Help me learn Mandarin Chinese

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.

Nah, I think it's Li Rui translating the title story? It's one of those flimsy 80s (early 90s?) paperbacks. Cheers for the recs! Wang Yiyan's my prof in NZ so I'd like to make the effort w/Jia. Yeah, Bruce Humes' site is one of a handful of places I visit that's accessible here; dry but earnest.

Really like this piece by a Chengdu-based friend about her time in Xinjiang: Hanzu in a Headscarf: Travels in Xinjiang. Also, dunno if there's the same panic about Chinese property buyers in CAN/AUS as in NZ, but this is a good overview on our latest depressing yellow peril redux.

xpost: Don't think they pay (or at least they didn't pay us - we did get a "best co-operation" certificate, as we were, uh, the only international collaboration) ... on the other hand, that kind of tilting-at-windmills/CI-style signalling is probably designed to skim some largesse from somewhere? Compared with a friend in Tianjin getting to go to Paper Republic events in Beijing, it's slim pickings for visible-to-老外 lit stuff here.

I need to knuckle down on my reading

finding something interesting is half the battle, e.g. i could never stay interested in ~readers~ because it was like being talked down to, despite how excellent they are for learning. it sounds like you're intrigued by some fairly cool stuff, so you should absolutely persevere with it and just take your time, learning any words that come up more than a handful of times.

I guess slowing stuff down doesn't muck up the tones?

not if you use something like audiostretch or audacity, because they leave the pitch intact. it's just like being spoken to more slowly.

Also, dunno if there's the same panic about Chinese property buyers in CAN/AUS as in NZ, but this is a good overview on our latest depressing yellow peril redux.

ugh. in australia we're battling unprecedented govt bigotry so i feel you here. we haven't had that specific issue, probably because our federal govt likes to withhold its otherwise pervasive racism when dealing with china because it needs chinese money.

(and by 'chinese money' i mean investment and business deals from the people's republic of china, not people with 'chinese-sounding names')

http://www.financialpost.com/m/wp/blog.html?b=business.financialpost.com//personal-finance/mortgages-real-estate/how-skyrocketing-vancouver-home-prices-are-fuelling-anger-towards-foreign-buyers

http://www.24news.ca/the-news/canada-news/138953-why-is-a-richmond-bc-neighbourhood-with-many-expensive-mansions-also-one-of-the-citys-poorest

here in melbourne loads of tiny apartments are being approved/built to cater for chinese expats/留学生 (although afaik nobody official has yet attacked those people on the basis of their name).

etc i was going to link to a poll i made BEST GUANGZHOU METRO STATION and realized i never actually made one

Bleh, fatfingered F5 & lost my detailed breakdown, but I dig 萧岗 for being in the middle of nowhere (field/construction site, 20-25 min walk through caryard back alleys & ratnest creeks); 广州火车站's pretty smooth & 昌岗 more of a hassle to transfer; love emerging from a 45min trip to, IDK, 珠江新城 to find there's been out-of-nowhere cloudburst while travelling and everyone's setting up camp around the entrances while others unfurl umbrellas heading up the escalators; stumbling across the ghostly APM stations after finding a tunnel leading from the library's basement cafe through weird subterranean malls.
Despite being the 6th busiest metro system in the world(!), I've never had a bad experience w/it or felt as stressed as when I travelled on the London/Paris equivs, though obv not as idyllic as the beer-sinking lackadaisicalness of Berlin's. IDK, coming from Auckland where the first proposed metro system could have been built with the cumulative cost of subsequent feasibility studies, + world's worst differential between peak/offpeak traffic times means I'm pretty rose-tinted about metro systems.

etc have you been any of the crazy neighborhoods that are kinda like kowloon walled city (like just these apartment buildings built with like a foot of clearance between them) alleyways that never see sunlight etc

Yeah, my friends call them handshake alleys; there's a bunch up in 白云 not far from where I am (or at least the outskirts of these kind of places - not sure how deep they go as I don't tend to try and squeeze down them - been past when it's started raining + some DIY fumigating's been happening, and there's a million roaches swimming in puddles). I get a fortnight off mid-August to hopefully explore a little more.

