Help me learn Mandarin Chinese

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 !!!!!!!!