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.

haha that's actually a concern, a lot of chinese kids are being raised with cell phones and THE INTERNET and are forgetting how to write characters

xp they would say: look at vietnam! and then chinese kids won't be wasting time studying useless characters and will have more time for play!

xxp yeah, text has ruined me for handwriting characters. jeez. i whip out my phone all the time in a way i didn't when i had to be writing high level shit by hand (ie academic whatnot)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den

One of the omg things about having an iphone is being able to write characters all the time if you like. I pull out the pinyin kb occasionally (e.g. if I really can't be fkd getting the hwr to recognise some moderately complex/ambiguous character) but mainly it's all strokes.

pleco has a full screen HWR software it's awesome

pleco is my life iirc

i'd recommend trying wenlin if you haven't already, as a general allpurpose piece of software for learning chinese, translating chinese, etc. it just received its first update in a decade and famously looks like you're still using windows 3.1 but it's dope.

in fact yesterday my teacher spotted me running off some stroke order animation on the ipad and was all "WHAT is THAT" xp

mmm, I had a look at the wenlin website a couple of times, saw the price and lost interest. I'm sure it's excellent but I have so many effective tools on the go that I don't need something that extensive atm. Will probably go back to it one day though.

yeah wenlin is gonna be my next big purchase

hmm, the way the $au—$us exchange rate is atm maybe i should just do it

One day when I get my shit together I'll fill this thread with links to every book and resource that I find invaluable.

So we are now doing time and I am fucking shithouse at it.

Geez I know China's regime is oppresive but I didn't think studying it would get you into THAT much trouble.

HAR

Teacher keeps asking me stuff and I keep having to ask him to repeat it fifty times.

"现在几点吗?"
"I DON'T FUCKING KNOW"

Just bought this fucko --> http://mandarinposter.com/

wow!

Heck. I'd put that on the loo wall myself! Great way to do rote learning btw - my old housemate/bff Ange used to have a TCP layers/networking layout poster on the back of the loo door at ours when she was doing CS/multimedia. I think I learned more from it than she did, staring at it every day... cos it became 100% relevant in my job, and now shes a cook in the Navy, so erm.

It is definitely great for that, but my use will be marking off the characters I've learnt with the lol included whiteboard marker. I'm guessing I've picked up half those characters, so tracking my progress on this giant thing will help me get through the rest. btw there's a SECOND one of these coming soon, 3,000 chars in total.

How the heck did the Chinese get anywhere once typewriters/computers came about?

I need someone to explain a chinese typewriter to me. <-- :d

100% in the written exam. 100 fucking %. Going to treat myself.

Booyah! Go you! :)

aww thx <3

I'm trying to learn a little bit of Mandarin too, just for fun since I'm going to China for a couple of weeks in September. I'm not going to try to learn the written characters though - it'll just be spoken with a little bit of pinyin to help with memorization. Has anyone tried Chinesepod.com? I'm doing the free trial and so far the lessons seem pretty good.

this blog post saved my life today

http://robrohan.com/2007/02/03/typing-proper-pinyin-on-mac/

Brilliant, just what I need.

o. nate, I've not spent a great deal of time with ChinesePod but it gets a huge rap from loads of learners.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-07-19/news-corp-share-slump-murdoch/2799888

News Corp total value down 20%/US$9b since all this started. DELICIOUS.

(estimated)

shit, wrong thread

...or is it.

I just LAPSED into Chinese because I couldn't remember the English for something. Didn't realise until after I'd done it. First time ever.

NEXT:

1. learn some other sinitic language, start telling everyone how 吴语 has as many native speakers as german, decry the chinese govt 汉办 confucian institutes' destruction of minority languges and commitment to simplified characters which cut us off from chinese history and the greater sinosphere
2. get really into some weird obscure shit like 1950s land reform-era socialist realism sci-fi or bawdy errenzhuan from some specific neighborhood of a specific city in liaoning
3. carry a copy of 西夏旅馆 or 荒人手记 on the bus, meet literate taiwanese girls
4. smoke a blunt of tuna kush with david der-wei wang

I'm gonna have to start calling you Mal, Adam!

idgi

Mal from Firefly, you kno. They lapse into Chinese swearing and such.

nooo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYTM5H2IDSg

omg that's fantastic, I had no idea

Sir, you must watch all of Firefly forthwith! Its only one season. I can lend you my dvd if you like. Its bloody awesome.

Thx for offer but I can get my hands on it pretty easily. Quite fascinated now, ha.

Yeah its not a pivotal thing in the show but it lends a great flavour to it. And Joss Whedon's stuff is great, so.

They have a course in Chinese in our ELEMENTARY school. I mean ffs I had a hard time learning french. Granted, it's for the gifted kids.

http://carlgene.com/blog/2011/07/110-diseases-disabilities-and-disorders-in-english-and-chinese/

thank you forvo.com for allowing me to enjoy dyao's username:
http://www.forvo.com/word/%E6%88%91%E7%88%B1%E4%BD%A0/#zh
(things everyone who actually posts on this thread already knew)

Adam's link reminds me that I recently spent some time googling the Chinese for smallpox on account of the image linked and partially explained herein:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1678

now feeling creepy for accidentally using dayo's old username and calling Schlafsack his real name when neither of you know who I am, sorry both

forvo is pretty handy though in my experience of learning languages which are not Chinese

the school I went to now makes the kids learn Mandarin, was kind of envious when I read this in the alumni newsletter, but also felt a frisson of shame and panic that I would not have been smart enough to learn something so radically different as Chinese, and now other kids are

(but the thought of doing a tonal language in school with all the mean kids listening is pretty horrifying to those of us who can't even sing or manage a convincing French accent)

and calling Schlafsack his real name when neither of you know who I am, sorry both

it's cool (i am he)

imo Chinese is on the whole more useful than (a) languages like French and German as the native speakers can usually speak English anyway and (b) crap like Latin that my school stopped teaching the year before I started. LATIN.

usually frequently

Why do all the rooms have to end in 室 OR 房 OR 厅? Jesus.

庐墓[廬-] lúmù* 〈trad.〉 v.o. ①mourn for one's deceased parent by dwelling in a hut by the grave

O___O

宠擅专房[寵-專-] chǒngshànzhuānfáng f.e. be unusually favored by a husband (said of a concubine)
蹿房越脊[躥---] cuānfángyuèjǐ f.e. operate as a second-story thief
房中术[--術] fángzhōngshù n. the art of lovemaking
跳房子 tiào fángzi v.o./n. hopscotch
圆房[圓-] ¹yuánfáng v.o. solemnize/consummate a marriage (of a son with a girl raised in his family)
毡房[氈-] zhānfáng p.w. yurt; ger M: zuò
子房 zǐfáng n. 〈bio.〉 ovary

蹿房越脊[躥---] cuānfángyuèjǐ f.e. operate as a second-story thief

this is just

冰室 ³bīngshì n. ice-cream parlor M:¹jiān
病室 ¹bìngshì n. ward (of a hospital); sick room M:¹jiān

蚕室[蠶-] ²cánshì n. ①silkworm nursery ②〈trad.〉 prison where the punishment of castration was inflicted
热入血室[熱---] rèrùxuèshì f.e. 〈Ch. med.〉 invasion of the blood chamber by heat
浊气盈室[濁氣--] zhuóqìyíngshì f.e. Foul smell fills the room.

love it

I don't think those are that weird

nah it's mostly just languages randomly having words which are expressed in a more roundabout fashion elsewhere? I mean:

Tailgating (1) manoeuvering one's vehicle unreasonably close to the one in front of oneself; (2) attending, or organizing, an informal feast outside the site of a sporting or cultural event.

ok strikeout "randomly" there

Year 1 complete. They reckon I got a load of HDs and now I am officially owed a certificate. Highly useful if ever I want to book a holiday or talk about students.

what kind of certificate? is it an hsk-focused type of deal or a university thing?

http://rmit.edu.au/browse;ID=C1064

The course is definitely geared in the direction of 新HSK – the Cert I content bears a conspicuous resemblance to the 新HSK 1 & 2 word lists. RMIT is Melbourne's only HSK testing centre (last I checked) and the same teaching staff run both, so the correlation is deliberate.