no idea where 萧岗 xiaogang even is without looking at a map but yeah some of the stations toward the airport are often emerge in empty field long sidewalk to get somewhere. the panyu stations i rode into the city from, at xiajiao, where when you come up just a parking lot and mototaxi drivers under parasols and nothing around except hotel furniture wholesale warehouses and wide roads with speed bumps and no traffic. when i first got to the city and went from where i was staying in renhe to the city the metro was like you've got the feeling that you've traveled so far if you go from the grassy wilds of the north to tiyu xilu suddenly surrounded by malls and hotels.

so i'm doing this now

marvellous. where are you studying?

best tip i can offer is to focus on tones, right now. it's easier in the long run if you spend even a small amount of time getting to grips with what the tones are, how they sound etc.

attempting to teach myself using a combination of textbook (integrated chinese), ANKI flash card drills, handwriting practice with a 汉子 dictionary, youtube vids of native speakers and a couple iphone apps (ChineseSkill and Standard Mandarin for pronunciation help)

the textbook wisely starts with pinyin pronunciation and goes through all of those before it introduces even a single character -- i was expecting to have trouble with the tones since i've never attempted to learn a tonal language before but so far it's been surprisingly easy to grasp.

writing/recognizing characters hasn't been an issue since my japanese is at a good level, but i've been wary of making false assumptions about meanings/making hasty correlations.

the grammar is amazingly simple and direct. such a relief after the endless nested clauses and grammar particles of japanese.

yeah, chinese grammar is closer to english too so it's fairly predictable for us.

self-teaching is a great way to get started because you can really gauge whether you want to pursue it without forking out for/committing to classes. if you've got to grips with the tones this early, the later stages should be loads easier. apps are so great for self-study now; in fact i believe they've put languages like chinese well within our grasp.

the plan for now is to get my TEFL certificate and find work at a language school in china, and eventually start language classes within the country with the end goal being to get my degree from a chinese university (since it would cost a fraction of what it would here in the US)

do u already have a degree?

no, had to drop out for money reasons, but i know people who've done what i'm planning without a degree

just wondering. don't get the wrong idea. i highly encourage it. just you know, things are tighter with visas now and as subwoofer that's spent time in a chinese jail just wanna say be careful that you work legally and the school can make that happen. have fun. get over there as soon as you can.

i am currently trying to learn japanese and def miss straight fwd grammar and 1 writing system. and i deeply miss just the warmth and relative openness of chinese people. learning japanese here, very few streetside chats to practice unlike china. immersion in chinese, going to china is rewarding in so many ways.

someone that's-- not subwoofer

thanks

the place that does the course for the certificate has a lot of contacts in different cities for language schools and the interviews are done via skype (i believe). i'm thinking either kunming or guangzhou since they're big enough that there'd be plenty of job opps but not so big (or well known by westerners) as to have a lot of competition job-wise

i definitely don't regret studying japanese. i'm still nowhere near native-level so i'm trying to keep it up, but it's hard to stay motivated.

are you in japan now?

preferably make sure it's somewhere that can promise a z or x visa rather than m business or f visit visa-- but if not, honestly, whatever. there's no rules about how visas operate that extends across china. esp guangzhou and kunming, if you can get everything hooked up, you can skate with sketchy status. it's when you get off the beaten track that you need to have everything 100% locked down.
gz over kunming -- "but not so big (or well known by westerners)": they're both full of westerners and non-westerners, shanghai and beijing might be the top expat destinations but gz and kunming... a different type of expat but esp gz is probably the most multicultural city in china (excluding hk). it's huge but comfortable, good transit, good food, good weather, good weed, mayyyybe the most liberal big city in mainland china, geographically/culturally close to hk. i last went to kunming in 2006 and i hear it's extremely different now.
yeah i\m in tokyo now! would rather be in guangzhou.

i'm sorry-- this is mostly unsolicited advice.

i'd rather be just about anywhere than the us right now but 我很想去广州

i rather enjoy yr unsolicited advice!

