Help me learn Mandarin Chinese

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.

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.

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