Bloke at the gym had 'upright' tattooed on his arm, upside down.

I'm teaching myself at the moment. Got a little BBC Active guide for Chrimbo. It's bloody tough, but so far I can say 'hello', 'how are you?, 'i'm well, thanks', 'i'm not so good', 'I am Charlie', 'I am not Kevin', 'Good Evening', 'Good Morning' and a few other phrases. Even though it's Pinyin, it's still really tricky to know exactly how to pronounce words.

Pronunciation is a killer. Even when you get the hang of the tones, the syllables in particular get nasty for a native English speaker (e.g. 'zh', 'sh', 'c'). It's so far from anything with which we're familiar that it takes some time to retrain the mouth, and even then it's probably not right.

Yeah, like never sure how to pronounce "q" or "x" and often words can be spelled completely different and yet sound almost exactly the same to my ears. It's fun though and I'm enjoying it - even if I only learn a tiny bit, I'll be happy :-)

wish chinese characters appeared on this work computer. one thing i think i'm missing out on is the fact the bbc guide is entirely in pinyin with only token chinese characters.

i don't even know why i decided i wanted to learn. i don't have any burning reason other than i think it might be interesting and challenging.

It's brilliant that you're doing it, and the benefits of Chinese in the 21st century can't be understated. Let us know if you want/need help with stuff; there's a fair range of Mandarin proficiency on ilx.

hey thanks AA. I intend to practice a little bit every day - I'm in no rush to learn quickly. Indeed, I don't think with a language like this it's worth rushing, and even though I've been at it about three weeks, I'm happy just going over the first couple of pages in the book and learning them by rote. Because I'm fluent French and not awful at Spanish and German, I figured it would be good to go right out my comfort zone.

xiexie

bu ke qi

and i've already learnt something! i like how "bu ke qi" translates literally as "don't be polite" but means "you're welcome". I'm sure there must be an analogue in some European languages. I can imagine an old Scottish granny saying something like that after you've thanked her for a boiled sweet or something.

There are loads of analogues! We take them for granted because we're used to them, but they're definitely there. I can't think of them right now (11.30 pm here) but I'll crack open the brain's language centre in the morning.

Actually, no, wait, not analogues, just common English phrases that don't make any sense. I shouldn't sleep and post.

I also like how the translation of "I'm doing so-so" in response to "How are you?" is "Mama-Huhu" which means "Horse Horse Tiger Tiger"

(I would add the accents/inflections but I'm still a bit rusty and I'm at work and don't have time to boot up character map)

Recently I read that horse-horse-tiger-tiger is a thing they teach language students, and isn't really used at all by native speakers. So disappointed.

(along with 'how are you?'; 'have you eaten?' seems to be more common)

I use horse horse tiger tiger! 'have you eaten' is the one that I hear less of

but I mean, you only use ma ma hu hu when you really aren't feeling that great

So do they not say "mamahuhu" or is it just the horse-horse tiger-tiger thing (which is a cuet mnemonic all the same)?

And do they say "have you eaten?" as a form of greeting?

Oh, and one of the most annoying things about Chinese is that everything you think you know is always debunked, and then the debunking is debunked.

<3

Yeah, 'have you eaten/chi le ma/吃了吗' is a greeting of some description, at least in some regions.

China's a big country with many dialects. I guess if you compare it witht he many variations of English, no wonder there's some disagreement. I mean, there's no actual consensus to how many characters are in the language, so...

Yeah, and many of the regions have their own local dialects anyway. Mandarin seems to be universally understood, though (based on hearsay; dayo/dylannnnnn plz jump in), and the written form is just about everywhere because the govt forces it.

Bed.

not so much dialects (which would mean variations on putonghua) but completely, mutually unintelligible versions of chinese!

written chinese is pretty much universally understood (if you're literate)

Out-of-work tutor available:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgN1Bk_mzkw&feature=related

http://resources.allsetlearning.com/chinese/grammar/

~useful~

skritter for ios is basically incredible

oh yeah? what isi it?

srs-based flashcardy system with full stroke recognition etc

http://www.skritter.com/ios <– video explains everything

thanks for pointing me to this thread, dog latin!

class starts on Monday. It's just a USDA class (this one, actually), and we'll only cover 150 words during this first 10-week session but i'm still really excited! and pumped to hopefully be moving into the intermediate courses, this time next year. prepare for lots of stupid questions from me, ILX!

skritter is awesome. i've going through the 101 list, but i've also got it synced up to the textbook i'll be using for my class. i just spent the last hour memorizing the characters for chapter 1, got it down pat! :) and it's awesome that it ties in the pronunciation too.

by the way, rì (time, date, sun, etc) is so fucking hard to pronounce for me.

it's not a phoneme that's used at all in english, I don't think

best advice I can give is to do your best scooby doo impression

yeah, the best i can do sounds like a constipated dog, so i think i'm getting there!

loool @ scooby doo impression. rì/日 is definitely on the tricker end of pronunciations for native English speakers, so don't fret Z S. You'll have an ace time. Also I might be dumb but I can't find the name of the textbook in your link. Which one are you using?

Skritter is indeed awesome. I've been chucking a load of known and new vocab lists into it, currently at 769 written characters learned and 869 written words learned aaaaand it's just started crashing. But still incredible. When it finishes adding all my known vocab lists I should be nudging 1,000 characters (so if the crashing gets worse I will be bloody annoyed).

oh, the link didn't include the name of the text, it was just a link to the class. the book is the new practical chinese reader, which i've read is kind of outdated and not the best, but...that's the assigned text! i'm going to combine it with skrillexskritter and rosetta stone, so hopefully i'll be set. plus my roommate speaks mandarin, so she'll be good to practice with (as long as i don't get too pissed to talk to her due to her occasional passive aggressive roommate notes)

NPCR is probably the most used with native English speakers, so you're well set there. Excellent that your roommate speaks Mandarin btw – I don't have any convenient Mandarin speakers ANYWHERE and it's retarding my growth.

http://sinoglot.com/blog/2012/06/back-up/

found this interesting re mandarin pronunciation made me rethink some
tongue positioning issues pronunciation issues even after 6?? years of speaking the lang

never had a 日 issues as far as i can tell

狗日的 great curseword

http://boxun.com/news/images/2011/08/201108191146yuanqing1.jpg

Wooo! I'm learnding via Skritter. Only problem is it seems to be adding words and vocab a little bit fast for me. I'd only just got used to the first 5-6 characters and now it's added something like 10 more without really revisiting the old ones. Also, some characters look literally identical to me, and yet mean different things. Also, I'm sure 'rén' (meaning man) was written differently to how it was written yesterday... what gives?

