Help me learn Mandarin Chinese

gwun kai. piss off.

chu ni de. feck you.

So I am doing this formally. Week three and we are already asking one another what our mobile numbers are ffs. Blitzing the characters but fuck a pinyin.

Oh and when Lætitia out of the Stereolab does her 'ba-ba-ba-ba' thing she is essentially saying 'eight-'eight-'eight-'eight'.

yah but what tone is she using? she could also be saying dad, pluck, shit...

yah i was being silly

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"

:D more please!

If she is eating DUMPLINGS! I can say "她喝饺子"

If she has been arrested I can say "她在警察局"

one of my few, few, few real talents or whatever is being near native-level functional in written chinese and spoken mandarin, able to struggle thru a conversation in cantonese. whenever i reveal this, it's met with shock and surprise and "why don't you... get a real job, then?" it's weird since it's like the language that biz students and the guy on desperate housewives want to learn and it's going to be the international language of business (well not really but) and for all the people that profess to be learning mandarin, very few get beyond a very rudimentary level.

i encourage people to learn it, though. i just wish it wasn't mostly dicky commerce students. i'd love to hear people tell me they were learning chinese so they could read can xue or something. i guess i'm sort of jealous of japanese or french or whatever.... nobody really learns mandarin for romantic or whimsical or whatever reasons, do they?

happy may 4th.

dude's going to wonder why his boss is drinking DUMPLINGS!.

oh god now there's a lolgag on the word "dump1ings", brilliant

o fuc i confused 喝 and 吃 again

but 饺子汤 is 喝able and is my favorite part of the meal: the starchy floating meat fat bedazzled soup produced by boiling jiaozi. so let's say she was enjoying a bowl of that.

您好請小籠包。

謝謝謝謝

Re your long post: some people in my class are learning it so they can talk to their in-laws, which is nice. "Career prospects" is my ~excuse~ but really I'm doing it for a load of reasons, only one of them job-related.

ni de pengyou, wo yao yi bing pijiu

i mean WO de pengyou

one time I was on the Chinatown bus and I called my friend T1ff4ny Ch3ng and told her really excitedly and loudly "WO ZAI GONGGONGQICHE!!!" in, like, perfect tonage and everying. She was like "whoa, that was really good pronunciation, hen hao!" and I looked around to see if anyone was like "whoa, crazy white boy speakin' our tongue!" but nobody noticed or cared :(

xp oh and it's four certificates over four years and I think most will pull out after one year. Learning options for Mandarin (here, at least) are unacceptably limited.

This is my favorite thread and I have NO idea what you're all saying. So great,

aww stevie d ;_; xp

sorry stevie, I've stopped batting an eye at white dudes speaking 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.

i'm now hitting the hsk5 vocabulary and working on the traditional forms as well. this is because i'm tired of flicking through a dictionary every time i want to read something with any complexity. it's also because characters are what got me interested in chinese in the first place.

daily listening is paying off, too. there's still plenty of gaps but i have far less trouble understanding speech, and recently i've noticed how much i'm processing subconsciously, to the point where sometimes i can't remember which language something was said in. chinesepod is making a huge difference here, i think because i can pick the right level for where my head is (elementary for when i'm tired or distracted, upper intermediate for when i'm in the zone).

大山 is here for the comedy festival and doing chinese-only gigs, so i'm going. not sure whether i'll cope but nothing ventured nothing etc etc.

because my life went to shit in 2016 i don't know when i'll get to go back to china or in what capacity. which sucks. i'm still aiming to spend a lot more time there but fuck knows how.

on a separate note, demand for chinese tuition is going backwards in australia: tertiary graduations are low and declining by the year, and non-华人 students are dropping out of high school chinese because they can't compete. in general the whole country is coasting on right-wing entitlement and ideological posturing, and one day we'll realise china's super-important and we never bothered to skill up properly (either just before or just after we become literally mad max). i do not understand this.

