Help me learn Mandarin Chinese

when I was little I had this travel book about China that had some pages of Chinese characters..someone told me that Chinese letters were pictures, so Imade up this whole elaborate story about what it all meant....most of the story revolving around rows of houses because that's what I thought they looked like. Was bummed later to find out that it wasnt quite so simple, lol.

(hence why I love this thread)

omg that's so cute

lol most chinese characters are pretty amenable to having stories made up about them to help you remember their meanings (especially traditional characters)

yeah, that's how I learn them

yeah i mean in china, they're a dime a dozen tryna get that 大山 money.

i mean with fucken 8,000+ of the things you need to have some sort of mnemonic system xp

big mountain?

chinese is rife with spurious folk etymologies. 安, man was i bummed out when i found out 女 was just a phonetic element.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashan

家

this is the chinese word for family/home, you can remember it easily because the top part with the little lid and the little dot is like the chinese radical for buildings or something, and the bottom one with all the lines is the chinese radical for pig, so naturally a house is where you keep your pig, right, yeah!

yeah a lot of chinese characters, one radical is to give the sound & the other one(s) are for the meaning, it's tricky, but once you crack the code it's cool

i've always thought of him as a sort of buffoonish stooge for the party and whatnot, but maybe that's a bit childish on my part.

yeah, it's a beautiful thing. chinese etymology is actually sort of an undeveloped field of inquiry or whatever. what an amazing language.

i get depressed as shit by the pinyin.info gang and their eliminate characters rhetoric.

http://www.chineseetymology.org/CharacterImages/Bronze/B10000/b11100/b11194.gif

yo what you got at your house

a pig

oh cool, me too. you gonna eat it soon?

yeah

neat

I actually kinda lol that mandarin was chosen as the national language of china, it's actually got some pretty major defects, like being very sound poor compared to some of the other dialects

鬻

Anyway, so ages ago, some Warring States period Einstein decides that what the world needs is another 22-stroke character, and so he goes and smacks 粥 into 鬲 and produces 鬻. He writes it down and goes to show it off to all his literatus friends, all, “Yo Scholar Danqiu, you know how you and Master Cen thought that you were pretty cool with that seven-stroke expansion of 畺 the other week? Well, check this out, bi-atch!” And then Scholar Danqiu was like, “Yo, only losers still say ‘bi-atch,’ so why don’t you get your loser ass and your loser new character out of my face?” And so the scholar goes home, tail between his legs, and vows to find a use for this awesome new character that he’s created.

And he finds one! See, today, 粥 and 鬻 are pronounced pretty differently – zhōu and yù respectively — but back in the day, they sounded the same, or more or less the same. (Karlgren reconstructs the pronunciations as *tiuk and *diuk respectively.) Over time, the pronunciations and meanings diverged, and so the meaning of 鬻 evolves from “tasteless glop with the consistency of snot that nobody with functioning tastebuds could ever conceivably enjoy eating” to “to nourish” to “to sell food” to “to sell, particularly as an act of desperation in trying times” to “to sell one’s own child.”

That’s right, there is a single-syllable word in Chinese that means “to sell e.g. one’s own child during e.g. a famine,” and in a delicious little irony, it’s derived from 粥 “gruel” which makes it cognate to 育, “bear/raise children.” It occurs in words like 鬻子 “a trader in children,” 卖妻鬻子 “to sell off one’s wife and son [in a famine],” and, most interestingly to me for personal reasons, 鬻文, or “to write for pay.”

Man, I love Chinese.

it's weird... you know, being able to speak "chinese" better than chinese people is a reasonable goal. since, like you said, mandarin is still the 2nd language of millions (hundred of millions, maybe!) of chinese people (shit, look at how many speaker wu has!!!)

actually, you didn't say that but you know what i mean.

i get depressed as shit by the pinyin.info gang and their eliminate characters rhetoric.

Yeah this is garbage. Pinyin is a stopgap imo. Also good luck getting like two billion people to give up their writing system.

haha that's actually a concern, a lot of chinese kids are being raised with cell phones and THE INTERNET and are forgetting how to write characters

xp they would say: look at vietnam! and then chinese kids won't be wasting time studying useless characters and will have more time for play!

xxp yeah, text has ruined me for handwriting characters. jeez. i whip out my phone all the time in a way i didn't when i had to be writing high level shit by hand (ie academic whatnot)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den

One of the omg things about having an iphone is being able to write characters all the time if you like. I pull out the pinyin kb occasionally (e.g. if I really can't be fkd getting the hwr to recognise some moderately complex/ambiguous character) but mainly it's all strokes.

pleco has a full screen HWR software it's awesome

pleco is my life iirc

i'd recommend trying wenlin if you haven't already, as a general allpurpose piece of software for learning chinese, translating chinese, etc. it just received its first update in a decade and famously looks like you're still using windows 3.1 but it's dope.

in fact yesterday my teacher spotted me running off some stroke order animation on the ipad and was all "WHAT is THAT" xp

mmm, I had a look at the wenlin website a couple of times, saw the price and lost interest. I'm sure it's excellent but I have so many effective tools on the go that I don't need something that extensive atm. Will probably go back to it one day though.

yeah wenlin is gonna be my next big purchase

hmm, the way the $au—$us exchange rate is atm maybe i should just do it

One day when I get my shit together I'll fill this thread with links to every book and resource that I find invaluable.