ilx user etc spent a lot of time in gz. i lived there a yearish. known as being more boring than shanghai/beijing but fuck those cities unless you work for citibank on a fat expat package imho. gz is fun. lots of chill spaces. meet people from all over the world. good student population / hustling class nonwestern population. cheap enough esp if you live outside of the central districts. cleanish air. green. good music / art scene. a city of migrants and a native population that was always outward looking, far away from the influence of the central government usually. cheap flights to southeast asia (good reason to get multi entry visa). if you end up hating the program or whatever you're with, easy to make the jump to alternate employment. it has downsides but prob the best city to live in if you're in the prc. but supposedly kunming is on fire and a really fun town too.

yeah actually access to se asia is why i'm interested in those two in partic. -- really wanna visit yangon, chiang mai, vientiane etc

just another piece of unsolicited advice: clouds, you've already studied japanese so you're probably used to the learning curve, but give chinese a looooot of time. i'm in taiwan now and have been having half-hour conversations with complete strangers, but that's taken five years of study and practise, and hundreds of failed and demoralising attempts at simple communication. if you get to the six month mark and you feel castrated verbally, it's normal and not in any way a negative indication of your progress. also, beware of accents and dialects: you can have a decent grip and turn up somewhere (esp. nanjing in my experience) where people's speech deviates just enough from putonghua that everything is twice as difficult as it should be.

dylannn how come you're in tokyo now? forgive me if you've already discussed this and i've not kept up.

thanks aa

yeah as with japanese i don't have any arbitrary goals or foolish time constraints so i am cool with learning chinese for the rest of my life

i feel like the chinese language and culture are so deep you could just keep learning new things forever and that's pretty exciting -- maybe 10 years from now i'll be diving into 吴语 ^^

yeah it's a bottomless pit of exploration. even if you feel you've exhausted a particular aspect, you can move onto chengyu, trad characters, dialects, new cities/regions, classical writing/calligraphy etc etc etc

hey aa why are you in taiwan? longterm?
my girlfriend and i moved to tokyo in october. she had a job offer. i tagged along. i'm struggling to learn japanese and it's going extremely slowly.

the original plan was to move to guangzhou this year but... combination of not a lot of job opportunities and the only opportunities kinda sketchy with the visa. it was cool to go solo back in the day but bringing along my girlfriend who's never been to china to live there for a few years, i couldn't do it. i took her with me on my last job hunting trip and she was okay with hong kong but i couldn't picture her in guangzhou.

clouds yo if u want to run anything by me or ask anything u can always email me

will do dude, thanks

hey aa why are you in taiwan? longterm?

holiday, at least technically. we're both out of a job (she by redundancy + payout, me by quitting a crazy job that was destroying me) so we came here pretty much on a whim.

it's my third time here, but this time i've felt my chinese jump from absolute kak to reasonably confident (i was here in november and just totally hopeless). heaps of spontaneous conversations with locals all across the country.

long term would be brilliant but the work would have to be spot on. plenty of opportunities at home for now, but i'm strictly taking short contracts so i'm ready to jump if/when something comes up.

my girlfriend and i moved to tokyo in october. she had a job offer. i tagged along. i'm struggling to learn japanese and it's going extremely slowly.

it's brilliant that you can use the opportunity to attack another language (even if it's glacial atm), and i totally get not wanting to drag someone to a chinese city long-term. if you're not emotionally invested it can be exhausting (and i've only ever travelled/studied there in shot bursts).

good to hear your hard work with chinese has paid off. it's so much different exploring a country when you speak the language.

trying to learn japanese i've started to question all the advice i've ever given about learning mandarin. i take a few steps, manage to cram some vocabulary into my head and it flows out again. i decide i can read hiragana and katakana and i'm deciphering everything and then a short time later, i realize i've forgotten half of what i learned. i think i got lucky, learning chinese at the time and place i did.

maybe it's learning a language at 30 while i learned chinese in my early 20s. part of it is what japan is like, compared to china. life in china involves a lot of informal chitchat, go to buy a pack of cigarettes and you learn the history of the dude selling them, buy some barbecue and you're involved in a chat with the table across the way. it's a good push, you get good at answering the same set of questions and figuring out how to ask your own.