An Adam Ant classic comes to mind when you describe situations like that:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVWWtqa9-7M

I was wondering about 大山. I am languishing around HSK2 but was thinking I should go for the experience of the thing.

ned otm

I was wondering about 大山. I am languishing around HSK2 but was thinking I should go for the experience of the thing.

it'd be cool if you're resilient enough to not be demoralised. i don't expect to get much out of it apart from just trying tbh, but if i pick up the gist of a handful of anecdotes i'll be happy.

here's a clip from the same show (大山侃大山) in beijing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9KLjy47eu0

daily listening is paying off, too. there's still plenty of gaps but i have far less trouble understanding speech, and recently i've noticed how much i'm processing subconsciously, to the point where sometimes i can't remember which language something was said in. chinesepod is making a huge difference here, i think because i can pick the right level for where my head is (elementary for when i'm tired or distracted, upper intermediate for when i'm in the zone).

yesterday i spent 3+ hours speaking only chinese with a load of people with a load of accents and understood nearly everything. fucking years, that took me. fucking years.

this is the sort of language where as an english speaker you go "i think it would be fun to speak mandarin" and the best part of a decade later you eventually can.

my grammar sucks though, but eh.

hell yeah. you stuck with it unlike 99.9% of people that say they're learning chinese. a decade or so into it, i would still hesitate to say i speak fluently and i still have the vocabulary of a precocious child when speaking about most topics.

yeah, there's no way i'll ever hit native fluency. that's madness. i can read a lot of stuff though.

fuck this shitty language

I manage and train English teachers, and every time I had actual Mandarin classes I was very unimpressed by how fond of severely-outdated teaching methods the teachers were, and would quit soon after. So now I can speak pretty well (especially about food!) due to living with my wife's family for three or four years, but my reading is still stuck on the set of 300 or so characters I learned using Anki, and my writing is non-existent. I know very few people who managed to get anywhere near fluency.

i'm of the belief that the cruelest and "outdated" methods are appropriate for learning to read and write chinese: writing by hand, copying out texts, laboring over novels with a real dictionary.

not necessarily rote learning though but i think
writing by hand: really grinds things into your memory
copying out texts: means you build vocabulary + study useful common written language and if a good novel then useful spoken language, and it gives you something to think about while writing things out
real dictionary: looking things up by stroke order and radical helps you understand how characters are built

Yeah, I kind of agree with you as far as reading and writing are concerned but they didn't do much of that either - more explaining Chinese grammar in English, going through exercises in an awful textbook (one apparently modeled on the dreaded New Concept English which is still a mainstay of Chinese schools) - I guess they thought we could practice writing / reading at home, and a couple of the teachers were transparently using it as an opportunity to do some speaking practice in English.

I just remembered my first teacher who was fantastic actually, so I shouldn't be quite so fundamentalist about it maybe.

i see what you mean. i was picturing something more austere. i had my share of bad textbooks, horrible exercises and materials on beijing opera masks.

Hi, if you want to learn the Chinese language then you should start with some basic words like greeting and all. You have to follow steps to learn this language. If you know English well then you can easily understand this language. You have to start seeing Chinese movies with subtitles which helps you a lot to learn this language. Listening is the best practice. After that, you can continue with speaking and writing.
I am a tutor of English & French language. I always try to learn different languages, because I like to learn languages. I am also learning Chinese from https://nativemonks.com/mandarin-classes, which helping me a lot. The tutors are also really good. You can also refer this website to for your learning process.

THANK YOU HELEN12 FOR YOUR EXTREMELY HELPFUL NOT-SPAM POST

谢谢

hhh is the new hahaha

i’m in taiwan again and i’m FINALLY breaking through the shitty listening comprehension wall. it’s only taken eight years.

anyone who’s considering learning this language needs to factor in several years of trauma and heartbreak. worth it though. i’m not the same person but in a good way.

i've never had that problem, maybe the opposite though, was always able to follow a conversation even before i could contribute to it, and that feeling persists to now where in a conversation i've got things in my head that i'd love to say but usually err on the side of saying something i can confidently express, leaving my brilliant thoughts unspoken.

agree with the overall message, though. i know it's the thing now to say "no all languages are equally difficult and foreigners struggle to learn chinese because they start so late and learn in inefficient ways" but no, i think there is something to mandarin being tough for a native speaker of english to master (although yes, teacher mandarin as a second language is not exactly treated seriously or done in the best way, and yes, most people are starting it first year of university at the earliest, leaving aside those lucky few people that get a high school class).