人入？

i never tried the flashcard/electroflashcard thing because i found the best way to put chinese characters in my head was the boring way my chinese teachers told me to put chinese characters in my head: writing them over and over again, copying out chinese texts etc

i don't like the idea of learning the spoken language then trying to figure out characters either. just grind thru learning tohose fucking characters while learning the spoken language at at some point things will joint up together. i found out i could learn a lot by watching subtitled chinese tv just tpfilling in my knowledge of characters by being able to match up sound to shape.

if you do this at a certain point u will be able to sing ktv songs and impress everyone EVEN IF you have have no idea what you'er singing

Rot In Hell, Chinese Communist Party Fuck Chinese Communist Party btw

download weixin for your phone too dawg

Okay, cool. Have you tried Skritter yet dylann? It's actually very good (although I'm aware it's no replacement for lessons, or being in the country). It's actually very good at teaching writing, pronunciation, definitions and reading all in one.

i tried it when they first released their iphone app. i have pleco on my android phone.

i communicate in chinese everyday but since needing to write university shit, i rarely have to write it. even when i lived in china, i was typing/texting and memory of a character wasn't important. it's weird: you can type a charaqcter everyda and sort of SEE IT IN YOUR HEAD but fuck if you can write it by hand. so frustrating when it coems time sto wtire ea short note or njot down somebody's name.

Only problem is it seems to be adding words and vocab a little bit fast for me. I'd only just got used to the first 5-6 characters and now it's added something like 10 more without really revisiting the old ones.

I agree, the default setting seems to assume that the user is Rain Man! But luckily it can be adjusted.

You can go into Settings, then the Vocab tab, and switch "Add Frequency" to Manual Only. Then you can add new characters into the stream at your own pace, one at a time, by clicking on the + button at the top of the screen when you're studying.

ah nice one. how you finding it Z S?

Great! And actually I just signed up for 6 months more ($39.99), because I'm certain I'll be using it a lot.

I went to my first Mandarin class on Monday, and I could really feel the difference. Everyone was writing wǒ really slowly and laboriously, and I was busting it out with ease, without even having to think about it! Plus I knew the characters well enough that I noticed errors in my teacher's writing on the whiteboard (although he may just be a really sloppy writer)! /braggin

Can I remember wǒ, given I've been using Skritter for just two days? I'm guessing it means 'mouth' and is drawn a bit like a small square? Probably not...

我口

Another thing about skritter that I didn't realize at first is that you can swipe up on characters to erase them and start over again, which is useful for learning new characters when you just want to write them 20 times in a row.

chinese script doesn't show up on this pc.

oh i was wrong. I shoulda known - wǒ bi shi etc..

你鄙视我？我更鄙视你！

Why are there more than one characters for xin (heart, mind rad.61)? That's been confusing me somewhat

i think there's only one form, isn't there? 心, except for the two forms it appears in when used as a radical, in which case it looks like 忄 or (used in the 慕 in 羡慕 or in the 恭 in 恭喜发财 KUNG HAY FAT CHOY).

lots of similar looking characters to get it mixed up with, though.

必？ 小？ 伈？

卵 is a cool character

soz, lots to respond to

http://sinoglot.com/blog/2012/06/back-up/

found this interesting re mandarin pronunciation made me rethink some
tongue positioning issues pronunciation issues even after 6?? years of speaking the lang

― dylannn, Thursday, 28 June 2012 19:38 (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i never tried the flashcard/electroflashcard thing because i found the best way to put chinese characters in my head was the boring way my chinese teachers told me to put chinese characters in my head: writing them over and over again, copying out chinese texts etc

― dylannn, Thursday, 5 July 2012 19:34 (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i don't like the idea of learning the spoken language then trying to figure out characters either. just grind thru learning tohose fucking characters while learning the spoken language at at some point things will joint up together. i found out i could learn a lot by watching subtitled chinese tv just tpfilling in my knowledge of characters by being able to match up sound to shape.

― dylannn, Thursday, 5 July 2012 19:36 (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

btw I applied for HSK level 2 and now I'm shitting my pants.

that's cool. did we talk about the hsk on this thread before? have we talked about hanban before?

there's no composition thing for hsk level 2 is there? composition is the killer.

re skritter/writing characters: i do 60-70% of my daily communication in chinese and sometimes i doubt i could reproduce close to half of it with a pen and paper. it's all typed, spoken.... there was a point where i was writing thousands of characters off the dome (with hardcore studying beforehand). but now if i have to write something by hand, it usually comes back to me very very slowly and only because i have the building blocks stuck in my head. but a lot of it has evaporated. let this be a warning to you.

First lesson lunchtime today! Woop!

How was it?

dylannn: Yeah, we've talked about the HSK before. I don't really know what's in it yet, apart from the word list, which I'm reasonably comfortable with.

Well, it was pretty straightforward. Although the other girl in the class turns out to have a lot more experience than me, but that's not really a bad thing. I have to practice at least 3 hrs a week. Learning this is using parts of my brain I didn't know I had.

It's really great when you discover that you're behind in one aspect of the language but ahead in another.

http://phonemica.net/

possibly not really a great learning tool or anything but the recordings on phonemica are fun

i love lianyungang dialect, which is wildly different from non-coastal jiangsu dialects and sounds great.

http://phonemica.net/entry.php?id=13

far out, completely forgot how to write 喜 tonight

drink more 7-up
or get married

have more chinese new years

wikipedia thinks composition only for level VI

Good. I returned to Skritter after three weeks, 2500 item backlog and I'm so out of touch that I actually feel stupid, so composition can gf

learning chinese is like marrying a junkie, i swear

everything is going beautifully and you feel on top of the world, then one day you come home and all your cash has gone and there's shit on the walls

Every time I see the wdyll July thread title I think "baba"

区_区

just hit 1,000 written characters in skritter (93.2% retention) ^_______^

hooray!

i'm wondering about my Mandarin lessons. I've had two so far and my third is this lunchtime. Thing is, they're very useful but also very expensive for me and I find I never get round to doing the homework whereas if I were to subscribe to Skritter, it would be a lot cheaper and I find I have lots of time I can spend just using that, rather than digging out loads of paper and making notes etc.

have you considered dropping the classes, hitting skritter for, say, six months, plugging in pre-packaged lists (e.g. the HSK set) and joining a speaking group?

ime unless there's a very clear goal at the end of classes, there's not a huge incentive to keep it up (mine costs au$1,750/yr but results in accreditations with a reputable university)

it might be an idea. I'd not heard of HSK before. I'm thinking Skritter is more practical for my needs, especially since I doubt I can afford the class + Skritter. Only good thing about the class is I can ask questions if I get stuck. Otherwise, attending a class makes it feel more like school (homework etc), whereas Skritter makes it feel more like an educational game.