right yeah, i mean, she was up for it and was going to study in guangzhou but it was hard to get everything lined up perfectly. it's still a possibility, longterm, i guess, and she has managed to teach herself chinese to relative fluency (in the time that i've worked up to being able to read street signs in japanese and answer "where are you from?"). if i really want a fix of china, it's a cheap flight.

life in china involves a lot of informal chitchat, go to buy a pack of cigarettes and you learn the history of the dude selling them, buy some barbecue and you're involved in a chat with the table across the way. it's a good push, you get good at answering the same set of questions and figuring out how to ask your own.

is that not the case in japan? i've not been so i don't know how things work there.

you mentioned age but you're clearly predisposed to this sort of language learning, so honestly it's probably something else. i only started at 35 so i can't compare directly, but i know i had to spend an insane amount of time with flashcards in those early years, mainly because i didn't have the context to bed that stuff down. these days (with chinese) i'll see a word once/twice and remember it for months because i've understood the context. is it perhaps that you still need to build up that context in japanese before you can grip/retain new information?

i think it's mostly just living in city with 40 million people shoved into a small space. you have to have respect for privacy and personal space if you spend your entire day never more than a few feet from and often even closer to other people. there's something else, though. maybe a professional japan cultural expert can step in and speak on it. it's a big cold city but it feels colder than most big cities i've lived in or visited.

but. i've turned things around. i've started making progress the last few weeks as, 1) i've started taking regular classes. heavy motivation to not suck in class and try to keep up with the 90% chinese students in class who are starting out at a higher level than me. competitiveness has driven me to dedicate time and effort to mastering japanese. and, 2) i started going to a bjj gym where everyone speaks japanese (or portugese) and i have somebody to talk to now.

oh brilliant.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/search-soul-mainland/

i'm three days off my last exam before graduation and the material is the most boring garbage i have ever seen in my life. it's 100% about bonsai trees and folk music and taiji sword and folk dancing. there's a whole section which is just some people talking about some other people who are watching a load of old retirees who meet under an expressway overpass and sing opera songs, badly, because they're old and they don't care. that went on for two weeks and we're being examined on it. fuck, the most recent thing i needed to do in chinese was call a bank and ask why an atm ate my money. there is not a single thing here that i will ever need to use. i'm at risk of getting a crap grade because i cannot stay focused without wanting to hack myself to death with a biro.

and every character likes everything. at no point does one person say "do you like doing the yangge dance?" and the other says "no i really hate it it's really boring". they always say "yes! i love it! i do it all the time!" there's no light and shade. every person in every dialogue really really loves every ancient folk dance, every ancient folk music, every ancient martial arts everything.

this is exactly like if an english textbook had two blokes standing around watching other people who are watching other people who are watching other people who are watching other people who are watching some morris dancing, and one says "do you like morris dancing?" and the other says "yes! why i love morris dancing! it's the most famous ancient english-colonial activity! everyone loves morris dancing! it's very good for the health of septuagenarians" and then they wank each other to sleep.

A few years ago, a few other translators and I were talking with employees of a Chinese publishing house who said that they had some books that they wanted to translate into English — things that they said would show foreigners the real China. There was a brief and intense period of excitement, until the publishers said that these were coffee-table books about Peking Opera masks and different varieties of tea. Ever since then, I’ve used “Peking Opera masks” as mental shorthand for the Chinese habit of attempting to interest the world in aspects of itself that most Chinese people don’t give two-tenths of a rat’s ass about. (This same thing affects Chinese-language instruction, but I’ll save that rant for another post.) Even just a couple of years ago, almost all officially backed Chinese cultural offerings were of this sort — books about tea and opera masks, yes, or Foreign Languages Press translations by non-native English speakers, or poorly subtitled documentaries about the Potato Festival in some godforsaken corner of the Shandong peninsula. (“Since late Ming dynasty, the town of Pirang is acclaimed as ‘hometown of potato!’”)