Help me learn Mandarin Chinese

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!’”)

what textbook are you using now with all this in it?

loooove pasden's writing, and that piece was absolutely bang on (he had loads to do with chinesepod, which still prides itself on covering topics that are useful and properly interesting)

xp npcr3, which is fine for grammar but shithouse for scenarios

this one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gESEBfMZjY

that's not how i pictured ma dawei at all!

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

peking opera masks make an appearance and we learn important differences between western and chinese culture-- foreigners rip open their presents and chinese people open them later!

that lesson in particular is so inspid

"here's a small gift for you"
"oh, it's a calligraphy brush! and it's a famous brand! thank you! here's a small gift for you"
"oh it's a fresh shit in a sock! why thank you!"
"it's just a small token"

x 373638352782

In the meantime the word for alley and prostitute are almost exactly the same

Been brought to three alleys today already ffs

小姐 v 小街

the importance of tones

in a year of crazy bleakness i've come ahead in leaps and bounds with this. i graduated from the aforementioned uni course (and won an achievement award!), i can now read 95% of everyday traditional script, and my listening comprehension is coming together rapidly.

i've stopped going to language exchange meetups altogether because it's always the same questions again and again ("why do you want to learn chinese?", "wow you can write a whole character???") from people who have an upcoming ielts exam and insist on speaking english. instead i've started going to groups that skip the formalities and jump straight to hardcore analysis and translation.

as a learner i think you need to regularly step back and assess whether what you're doing is still relevant — you can make sudden leaps that render your current routine totally useless, but you're so knee-deep that you don't always notice the change.

the most important thing is that i love it as much as i did when i started. you've got to love chinese if you want to become good at it.

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.

you've got to love chinese...

This is my big problem now. I was doing pretty good at self-study for awhile but now I've pretty much lost all motivation to keep going with it. Sounds like you've really excelled though. Jia you and all.

how do you find groups that focus on analysis and translation? do they actually exist on meetup.com?

a lot of them are closed groups that have a minimum standard for entry (e.g. "must be chinese intermediate or higher", "must not repeatedly vocalise their amazement that an english speaker can read chinese"). i've been invited to a couple because i take the study aspect super-seriously or have a skill they need (e.g. converting traditional to simplified for an event run by taiwanese people). some are on meetup but the groups have obscure names that don't always come up in searches; it also helps that i live in a city with at least a dozen separate chinese-english meetups every week.

This is my big problem now. I was doing pretty good at self-study for awhile but now I've pretty much lost all motivation to keep going with it. Sounds like you've really excelled though. Jia you and all.

― viborg, Tuesday, 8 November 2016 21:25 (three days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is why i encourage every prospective chinese learner to think about whether they see it as a short-term hobby or as a means to proficiency.

in order to be proficient (as a second language) you need to love the hell out of it and have a solid reason to keep going, because for many it's a decade-long slog and the plateaus alone can destroy you. it's only through sheer luck that i cared about this long enough to be able to negotiate travel plans and read books.

if you do it as a hobby for its own sake, the most important skill is to not beat yourself up for the limited amount you can achieve. i'd argue that being able to write 10 characters from memory is itself an achievement.