If you find a good casual speaking group that meets regularly, you can ask questions there. The one I go to has a good balance of en-native and zh-native speakers, and is always hugely worthwhile.

i think i've discussed it elsewhere on this thread but. i find a lot of chinese classes are taught by people with a real minimal idea of teaching chinese to foreign learners. if you're paying for a class, you better be happy with the teacher and have a clear idea of the goals of the class (ie. based on hsk, whatever).

skritter + chinesepod (best online mandarin learning program/community) + commitment is prob good enough until you have an idea what you really want to do.

i think i've discussed it elsewhere on this thread but. i find a lot of chinese classes are taught by people with a real minimal idea of teaching chinese to foreign learners. if you're paying for a class, you better be happy with the teacher and have a clear idea of the goals of the class (ie. based on hsk, whatever).

Yep. I'm lucky in that all three of my teachers are excellent, and the course coordinator is cluey and genuinely invested.

i have likely mocked chinesepod other places (i'm not sure i have and i don't know why i need to put that disclaimer in as if somebody who closely follows my online postings is going to gotcha me by digging up an instance of me saying chinesepod is shite) and i do have a few minor problems with it but check it out, dl. the beginner lessons are engaging and useful.

aa, you might want to check it out, too, because it does quite well at intermediate material, especially for building your listening and comprehension.

the team that puts it together includes a lot of people (like john pasden) who are experts on language acquisition and know what they're doing.

john pasden overview of chinese learning career

http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2007/05/06/how-i-learned-chinese-part-1

I did have a look at Chinesepod a long time ago, way back before I was any good at listening, so yeah, probably time to give it another go. btw Pasden wrote a new supplement to that article just last week: http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2012/07/31/how-i-learned-chinese-part-3

Last night I got 83%/88% in an HSK 2 practice test, despite not understanding the point of a whole section.

i haven't posted in a while, but the final for my first mandarin course is monday! so far, i excel (relatively) at remembering characters and recognizing and properly pronouncing tones, and i am completely fucking awful at recalling basic vocabulary on the fly.

was just thinking it would be dope if itunes had chinese language podcasts (i.e. recordings of chinese shows rather than just podcasts aimed at chinese language learners)

thinking of doubling on mandarin in add to japanese next semester for my asian studies undergrad is this madness y/n

What level of Japanese are you at? I wouldn't do that unless I were at least fludly conversant in one, but that's just the way I approach language tbh.

i am completely fucking awful at recalling basic vocabulary on the fly.

That's harder than recalling individual characters imo, so don't beat yourself up about that. Best of luck for your exam btw, even though it sounds like you'll absolutely shit it in.

depends on what your goals are, i think. if it's to fulfill a language requirement (2 langs for undergrad asian studies degree mostly right?), it's easy enough to grind thru a 100 level mandarin course. you'll prob come out with a vague basic knowledge of mandarin that will fade quickly and some valuable knowledge of written chinese that might help in approaching japanese texts (you're mainly interested in japan, right? modern japan?). i find students that approach chinese after studying japanese (like, those with some fluency or good intermediate skill at least) have FUCKED UP pronunciation issues (and always want to tell me how oh this kanji means something TOTALLY different in japanese isn't that interesting) (and most aren't interested in fixing their pronunciation issues because they aren't interested in the vast treasure trove of sinophone culture and literature and just want to get back to their comic books goddamnit DESPITE THE FACT THAT it's common knowledge that the japanese were illiterate fishermen until given the gift of the chinese writing system btw).

in the middle of doing a degree in chinese lit, i knew i had to get another asian language credit and chose korean. i did one semester of an intro korean class, a class on korean linguistics, and one or two modern korean lit classes taught in english (by bruce fulton #1 boss of modern korean->english translation but actually kind of a jerkoff).

it seemed interesting to me at the time that korean, japanese, and chinese attract totally different students. even if they were mostly getting a generic asian studies degree. it was a totally different crew focused on each language.

i think the advanced chinesepod podcasts are good because it's legit useful 口语 and presented at normal speed or whatever and they're usually halfway interesting but if you need it, you've got vocab notes to refer to after and a space to pose questions about word usage and whatnot.

chinese telenovelas on tudou or youtube are good for learners, more than podcasts which can be hard to follow without two things that the telenovelas have: visual clues and subtitles. it's cool to be able to use the visual clues to guess at vocab in context, and the subtitles are a good way to learn characters because you're associating the sounds with the words. you're constantly listening superhard to what's being said and simultaneously raking your eyes over the subtitles to figure out what's being said. and thank god for china being a nation of mutual unintelligible dialects because so much chinese tv is subtitled----- so the min speaker in fuzhou can understand a beijing beamed news broadcast the 话 that's not absolutely 普通.

and just wanna say mad respect to yall, aut al and zS, for sticking with this shit. in my experience with mandarin as a foreign language learners, it's fucking hard uphill slogging to learn chinese without an immersive language environment.

haha thanks dylannn. It's certainly tricky, but I've got two classes a week, two speaking groups a week (that I miss frequently but they're always there) and a load of music, web sites etc. around, so there's always stimulus. None of that compares with proper immersion of course.

re your point about Japanese students learning Chinese and arsing the pronunciation: a bloke in my class grew up in Malaysia, learning Cantonese by watching local telly + subtitles, and his 普通 is corrupt even to my ears (e.g. 'sh' comes out as 'ss'). He also rips through dialogue really quickly, so it's always a struggle when I'm paired with him.

I have some 简体-subtitled Chinese TV shows that I'm still too intimidated to watch. I tried again just this week and couldn't keep up. Having said that, though, it's weird how you can be sitting at a table with a load of people speaking naturalistic 普通话, picking up maybe 30% of the words, and then suddenly (after say half an hour) the whole conversation is crystal clear, like the babel fish in your ear has suddenly righted itself.

十四是十四，四十是四十，但是十四不是四十

whoops

四是四，十是十，十四是十四，四十是四十

http://v.ku6.com/show/mn6TsS2nS-Dz6uHmBAeqhw...html?loc=youce_tuijian

xps to dylannnnn i'm pretty interested in east asian languages in general, i just happened to start with japanese. my plan is to do a transfer program after i get my undergrad and work in japan, mb even using as a hub for further studies (it'd be easier to fly to/from china/korean and japan than from the us, right?). my focus might end up being studying the linguistics of the various sinitic/altaic language groups, but it's too soon to tell really

btw I applied for HSK level 2 and now I'm shitting my pants.

― undermikey: bidness (Autumn Almanac), Tuesday, 24 July 2012 19:01 (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

think i fucked this

I practised my arse off for this thing (9 practice exams, passed them all comfortably), get in the room and for a whole block of questions it was like the audio was in lingala or something. maybe I was too nervous, really not sure at this point. if I pass the first half it'll be a miracle. devastated.

I have a gut feeling you'll be fine.

hmm cheers. there's always hope.

http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/10/making-mandarin-mandatory-in-u-s-kindergartens/

1) come on
2) a financially gutted school district grasping at straws
3) if you're just going to look at probable success rates and the utility of the language, spanish wins in this part of the world (southern united states, article mentions growing hispanic population) + a good esl program
4) if it has to be stated again: mandarin is not the future language of international business. give me a break, guys.
5) and most importantly, confucius institutes creep me the fuck out

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/05/us/critics-worry-about-influence-of-chinese-institutes-on-us-campuses.html

i hate confucius, i hate his institutes

http://www.epochtimes.com/i6/608120040071017.gif

sorry, i know this thread is "help me learn mandarin chinese," not "discourage rural georgian kindergarteners from learning mandarin chinese"

Yeah, seems so much more important to learn Spanish.

