mountains (idiom); where there's a will, there's a way
杀鸡给猴看	shājīgěihóukàn	make an example out of someone to frighten others
不醉不归	búzuìbùguī	not return without getting drunk
心甘情愿	xīngānqíngyuàn	totally willing; perfectly happy to
妻管严	qīguǎnyán	hen-pecked
妻管严	qīguǎnyán	hen-pecked

Typically a chengyu is associated with a story (i.e. 画蛇添足), phrases like "无论如何" are more accurately classified as four-character vocab words imo

1) For language programs, how long? Think the typical intensive programs like Princeton in Beijing, Harvard in Beijing, ACC, and IUP are all very good

It's worth going to one where students are actually serious about keeping language pledges, all of the above attract quality students

CTrip has reviews although a Chinese person's standard of what's acceptable may be lower than an equivalent Westerner's

Haven't used eLong in a while but that's another choice

For Flickr/Instagram, you can try nipic maybe? I don't know of any instagram equivalent, most photo sharing my friends do is over WeChat

how is this going for you all?

i just spent a week in china with the express purpose of speaking no english. day one was horrifying but the last few days were incredible.

oh and i failed hsk4 because my listening's shit. so there's that. listening is now my last big roadblock so i'm throwing everything i can at it atm, and restarting tutoring in december. also studying to attempt hsk5 next year (should be able to leapfrog hsk4 if i can sort out my 听力).

I've been using pop-up chinese to work on my listening. The free stuff is on iTunes, I haven't stumped for a paid account yet.

http://popupchinese.com
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/popup-chinese/id292036117?mt=2

Had a brief break after my (shaky) EOY Mandarin stuff to deal w/my other courses; now I've got the summer to study/practise before heading to Guangzhou in Feb to study for at least one semester.

Where in China did you go, AA, and did you travel in a group or solo?

Cheers AA, haven't heard from you in a while and was wondering where you ended up on this

Good luck w/ the HSK4 and drill those tones

sup AA????
probably not being in a sinophone country the listening is the hardest part. as much as my spoken chinese slides, i think living in china for those years has stuck the ability to hear + understand chinese in my head.
and yeah where did you go / what did you do?

cheers 龜. i'll keep hacking at vocabulary while i get my listening sorted, so i should be able to pass hsk5 and 6 on a pretty normal line of progression.

etc:

before heading to Guangzhou in Feb to study for at least one semester.

oh man, that will be incredible. guangdong university of foreign studies?

Where in China did you go, AA, and did you travel in a group or solo?

solo. went to beijing and shanghai because that's how the flights worked out, but also beijing is my equal favourite city in the world atm.

dylannn:

probably not being in a sinophone country the listening is the hardest part.

it is incredible how quickly my listening improves while i'm there. i've only started watching ~television~ in the last couple of months because it's only recently that i've understood enough speech to build on.

i think living in china for those years has stuck the ability to hear + understand chinese in my head.

did you find that getting over that listening hump was a permanent achievement? obv there's stuff like vocabulary and accents to deal with, but do you feel now like the basic comprehension part is a skill you won't lose?

and yeah where did you go / what did you do?

i stayed out of tourist areas nearly the whole time and tried to find ways of having conversations. the most successful was on the 高铁 when a passenger saw my study books and insisted on making me talk for 2–3 hours straight. the scariest was when i was fully hit on in a cruising park (i didn't know it was a cruising park) and had to 说中文 my way out of it. everything else feel between those two points and the whole thing was just brilliant.

dylannn i'm sure you know this all too well, but all I needed to do was say '你好' or buy a ticket or order a basic dish and complete strangers would light up. i had so many conversations just by saying something really simple within earshot of a local.

what do you love about beijing?

yeah of course. and trains yeah when i flew back to china the last time i took a 24 hour train from shanghai to guangzhou and had no seat, stuffed in the space between cars. it was like an intensive refresher course in speaking/listening after too much time away from the language-- and you can't leave!

did you find that getting over that listening hump was a permanent achievement? obv there's stuff like vocabulary and accents to deal with, but do you feel now like the basic comprehension part is a skill you won't lose?

i've been doing a lot of sideline grinding commercial translation and big personal literary project translation work (I HAVE A STORY IN THE NEXT ISSUE OF CHINESE LITERATURE TODAY BTW), communicate with friends/colleagues in china, so i'm immersed in the written language day-to-day. but even talking to sinophone friends i've become incredibly lazy about actually speaking chinese and my flow has suffered quite a bit. but listening, it's stuck in my head, just an unloseable passive skill.

what do you love about beijing?

it's unlike any city i've ever seen; it's almost completely foreign to a non-chinese speaker from p much any western country; the scale of the place is utterly overwhelming; it's almost impossible to get lost; it's relaxed cf. shanghai, hong kong &c.; every district feels completely unlike every other district (at least inside 四环); it's cheap; and it feels so safe for tourists that i never have to worry unduly about anything i.e. standard precautions are enough.

when i flew back to china the last time i took a 24 hour train from shanghai to guangzhou and had no seat

oh man. i've not yet done that, but everyone i know who has has said it's the most fun way to travel. this time around i only got the 高铁 because i didn't have heaps of time.

how did you sleep without a sleeper? was there at least room to lie down somewhere?

(I HAVE A STORY IN THE NEXT ISSUE OF CHINESE LITERATURE TODAY BTW)

!!! please bump the thread when it's published (i assume it's this and there's no publication date for the new one afaict)

but listening, it's stuck in my head, just an unloseable passive skill.

oh that's excellent news. cheers.

the train leaves shanghai at 7 pmish so, there's a few of settling in and making friends so you can catch 10 minute bursts of sleep later that night leaned against each other, jostled away by stops in middle of nowhere jiangnan and people stepping over you to get through to the bathroom. then by southern hunan enough people have gotten off, it's afternoon and you can lay out on the floor. but i wouldn't say it's much fun.

i will yeah i have no idea exactly when the next issue is out.

xp wow