Help me learn Mandarin Chinese

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

http://www.fluentu.com/chinese/

i did some work for them recently -- translated captioned usu non boring video content SIGN UP FOR FREE

Oh hey dylannn, just lifted the edition of Chinese Literature Today w/yr Dong Xi translation from the waiting room of our local CI. Guess the issue came out late Dec?

Flying to GZ in ~2 weeks on Malaysia Airlines.

AA - yep, GDUFS.

hey cool. glad to know the folks at the confucius institute are reading it too.
have fun in gz. business or just going there or what

if u need some tips

Studying Mandarin at GDUFS/广东外语外贸大学 for a semester. Tips welcome! Only know random bits & bobs from random people who've toured here or bookstore recs from academics. In the NZ's-a-village stakes, it turns out an ex who's been living in Melbourne for a few years is moving to GZ at the same time to teach music in an international school.

cool cool. yeah if you want to see shows c-union + 191 space are probably the best. c union is located in like the backyard of an office building in this piss smelling public park you have to walk past a traffic gate thing to get to but you can drink outside and listen to 80s dancehall mostly at night. not mentioned is loft345.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGfBO9Byov8

there's lots to do, i think. go see shows at c union and loft 345 for sure. take the metro everywhere. go to taojin and wander around the friendship store and picture what the city looked like in 1982 when most of the stops on the metro if there'd been one would have exited on green swampy fields, walk around the pretty green lawns, garden hotel. it's close to xiaobei, african market stalls, kazakh girls selling phonecards on the flyovers speaking russian, don't buy drugs and you'll be offered them over and over again but you might get the chance to smoke some bushy gz kush at loft 345 if you're into that, get a sujuk sandwich maybe. wander around the old streets around dongshankou, liwan, go to that big park, get the fishy porridge they sell off the boats, eat changfen at yinji. gz has some of the nicest oldest proudest neighborhoods in the country, protected by southern pride, lingnan culture, lots of money but lots of interest in preserving and not wholesale giving up on and tearing things down, all the beautiful buildings. enough has been torn down but enough is still there. go to shangxiajiu and shamian island even if they're ""touristy"", all these things are. shamian island has the most beautiful starbucks in china. get drunk at perry's (10 rmb zhujiang and on tobacco night free cigarettes at the bar) before going to party pier and walk back at dawn through zhujiang new town's year 3000 architecture or go to haizhu, some place like rich baby or heihei, along the river, or CATWALK, go to some fucked up club like kama and watch the colombian girls working. go to tianhe and walk for hours through underground-aboveground multifloor interconnected shopping malls. take the metro to panyu and eat at a seafood market or the last stop toward the airport and see where the city is still eating up the green and fields. take the bus to foshan. take the train to shenzhen and stay at a 7 days inn in luohu and walk across to hong kong for a day. take the train toward hainan and go to some coastal town and walk through deserted fishing villages or go east to huizhou where everyone is speaking hakka or go to dongguan to monitor the vice crackdowns.

Ha, will try and do all of those things. Still not sure how much the uh totality of the city's going to impact me; I'm moving from my country's capital which has a population around sixty times smaller than GZ.
Lot've documentaries in the works atm about Africans in GZ (six US-funded ones at least?), kinda curious to see if I can see much in the way of live naija while I'm over.
My CN friends keep recommending me YT channels of thee worst crêpey/neckbeard laowai, IDK.

http://news.yahoo.com/u-students-losing-interest-china-dream-jobs-prove-210258151--business.html

heat around study chinese was based on hype re future language of international business but i didn't know anyone expected to actually go to china to find the dream job as the article suggests. ??? reality is chinese is hard to learn and at the level of proficiency most foreign students get to (even like ba in chinese) it's almost completely useless. except for govt there can't be many people recruiting specifically for native lang engl 2nd lang mandarin (likely with limited literacy in that 2nd lang).

Jeez, I would think the incentive to learn is because it would be an asset for future corporate/hospitality/etc jobs within the US.

"I came to China thinking I could learn Chinese and get a high paying job. I learned very quickly that was not the case," said Ian Weissgerber, a 25-year-old American graduate student in China. "A lot of Chinese can speak English just as well as I can, and Chinese is their native tongue too."

?????

how do all the other major economies of the world manage to do business without american college graduates with mid-level proficiency in their native language helping them along?

Amazing. Guess there's some comparisons to be had w/Japanese as future language of international business in the 80s?

Handful of US students here (mostly ABCs w/some Cantonese or w/e), but the majority are either Koreans likely on the equiv of UK students on exchange in France, and Russians/Kazakhs/Uzbeks/Thai/Vietnamese/Togolese/Guinean/Somalian/Kenyan/&c on the hustle and I'm pretty sure didn't come here expecting to land a high-paying job.