However, my second 10-week session of Mandarin begins tonight!

I have studied exactly ZERO words/phrases in the interim between sessions, so tonight is likely to be brutal.

ahaha oh no

p sure I failed another exam tonight btw

i am starting to learn vietnamese. 'starting' means i got a pimsleur language lesson and hated it, learned how to say six words, and couldn't hear differences in intonation and forgot them all, and can now count to ten, sometimes. whyyyyyyyy vietnamese?

it's haaard

I practised my arse off for this thing (9 practice exams, passed them all comfortably), get in the room and for a whole block of questions it was like the audio was in lingala or something. maybe I was too nervous, really not sure at this point. if I pass the first half it'll be a miracle. devastated.

― * The "no hands" rule can be compared to socialist tax policies (Autumn Almanac), Saturday, 8 September 2012 11:45 (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

more than six weeks later and no results released, for ANYONE doing ANY exam at that facility on that day. from a given range of reasons that would explain the delay in releasing the results, i choose to go with the one that describes them as fucking spanners.

right now i'm awfully glad i just about killed myself studying for this thing

ugh sorry

np

can someone translate?

http://www.theonion.com/images/18/18499/original/450.jpg

I believe that's a translation of romney's remarks about China from the last debate

"Chinese leaders, I promise you, when I am President, I will make sure that China respects international trade rules. Your country has long manipulated currency to benefit your manufacturing industry, so that it has harmed American manufacturing. This is not fair! My administration will not accept this from China. The first day I enter the White House, I will label China as a currency manipulator. This is a warning."

take THAT china

and yeah, that must be from the last debate

hahah

http://www.theonion.com/articles/romney-delivers-stern-warning-to-china-speaking-di,30053/

but that was taken pretty much word for word from the last debate wasnt it?

*sheds wistful tear for jon huntsman*

more than six weeks later and no results released, for ANYONE doing ANY exam at that facility on that day. from a given range of reasons that would explain the delay in releasing the results, i choose to go with the one that describes them as fucking spanners.

― turn left onto bisexual woman (Autumn Almanac), Tuesday, 23 October 2012 19:13 (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

two months today, still nothing. they're ignoring my emails. someone else who sat exactly the same exam has got his results. utter utter UTTER fucking incompetence. rarely have i been this angry with anyone ever.

clearly i should not have killed myself studying for that fucking piece of shit exam

mannnn. that's fucked. i remember you saying the people running the course were decent, though. no word from them? call them up and cuss them out in the foulest chinese slang you can learn in the next half hour.

I tried them today. no word yet, but they're clearly my best hope given hanban is apparently incapable of scratching its arse

sorry to be all donnie downer, just absolutely ragged

听力 99 阅读 99 总分 198 合格

whether or not i ~trust~ that response is another issue, as I've yet to receive anything official (and tbh thought i had completely flubbed the first half)

I had to reload the software onto my iPhone after a crash and now Skritter is only showing new words. It's forgotten about all the ones I spent months learning before and never shows them. Anyone know what I'm meant to do?

oh god, someone on app.net is about to give me old 'so why are you learning chinese?'

i can feel it building

just say for the broads/future international language of business lol leave it at that

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3402/5702554422_2c98d56bd5.jpg

haha yes, native chinese speakers love it when you say you want to get rich off the language.

btw the above didn't transpire, but app.net seems to be a great way to hook up with chinese speakers. my crap language skills have been taxed to the limit today.

also, new dn

downloaded sogou pinyin but am afraid to install it for FEAR OF CHINESE HACKERS

what if there's a backdoor built into it????????

i solved that "problem" by using google's ime, which was built by leveraging some non-google database resources/jacked wholesale from sogou pinyin

not available for mac unfortch

well there was a leaked 'beta.' but it crashes in mountain lion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnnlkLDqgPI&list=PLC175F3EC9EA4B856&index=2

antonioni in china

...but it was severely denounced by the Chinese authorities as "anti-Chinese" and "anti-communist". The documentary had its first showing in China on 25 November 2004 in Beijing with a film festival hosted by the Beijing Film Academy to honor the works of Michelangelo Antonioni.

i guess i meant that for the rolling china thread

https://www.mi5.gov.uk/careers/use-your-language/check-your-skills.aspx

coming out of the chinese language programs at both universities i attended (esp ubc), the only serious attempts at recruiting us for future employment came from csis canadian security intelligence service

Starting Mandarin this week. Not the oldest person in the class, but everyone else seems to be some sort of Commerce/Law/Politics major, hmmn.

If you mind me asking, AA, which Aussie uni does yr course get accreditation w/?

ace! it's this one: http://rmit.edu.au

what textbook have you used in your courses? would you recommend them for an autodidact?

u looking for reading competency only or speaking/listenign to

both, really

i'm guessing it's probably like japanese in that the written and spoken word are almost like two different disciplines

yes

yeah, totally different disciplines. fortunately you're only learning one 'alphabet' and not three.

we don't use text books. the course is developing its own materials for some reason, so we use those.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCFRoILS1jY

We're using the New Practical Chinese Reader, which seems to be pretty widespread/standard - lots of relevant modules for various language learning/flashcard/etc sites online (Memrise, Anki).

re: characters & stroke order, I guess Skritter & equivalents would need to be smartphone/touchscreen-based things, right? Guess I'll have to make do with the more traditional rote copying on paper.

Starting Mandarin this week. Not the oldest person in the class, but everyone else seems to be some sort of Commerce/Law/Politics major, hmmn.

in my experience it was mostly biz/comm students in my classes. because it was the future international language of business. they rarely persevered. even if they ended up with a minor in chinese, their grasp of mandarin was so woefully incomplete that they would struggle to conduct any business in the language. (but the interest generated by crazy boosterism by ted talk financial "thinkers" about mandarin resulted in lots of cash and jobs for the chinese departments at lots of n. american universities).

new practical is the cream of an uninspiring crop of mandarin textbooks. it doesn't know how to deal with the written language but that's okay because you should be learning it somewhere else.

i don't trust skritter or equivalents (what are the equivalents? pleco? i have pleco on my phone and i use it mainly to look up unfamiliar characters because it has that little writing pad thing that actually recognizes my handwriting unlike previous programs) but i'm old fashioned and i learned with a pen + paper and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours copying things out. back in the day, i just grabbed any chinese text and went ham on it.

endless copying lets you discover your own methods for remembering character writing, your own mental shortcuts, your own little folk etymologies or explanations for characters that let you recall them later. it also drums into you that there are a limited number of building blocks. now, bring it all together and instead of 楼 a single character, you learn the building blocks of the character and come up with your way of remembering it (a little 木 tower and a broad inside 女 checking out some rice 米) and write it a few thousand times and it'll be automatic. and when you get those building blocks down, it gets easier to remember characters that use them in their construction. you got me?

grab a book of mo yan short stories or something, or check out a basic text like the three character classic 三字经 or get a bilingual collection of chinese poetry because those are easy to find, or hell, go down to your local chinese bookstore if you've got one and find one of those little intro character tracing paper flipbooks for kids that will show you the most useful characters and their stroke order.