So we are now doing time and I am fucking shithouse at it.

Geez I know China's regime is oppresive but I didn't think studying it would get you into THAT much trouble.

HAR

Teacher keeps asking me stuff and I keep having to ask him to repeat it fifty times.

"现在几点吗?"
"I DON'T FUCKING KNOW"

Just bought this fucko --> http://mandarinposter.com/

wow!

Heck. I'd put that on the loo wall myself! Great way to do rote learning btw - my old housemate/bff Ange used to have a TCP layers/networking layout poster on the back of the loo door at ours when she was doing CS/multimedia. I think I learned more from it than she did, staring at it every day... cos it became 100% relevant in my job, and now shes a cook in the Navy, so erm.

It is definitely great for that, but my use will be marking off the characters I've learnt with the lol included whiteboard marker. I'm guessing I've picked up half those characters, so tracking my progress on this giant thing will help me get through the rest. btw there's a SECOND one of these coming soon, 3,000 chars in total.

How the heck did the Chinese get anywhere once typewriters/computers came about?

I need someone to explain a chinese typewriter to me. <-- :d

100% in the written exam. 100 fucking %. Going to treat myself.

Booyah! Go you! :)

aww thx <3

I'm trying to learn a little bit of Mandarin too, just for fun since I'm going to China for a couple of weeks in September. I'm not going to try to learn the written characters though - it'll just be spoken with a little bit of pinyin to help with memorization. Has anyone tried Chinesepod.com? I'm doing the free trial and so far the lessons seem pretty good.

this blog post saved my life today

http://robrohan.com/2007/02/03/typing-proper-pinyin-on-mac/

Brilliant, just what I need.

o. nate, I've not spent a great deal of time with ChinesePod but it gets a huge rap from loads of learners.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-07-19/news-corp-share-slump-murdoch/2799888

News Corp total value down 20%/US$9b since all this started. DELICIOUS.

(estimated)

shit, wrong thread

...or is it.

I just LAPSED into Chinese because I couldn't remember the English for something. Didn't realise until after I'd done it. First time ever.

i want to offer something since i lived there, went back two years ago but changed too fast to keep up. good city to live/study in if you're not stuck out in the suburbs. monohouse is cool (might be closed). have the duck blood soup at liu yi wan, near daxinggong station and nanjing library (there's a branch of the more famous yadebao nearby) or xujianping for duck blood + tangbao.

cool, thanks! i'll be at 南大, gulou campus. looks like monohouse is still open, so i'll definitely check it out.

Are you guys familiar with 怎么老是你?

"how old are you" or is it an actual thing called 怎么老是你

That’s a word for word translation but apparently the real meaning is “why is it always YOU?” or something to that effect.

right like 怎么老是吃馒头 why are you always eating steamed buns 为什么这个APP老是连不上网络 how come this app never connects. i think it's a northern thing?
the chinglish joke comes to mind first

For my sins, I’m getting back into the game after my conversation-level chinese has deteriorated over the past 2-3 years. Does anyone have any recommendations for good beginner/intermediate readers/books? Something to slog through w Pleco or a dictionary? Speaking of which, is there a particular dictionary anyone recommends?

I’ve been an ILX/ILM lurker since the NYLPM days but have very much enjoyed this thread since I started “learning” mandarin in 2016.

i always use new practical chinese reader when i'm trying to teach someone the very basics because it's fairly sound but also because you can find pdfs online easily + videos of the dialogue are on youtube, but i think integrated chinese is still the most frequently recommended by people that know what they're talking about.

for a dictionary, i don't know what you're looking for, but i've always used wenlin which is incredibly useful at an intermediate level, if you want to try working your way through actual texts or throw in a short story, since it has mouseover definition at the bottom, and you can pop up detailed definitions for any character or phrase in the text, and also things, like, take a character and see all characters built from it, and phrases containing the characters, etc. you can also look up by radical or components or stroke number, so it feels as close as you can get to fooling around with a paper dictionary, without having to have a dictionary at hand. and as you get deeper into it, it remains useful, because the key dictionary database is from john defrancis' abc chinese-english dictionary but it also folds in information from shuowen jiezi and points to the correct entry in kangxi zidian, hanyu dazidian, karlgren's grammata serica recensa, etc. but maybe nciku if you want to download something, and that one is good because it'll give you a whole bunch of example sentences for terms or phrases you're searching for. BUT this is dark ages stuff, honestly, and everyone is probably using some cutting edge app.

is there a way to figure out how to transcribe text for somebody who doesn't know any of the characters ?

i'm looking at a singaporean LP from the 1970s and i'd just like to be able to have the title and track names (have already figured out the artist) so i can enter it into discogs.

i just don't know where to start !

OCR phone app (usually Pleco) + google translate to get the pinyin = the tedious way I've done things like this

thanks !

really having a hard time with this cover art. if anybody wants to take a stab at the curved lettering above the guy's head, i'd really appreciate it.

https://i.imgur.com/ZvSkHQv.jpg

it's actually kind of a cool pop / beat record with some good fuzz !

i'll even send you a vinyl rip of the record if you help me out :)

all i know is it's this guy:

https://www.discogs.com/artist/3206423-%E8%AD%9A%E9%A0%86%E6%88%90

fuzz guitar*

it says 风雪情未了

i mean 風雪情未了 if you want to be precise (traditional 风）

thank you !!!!!!!!