Off to see Nova Heart at TU凸空间 tonight. Is there a new rolling thread? Lot've local students I've met talking about the Under The Dome documentary.

average chinese biz studnent chinese minor doesn't speak as good engl as average nigerian in guangzhou imho

we should have naother rolling thread

Maybe make it permanent this time

Why don't American students who want to get a job in China just go there and get a job washing dishes at Pizza Hut or Outback Steakhouse and live 8 to a room w/o papers?

bcos those r not high paying or otherwise attractive jobs

穹顶之下: Rolling 中华人民共和国 / People's Republic of China (PRC) Thread

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).

― Autumn Almanac, Wednesday, 12 November 2014 14:44 (8 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hsk5 is out of the question this year BUT hsk4 might be worth re-doing.

i've forced myself to listen to >15 min of chinese audio every day for 286 days in a row (usually slowed to 70–80% of normal speed) and it's paid off: yesterday in a three-hour intermediate chinese class i understood every. single. word. after years of failing to smash through the great wall of 听力 this is huuuge.

my vocabulary acquisition and writing skills have suffered because of my focus on listening but who cares. i'm hearing and reading enough that i've not really forgotten anything.

also i read my first proper adult book (一九八四, including those goldstein chapters and the newspeak appendix) in two months. super-stoked that i could finish it.

i've forced myself to listen to >15 min of chinese audio every day for 286 days in a row (usually slowed to 70–80% of normal speed) and it's paid off: yesterday in a three-hour intermediate chinese class i understood every. single. word. after years of failing to smash through the great wall of 听力 this is huuuge.

Ugh, jealous; I've been way too lazy about this despite it being coming up half a year here - both last semester and this summer I've been in classes where I've been placed due to my character/vocab knowledge, but I'm the bottom of the barrel with listening/speaking ... probably understand 20% of what the teachers say? Their Mandarin is faster than any teacher in any language in any subject I've had before, tbh.

Made friends with a motley vaporwave/twee/shoegaze/post-hardcore local crowd via going to enough gigs, so it's been nice to practice a bit w/something I'm a little more vibe-compatible with; OTOH they'll default to Cantonese most of the time (which I'd like to pick up, but ...).

How did reading 一九八四 go - CN-CN dictionary, CN-EN dictionary, making notes, winging it? How long ago had you read the original, if at all?

I'm the bottom of the barrel with listening/speaking ... probably understand 20% of what the teachers say? Their Mandarin is faster than any teacher in any language in any subject I've had before, tbh.

it took me 4.5 years to get to this point. really you just have to keep headbutting that wall until you break through it.

u+k: try to focus on audio material that's at your vocab level, and get hold of something like audiostretch that (a) lets you slow down the audio to a speed that you can manage and (b) lets you scrub back and forth, spontaneously repeat short passages, etc. then, sign up to this deceptively magical site and stick to it: http://dontbreakthechain.com/

How did reading 一九八四 go - CN-CN dictionary, CN-EN dictionary, making notes, winging it? How long ago had you read the original, if at all?

initially i had to do a fair amount of dictionary checking (mainly cn-en, some cn-cn), but once i had the most frequent themes down it went pretty well. i read the paper version, forcing me to put down something physical every time i wanted to look up a word, which led to me doing that a lot less and relying more on context. ultimately, if you understand 80% of the words and persist, you can sort of glue together what's happening.

i've read it like four times which made it an ideal candidate, the last time being 2013 or 2014. that definitely helped because i could join some dots without trying too hard, and in some cases (e.g. that hate week parade) could just persist until i remembered the scene and worked out what was going on. a few times i had to go back to the english version just to check that my understanding was correct.

having said all that, i gave up on a translation of the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy because the prose was so ~florid~ that it just felt like the translator was showing off. most en-cn translations feel overdone tbh, so the next book i read will be untranslated chinese.

whereve u ben going to gigs etc

where have you been going to gigs, etc?

congrats aa on your progress! i just checked back and it's 4 years since you said "doing this formally now." first cn lang novel i read was... i want to say <<chronicle of a blood merchant>> // 许三观卖血记? -- which has just been made into a film set in 1950s korea! -- and then maybe a mo yan book? it's interesting the process of reading and feeling things open up and even just reading and not knowing what you're reading but going thru the pages. i would say to encourage you most: literature produced in the prc 1965-1985 is a pretty easy read -- compared to a contemporary translation from english or anything written in the vernacular before 1949 or so or most rok literature even.

congrats aa on your progress! i just checked back and it's 4 years since you said "doing this formally now."

far out so it is. super weird seeing how green i was in 2011.

it's interesting the process of reading and feeling things open up and even just reading and not knowing what you're reading but going thru the pages.

yes! sometimes when i'm tired i'll just read any old thing and parse "mother... anxious... smoke cigarette... come home... what to do" and skim the other words, although tbh that happens far less than it used to.

i would say to encourage you most: literature produced in the prc 1965-1985 is a pretty easy read -- compared to a contemporary translation from english or anything written in the vernacular before 1949 or so or most rok literature even.

oh brilliant. everything non-translated i've got at home is 2005+, but i can poke around some of the mustier shops around here. the closest i came to buying an old book was an ancient translation of frankenstein i saw in nanjing, because for some reason it was called 科学奇人 (science strange person).