write write write, buy a chinese-english dictionary and learn to look up characters by radical and stroke number and look up unfamiliar characters (at first, this will be every single one and then every second one). there might be a better way to learn to write chinese but i found this way effective (but slow) and fucking satisfying.

with spoken chinese, i've come to the conclusion that drilling pronunciation is crucial. it almost requires one-on-one training, though. tongue position, man. fucking tongue position. pay attention to that shit. getting the basics of pronunciation down is your first hurdle.

tonal shit is important but! i feel like too much attention is paid to teaching tones to students that can't pronounce words anyways and aren't in a position where tonal mixups will really hurt comprehension.

so, pronunciation. get that tongue in the right place.

most of the chinese kids i know dont even know how to write anymore they just know how do type

well thats an exaggeration. but u know

that is basically how i study japanese, dylannnn

i've seen chinese university students whose writing is a wasted battlefield of slumped logograms leaning against misplaced 单人旁, substituted and wrong characters, sudden pinyin with tone marks. but those fuckers put in a decade of rote learning and mindless character copying to get to even that point, once they abandoned calligraphy for pinyin input. so, i still say, if you want to have any hope of even struggling with written chinese in a world where you simply choose a character off a menu, you better sharpen your pencils, boys.

but... yeah, there are very few paths for a casual chinese student that will end with them needing to write anything by hand.

i ended up taking notes in chinese lectures, having to write exams without the benefit of a dictionary and now i use chinese at work and my writing is unsightly enough that i don't want to spoil it further with wrong/substituted characters.

okay, and a few more arguments for being able to write chinese by hand: i find the rote memorization and semi-mindless copying of characters is a satisfying part of learning the chinese written language. it also aids character recognition. and chinese calligraphy is beautiful and being able to write beautifully will make you cultured and a good person.

but this is relatively far down the road for most chinese learners and they should probably focus on just being able to speak it and read characters and have fun learning and using the language, which is possible without being able to write a grocery list by hand.

i found that a lot of the old guard of chinese department guys in western universities can express themselves beautifully in writing and have a great understanding of chinese as it exists in literature and poetry (and their interest in anything written after the ming is fairly limited and they were only forced into looking at modern literature as there became increased popular and academic interest in china and the sinosphere as a living thing that began in, well, let's say the early 1990s but who knows if that's fair to say or not) because... there was no use for chinese as a living language, no one was going to china. and chinese departments in universities functioned as a place where people were taught the chinese written language, how to read classical chinese and decode old texts. that's just passing maybe inaccurate observation. but it's interesting to see how the teaching of chinese unlike a lot of other languages people considered serious and important to learn is a relatively new area of scholarship and experimentation!

i don't trust skritter or equivalents (what are the equivalents? pleco? i have pleco on my phone and i use it mainly to look up unfamiliar characters because it has that little writing pad thing that actually recognizes my handwriting unlike previous programs) but i'm old fashioned and i learned with a pen + paper and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours copying things out. back in the day, i just grabbed any chinese text and went ham on it.

this is otm. i use skritter heaps, but it needs to be used with other things. you can't just hole up with skritter for a year and expect to come out with any applied knowledge, e.g. i can see a word in skritter 60 times and have nfi what it was within two hours, but if i see the same word in context twice it's usually locked in.

re chinese texts: i've taken to carting a copy of this

http://read.189.cn/loadFile.do?xzType=img&xzywType=cfmtxz&fileName=2000000000005883758.jpg

around with me everywhere; there's a load of stuff that i can't comprehend yet, but usually there's a handful of articles that i can get the gist of at worst and a fairly vivid idea about at best. you can get this mag (and also this

http://www.zazhipu.com/bookpic/20133/20133614520.jpg

slightly more teeny-love mag) in pretty much any chinese newsagency/bookshop; i never have trouble finding recent issues for au$1–2.

recently i've also started forcing myself to listen to chinese language podcasts (and i do mean ~listen~) for at least half an hour every day. i'm only understanding fragments atm (my listening is my weakest skill atm), but already my comprehension is improving.

if you're in a position to do it, and if it's easy for you to sit down and watch something, go to the aforementioned chinatown areas and pick up a dvd-rom full of chinese soaps. usually you'll get six billion episodes on a disc for just a few bucks. heaps of them come with chinese subtitles as well, so you can even read what's being said.

instructional texts are a great step up, and will always have value in your learning, but unless you try to immerse in proper chinese you won't really have a chance to see what you're learning in full application. even if you're only at the level of going 'omg that's 中 i've seen that character before somewhere' it's at least hitting the right language circuits in your brain.

i feel like too much attention is paid to teaching tones to students that can't pronounce words

ime tonal drilling isn't done enough. too many of the students i've studied with are so hopelessly atonal that i have no cocking idea what they're saying most of the time.

you want to at the very least be mindful of the tones as you learn. don't ignore them with the intent of picking them up later.

i find the rote memorization and semi-mindless copying of characters is a satisfying part of learning the chinese written language. it also aids character recognition. and chinese calligraphy is beautiful and being able to write beautifully will make you cultured and a good person.

so very otm. there was a point last year when my chinese handwriting (although surely conspicuous to a native speaker) was tidier and more fluid than my english handwriting (which has gone to shit in the age of keyboards), and it was a pleasure to just sit and bang out a page of audio dictation. i've done a lot less recently, and it really shows.

(nothing directed *at* you obv dylannn)

oh and the first time i saw a native chinese speaker (chinese born, chinese academic, newly in aus to study interpreting at uni) bugger up the handwriting of a reasonably simple character was one of the most reassuring moments of my entire life.

endless copying lets you discover your own methods for remembering character writing, your own mental shortcuts, your own little folk etymologies or explanations for characters that let you recall them later. it also drums into you that there are a limited number of building blocks. now, bring it all together and instead of 楼 a single character, you learn the building blocks of the character and come up with your way of remembering it (a little 木 tower and a broad inside 女 checking out some rice 米) and write it a few thousand times and it'll be automatic. and when you get those building blocks down, it gets easier to remember characters that use them in their construction. you got me?

yeah this is why i kinda hate simplified, so many of the traditional characters were simply just a bunch of 部首 put together, and then they just turned em into a bunch of ink squirts on paper with no organizing principle, a lot more arbitrary ime

plus, something like 龜 is badass but 龟 sucks turds

i was pretty surprised to learn that most chinese dudes use pinyin. in HK everybody told me that they used cangjie. but i guess mandarin pinyin is not 'natural' to them and they aren't taught cantonese jyutping at all. i guess pinyin is taught concurrently in china now so most kids are super familiar with it.

i do wonder if you were to design a ground up character input device for the computer what it would look like. like, no need to reverse-fit onto a qwerty keyboard.

having struggled with zhuyin/bopomofo and wubi, i have a lot of love for the simplicity of pinyin and it probably works the best if we're stuck with qwerty keyboards

http://data.bangtech.com/tips/mm/vista-zhuyin-ruby-and-soft-keyboard.gif

yeah that seems right to me, esp with databases that get constantly updated w/ netslang like sogou

still have not installed sogou yet :>

yeah pinyin is great xp, although imo there's a gulf between (a) using it as an input method/training wheels for new words and (b) totally relying it instead of learning characters. too many students in my third year do everything in pinyin.

tonal shit is important but! i feel like too much attention is paid to teaching tones to students that can't pronounce words anyways and aren't in a position where tonal mixups will really hurt comprehension.