No i think there's definitely something especially difficult about trying to master a tonal language if you're an adult native speaker of an atonal language. I learn most of my Chinese from taxi drivers now, fortunately the conversation usually seems to follow the same pattern. They do come up with some interesting questions about the US economy etc sometimes that are challenging.

i've never had that problem, maybe the opposite though, was always able to follow a conversation even before i could contribute to it, and that feeling persists to now where in a conversation i've got things in my head that i'd love to say but usually err on the side of saying something i can confidently express, leaving my brilliant thoughts unspoken.

i still can’t express full and rich concepts obviously, but it has been weird to be able to say most things i need to say only to have nfi what the other person says in reply. that seems to have changed now but it was horribly frustrating.

the other thing i noticed is that people are now speaking chinese to me nearly 100% of the time. not sure whether it’s my speech or my confidence improving. i’m now thinking completely in chinese a lot of the time, so maybe that’s helping things along too.

this week i came across a couple of foreigners whose speech was definitely worse than mine (not being a wanker, i could just hear the errors in their pronunciation and tones) who said most people in taipei were replying in english. that was definitely happening to me even last year but not this year.

i’m in taiwan again and i’m FINALLY breaking through the shitty listening comprehension wall.

well that didn’t last long. it’s not even two weeks since i left and it’s gone to shit again. what the fuck is going on.

is part of it taiwanese phrases or sentences in mandarin? i noticed that with taiwanese friends before, speaking mandarin, then i have to ask what a word/phrase is, and find out it's strictly taiwanese but still used when speaking mandarin (something missing from standard mandarin or slangy, whatever)?

also and i'm sure i've made this point on this thread before because i try to make it all the time. "standard mandarin" is basically like bbc english or received pronunciation, learned by almost everyone but not actually spoken by many, even fewer as their mother tongue or what they'd speak to their kids or parents. so, you're learning to speak and understand a language that's used by newsreaders and language instruction materials but few other people. everyone understands it but god help you trying to understand most people in china or taiwan or beyond. and also even that "standard mandarin" (modern written chinese, too) was never really standardized or is still in the process of being standardized where with english you're at the end of a long process of standardization (maybe from a north american perspective mostly where accents and dialects are harder to find).

but keep up the good fight!

i was just in shaanxi for a week and when i landed i was 60/40 on comprehension and by the end of it could pick up the bulk. slowly got the rules of shaanxi mandarin into my head, picked up the unique word usages, etc.

is part of it taiwanese phrases or sentences in mandarin?

nah because i didn’t have many problems in taiwan, it only collapsed after i left.

btw you are otm about “standard mandarin”, it’s so rarely spoken that it’s basically a con to tell students it’s the gold standard (it is as far as the chinese government and language bodies are concerned, not so much in the actual world where people say things). iirc everyone i’ve ever spoken to who speaks standard mandarin has confected it to some degree for my benefit, and even when they understand me they often don’t speak standard in reply.

at the moment someone online (in china) keeps sending me pure standard mandarin messages, but i can hear how hard she’s straining to make it sound standard. i don’t doubt she enunciates well day to day, but she still needs to put in some effort to go the full 普通話。.

unfortunately tough to teach a spoken language with a history of under a hundred years used as the lingua franca for almost 1.6ish billion people none of whom speak it as a native language (and some of those 1.6ish billion people, at least across the straits, disagree to varying extents on how exactly to pronounce it).

but it is a con to tell everyone it's the gold standard. i think there are lots of sociological issues related to class, identity, cultural hegemony and dominance with the way "chinese" is taught and some of that comes from the prc/rok directly and some of it from other sources, some of it from westerners engaged with china, etc. but i can't draw that together into something worthy of being posted to ilxor.com. i think part of that is expressed in the types of people chinese language programs even at elite institutions (a limited north american perspective here) hope to turn out, like, they don't necessarily aim to or expect to produce serious speakers and understanders of the language at a high level, and the people the language you learn is meant to help you talk to and understand are business/political elites/elites of other types. why the hell, the average professor of chinese would say and i'm sure the average confucius institute instructor would say, would you spend any time talking to someone that speaks nonstandard mandarin? maybe taking a taxi in from the airport, but otherwise why would that ever come up?

getting fluent in mandarin, you can figure out what's going on most of the time, and that's a high enough bar and one that most learners don't get over, so it's tough to propose and even harder for me at least to conceive of a program that could somehow prepare you to fly into a major city after learning chinese for years and find yourself barely able to follow the conversation. so, i suppose it would be nice, at least, if someone would tell you!

i was lucky in that i went to china first, picked up the basics without a grammar book, then decided to study chinese, so i had some idea that yeah i can study this for over a decade and not be able to understand most people outside of a big city or over the age of 45.

going to study in nanjing for a year. i've been before, but i really only remember going to librairie avant-garde, that cafe named after the tarkovsky book, and basic tourist stuff. any tips on things to do/places to see?

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 !!!!!!!!