Busting for the Chinese dude across the way to ask me where his boss is (while she's running a meeting) so I can say "她在会议室开会"

― finish with a fast piston pump (Autumn Almanac), Wednesday, 4 May 2011 15:03 (4 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

looool i can't even remember who this guy or his boss were.

incidentally the teacher i had then just happens to be the teacher i have now. back then i was useless but yesterday i was having proper conversations with him. the relationship is completely different and it feels weird.

191space, 飞LiveHouse, TU凸空间, SDlivehouse, Loft345 so far. Some of the people I've met are usually based in Shenzhen or Zhuhai, so might try to mission out overnight there when there's something special on.
's been nice having local friends to hang out w/post-show and go for yum cha; so used to $$ NZ taxi prices that I'd avoiding catching taxis here and cutting to catch the last metro, but things are so cheap (esp w/the DaDi app) that it's not really any hassle to stay out late.

I need to knuckle down on my reading - IDK why, culture shock, isolation or whatever, but I ended up reading a bunch of canonical UK 19thC stuff that I could never bring myself to read back home in OCE (GEliot/Austen/Trollope/Gaskell, + comfort-reading Wodehouse). Bleh. Found a pretty hoary Eng translation of Jia Pingwa's 天狗 at the public library to prep myself for attempting the CN copy I picked up. Wouldn't mind giving Huo Da's 穆斯林的葬礼 a go, either - you read any of his stuff, dylannn? Oh, & posted this to the Classic Epics... thread - http://www.nyrb.com/collections/calligrams/products/mirage ... not released til next year, but keen to read anything Southern.

Thanks for those links, AA! I'm still pretty new to having a smartphone, but if I can get an AudioStretch-alike working, that'd be great - less likely to swap to music if it's on the phone rather than my tiny mp3 player. I guess slowing stuff down doesn't muck up the tones? Trying to make use of Weixin's ability to chat small audio messages so I can practise listening & clarify via text if needed - need to be pushier with my friends, have helped so much w/their IELTS etc prep while feeling awkward about pushing my wavering/childlike tones & vocab on them.

ps: Teamed up w/a local masters student for a translate-a-short-story-into-English competition at my uni and tackled Ye Zhaoyan's 哭泣的小猫; and uh for some reason all the student entries seem to be padding out this thing, vaporware-style? "Those few journals are dominated by Western scholars or businesspeople with their special tastes and a desire to cater to their readers often by rewriting Chinese works. It is a common practice instead of honoring them as pieces of serious literature that should not be altered at will", oh dear @ that dogwhistle.

i'm assuming tiangou is goldblatt? i THINK i've seen his translation of turbulence ?? goldblatt is okay and his translations were important but he got really bogged down in jia from what i saw -- if you want to start with jia pingwa i'd suggest <<gaoxing>> which is more jia in urban folktale accessible mode -- lots of recent jia is more accessible too! everything post 2000 really. and the early short stories, and his short essays are fun too and those collections are all over the place. the 80s stuff is more dense and even when readable i feel that without a good grounding in the classics + major/minor intellectual movements in china post 1911 it's hard to get much out of it. wang yiyan's <<narrating china>> is a good intro to jia's work and i've referred back to it quite a bit when reading various works as it's the only engl language reference.

huo da i think that was assigned reading at some point during university. should probably reading it after spending a lot of time at a hui mosque in the northwest!

http://bruce-humes.com/ <---- interesting but boring notes on ethnic literature in china if you're interested

"Those few journals are dominated by Western scholars or businesspeople with their special tastes and a desire to cater to their readers often by rewriting Chinese works. It is a common practice instead of honoring them as pieces of serious literature that should not be altered at will", oh dear @ that dogwhistle.

which journals are they even referring to?? the few chinese translation journals out there are... mostly academic? and probably tend toward reverent, unfun literal translation rather than... whatever they're describing there. lol @ businesspeople

Chu says the intended reader is the educated public, and the idea is to promote cultural exchange and the positive influence of Chinese culture. :(

do they pay translators? it would be fun to produce fake translations of china dream fables with protagonists that demonstrate strong confucian morals and devotion to the chinese nation.