Yeah, it's p.brutal - the smallest groups in which we get to interact w/a lecturer/tutor are still about 25-30 people large. The professor taking the course is French, and had to keep in mind the Kiwi accent when explaining vowel sounds ("... like in ten, but not the way you say it here which is tun" etc).

I'm trying to show my head at the uni's Chinese Language Club though as someone a few weeks into a first-year course there's not a lot of use yet. The Confucius Institute here is pretty active - people I've met have been nice & they have a decent library (I'm a sucker for the Foreign Language Press box sets of The Water Margins etc) ...

okay, and a few more arguments for being able to write chinese by hand: i find the rote memorization and semi-mindless copying of characters is a satisfying part of learning the chinese written language. it also aids character recognition. and chinese calligraphy is beautiful and being able to write beautifully will make you cultured and a good person.

Been trying to get this down, though it's p.brutal with the gulf between beautiful calligraphic characters and my cramped grubby strokes with a ballpoint pen in a 1B5 exercise book. Though as AA said, will probably be better than my English handwriting which has gone to shit in an ages of keyboards etc.

i found that a lot of the old guard of chinese department guys in western universities can express themselves beautifully in writing and have a great understanding of chinese as it exists in literature and poetry (and their interest in anything written after the ming is fairly limited and they were only forced into looking at modern literature as there became increased popular and academic interest in china and the sinosphere as a living thing that began in, well, let's say the early 1990s but who knows if that's fair to say or not) because... there was no use for chinese as a living language, no one was going to china. and chinese departments in universities functioned as a place where people were taught the chinese written language, how to read classical chinese and decode old texts.

Yeah, I can see this (though here in NZ/Pacific Rim I think we have more academics from China doing contemporary (or at least 20thC) things); reading a book on the creation/context of Du Fu's canonisation atm for something else. There's a third-year paper on Classical Chinese I'll hopefully get to do, but I suspect I'm the only person in my language class who's into T'ang poetry/紅樓夢/Yu Hua or w/e.

recently i've also started forcing myself to listen to chinese language podcasts (and i do mean ~listen~) for at least half an hour every day. i'm only understanding fragments atm (my listening is my weakest skill atm), but already my comprehension is improving.

if you're in a position to do it, and if it's easy for you to sit down and watch something, go to the aforementioned chinatown areas and pick up a dvd-rom full of chinese soaps. usually you'll get six billion episodes on a disc for just a few bucks. heaps of them come with chinese subtitles as well, so you can even read what's being said.

instructional texts are a great step up, and will always have value in your learning, but unless you try to immerse in proper chinese you won't really have a chance to see what you're learning in full application. even if you're only at the level of going 'omg that's 中 i've seen that character before somewhere' it's at least hitting the right language circuits in your brain.

I remember having to shelve those mags a lot at Auckland library, AA! What kind of podcasts are you listening to? I guess I should dig around for more story-based/narrative radio shows (children's bedtime stories?) or equivalent to start off with.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130315-a-better-way-to-learn-chinese/1

i still contend that producing tones is relatively easy and isn't a huge hurdle for early learners. by that i mean, simply knowing what a flat tone sounds like and being able to make that tonal contour match what native speakers are doing.

the difficulty comes in attaching tones to characters, and then learning to properly employ them (moving from single character + tone to figuring out how tones are used in a full sentence or phrase). and i think that needs to come after basic pronunciation.

the first thing is figuring out how to make the sounds that the tones are going to be laid over. i think pronunciation is too often left at a "good enough"/"yeah, that kinda sounds the same" level. even when i deal with 2nd language non-chinese speakers of mandarin that speak the language at a high level and it's nearly flawless, the first thing i notice is that they're pronunciation is off because they're producing the "correct" sounds but in a way that's just mechanically different from how a native speaker does it.

i dunno. i guess consistent mispronunciation is better than nothing.

I suspect I'm the only person in my language class who's into T'ang poetry/紅樓夢/Yu Hua or w/e.

intro chinese classes attract the corniest fuckin crew of lames that you will ever see. it gets better.

my final thing is, like: just figure out what works, man. make learning an active thing. find your interests and set some goals. i mean, study your balls off and you can sit down in three or four months and read a yu hua story with minimal help from a dictionary. go on from there.

xpost

right. i think most people that study the written language eventually work out their own way to stack and unstack characters and it's not

...not less intuitive or whatever than other languages.

With virtually no Spanish, I can figure out in the right context that baño means bath, but that word in Chinese (洗澡) seems to offer no clues about pronunciation, let alone meaning.

but you could guess the meaning of 洗澡 in context:

我家洗澡用的是太阳能热水器.

right? if you can read most of the other characters in that sentence, you're going to get the meaning, at least. depending on your knowledge of characters you'll be able to guess the initial consonants of one or both characters in the duo, too.

i find written chinese massively intuitive. this is a language in which the word for computer is 'electric brain' and giraffe is 'long neck deer', i mean you can derive a hell of a lot of meaning from the characters that make up a word, much of the time.

dylannn: the big tonal stumbling block i have (and see in plenty of other learners as well) is knowing the tone, intending to use the tone correctly in speech, and even think you're saying it correctly, but being told by others afterwards that you got it wrong. i think it's just that when you're learning your brain tends to get itself into a knot where what you think you're saying and what's actually coming out your face are two different things. I'm really not explaining this very well btw.

etc: your first period of writing characters will necessarily be blocky as, and it'll look hilarious against real chinese handwriting. as you progress, though, you'll start to develop a style. i don't believe my handwriting will ever look native, but i'm well aware that i've picked up a sort of amateurish aesthetic that i'm quite pleased with (e.g. the 喜 in my 喜欢 is elongated and a bit brush-stroky, an effect i picked up from one of my teachers).

the two podcasts i've been listening to recently, mainly because the audio is clear, are:

- 友的聊播客: tech
- 到世界各地过春节: travel

just tried ordering in chinese on my own for the first time ever, made an arse of myself

we get back on the 马 and we keep going

sigh

also this is what happens when the teacher scribbles a load of answers at breakneck pace and i scramble like a mad bastard to keep up (if anyone cares, probably not)

http://i.imgur.com/0S7D0fL.jpg

I care! Damn sight neater than me; had a tutorial-kinda thing where one of the exercises was to see how many times you could write a character in a minute, got v,ropey p.fast.

I think what I need to raise my rote character game is writing out sentences that use the characters, hmmn.

do it, again and again and again and again

i've just started carting around a cheap exercise book so i can just spontaneously scrawl out great wads of text and get my writing back on track

it's not bad!

one of the things that writing characters on character graph writing paper (do you know what i mean? the 'basic characters 4 kidz' chinese character teaching books use this too and it's what chinese kids practice characters on) trains you to do is more attractively size elements of each character. it also helps to develop the skill of consistent character sizing in general.

yeah you can download them online and print them out https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9627011/PRC-Character-Writing-Sheet.pdf

yeah i did some of that back in the day, and i bought 'er indoors a little griddy practising book just recently

i don't worry about it so much because 99% of all authentic chinese handwriting i've ever seen is messy as fuck

although having said that

i have a gridded moleskine for writing characters

its not meessy its 草写

yeah

they've started showing us completely irrelevant cultural videos this year. turnout has been poor, so i suspect the confucius institute is partially funding the course to keep it alive, hence all the sudden jarring 'now let's stop learning and watch this woman dance for 10 minutes'

also we have a ridiculous exam tomorrow and i will fail it so drinking wine atm

i do want to hear this story, too: just tried ordering in chinese on my own for the first time ever, made an arse of myself.

i'm not going to lie, i did this as a early student of chinese, but even now outside of no-english-menu places or alongside native speakers that have already initiated a conversation in china, i file this under innocuous things that make you irrationally embarrassed but that's crazy and defeats the purpose of learning a language and is actually fun, so don't listen to me.

the story was this: i went into a dessert place in chinatown (amusingly called 糖人街, geddit) and they had a numbered list of menu items (presumably top selling, idk) on the wall. #1 was 雪花冰. i thought okay, yeah, an iced snowflake would be cool. the lady came over and i ordered 雪花冰 in chinese. she looked at me like i was an idiot, so i said it again like three times thinking i was pronouncing it wrong. then she showed me a menu with six pages of desserts under the category '雪花冰'. egg on face, 不好意思 &c.

you are otm about innocuous embarrassment. that cock-up won't stop me doing it again obv, but thinking back i should at least have correlated it with what was in the menu before asking for anything. if i had ordered 巧克力雪花冰 (or even 巧克力冰淇淋) it would probably have been fine.

tomorrow's exam is reciting, in pairs, 20 lines of dialogue each that we've had a week to prepare. the problem isn't the chinese, it's learning wtf we're supposed to be saying. even in english that's a ridiculous undertaking (we're not trained actors ffs). at this point i can't remember one line let alone 20.

there's also a written component that they won't tell us about (which will probably be fine), but i'm sure they'll have 15 minutes of 舞龙 to distract us before we do any exams

i was taught french by reciting roch voisine songs from memory and learning about making maple syrup, so i sympathize.

lion dancing would not be part of any chinese language curriculum i would devise.

haha maple syrup

i listen to HEAPS of taiwanese electropop, and it helps with listening skills, but i keep using words that the chinese teachers don't know (e.g. 等待, which surprised me)

it's annoying that i have stacks of knowledge (words, grammar etc) but am too shitscared to put it to use, so i'm stagnating in that regard. what i really really want is time with a chinese learner/speaker who also drinks, so i can get tipsy/tanked and shake this inhibition that's blocking my progress. it feels like i'm one blockage away from being conversant.

等待 is just the most formal everyday form of "wait." always those twin character clusters for modern written chinese, where older forms pare it down to single characters. maybe partly to negate the possible other interpretations of the single character forms (because 等 and 待 have lots of other meanings but can only mean one thing as 等待). in spoken chinese, 等 comes along outside of a pair but i feel it's just as often put in a pair ( 等着，稍等，等到？) or incorporated into a set phrase. they gotta know that one.

at the same time, there's lots of spoken chinese vocabulary that you should know that never pops up in class, i think. there's the example of 棒. i think i've used that example before on this thread: i never saw 好棒 in a textbook. maybe a more contemporary example would be trying to puzzle out 给力 from context.

listen, just go to class drunk

considering it tbh

等待 is just the most formal everyday form of "wait."

i thought so too, but the 中国人的老外 was all 'whaaat what is that word'

in spoken chinese, 等 comes along outside of a pair but i feel it's just as often put in a pair ( 等着，稍等，等到？) or incorporated into a set phrase. they gotta know that one.

you'd think so. 待 is in tomorrow night's dialogue (maybe because my speech partner's wife is taiwanese), so it'll be interesting to see whether the 中国人 teacher pulls us up

at the same time, there's lots of spoken chinese vocabulary that you should know that never pops up in class

i still don't have a clear view of what's meant to be spoken and what's meant to be written, so that's probably making me look a bit of a dildo

apropos of sod-all, i wonder how dog latin, etc et al are doing

Just hit a mid-semester break after a whole bunch of tests/etc - the listening one was more or less fine though I still have trouble distinguishing some initials/finals (+ whatever they were playing sounded like it was recorded on a boombox beside a motorway), written test wasn't aided by being on the same day as an essay was due so flubbed a bit on the more recent characters (语言学院的学生 is at a "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers" level for me atm), & the oral test was just a relief to get out've the way - my partner was busier than I was (deputy high commissioner of the C00k Islands, whoa) & the questions were fairly softball. We hadn't memorised our dialogue, though, which the people heading in after us had. OTOH they were sticking to the textbook while we'd gone a bit further out of bounds for vocab.

Really, really need to drill characters; shameful how disparate my recognition and ability to write have gotten in the past few weeks.

that disparity is a killer imo: my reading is decent but my listening is still way too patchy

whatever they were playing sounded like it was recorded on a boombox beside a motorway

that is the worst when you're still learning

妈了个屄的！

also we have a ridiculous exam tomorrow and i will fail it so drinking wine atm

some magic happened at some point (probably the wine) because this happened:

1. we knew there would be a 'written' exam first, but we didn't know what was in it, what we had to do, how long &c. it turned out to be 80 minutes long, all chinese questions (no pinyin) and handwritten answers about stuff we haven't even seen since last year. smashed it.

2. that 10 minutes of dialogue i couldn't remember last night somehow became me delivering ~the whole thing~ without a script or cue cards or ANYTHING. smashed it.

two reasons i'm ditching ios skritter:

1. the guided stroke writing (which you can't turn off) always tells you what the character is, even when you're getting it wrong. the consequence is that you don't learn it using your own brain because there's training wheels are in your face the whole time. (i think this has also damaged the neatness of my handwriting btw.)

2. if i go off and do, you know, ~actual language~ instead of just flashcards for a few weeks, i come back to find 3,930 (i am not kidding) overdue flashcards. right now i could either (a) be wracked and assailed by guilt and hole up with this thing for like a month or (b) just ignore it completely and get on with doing language instead.

pleco's flashcard system is primitive by comparison, but it stays the hell out of my face. if i have no idea what a character is, it lets me make the entire mistake before correcting me (at which point i can open the scratchpad and freestyle the correct character).

what does "doing language" mean?

congratulations on the exam stuff, too!

are you done/almost done your first year/certificate now? what has the attrition rate of fellow students been?

thanks! it's actually my third year/certificate, although my complete lack of confidence in speaking/communicating is holding me back a bit.

this year we started (two months ago) with maybe 10 students and we're already down to six. tbh i'm amazed the demand is so flat for a city that's (a) basically in asia and (b) choc full of native chinese. it's not like there are a billion accredited courses running here.

by 'doing language' i meant reading, watching video, listening to podcasts/music &c., i.e. real chinese as opposed to flicking through a load of unconnected words on cards. these days i get far more out of reading 读者 than doing flashcard reps.

http://gbtimes.com/lifestyle/education/dial-beijing/challenging-chinese-language-myths

he's a bit glib about the writing system

kind of shooting fish in a barrel or 瓮中捉鳖 if you want

If you visit Spain, it can be easy to pick up common phrases on the street. Is it similar with Chinese?

No. The problem is the textbooks teach you certain things, but then maybe you go to Beijing and they speak with a certain kind of accent.

but why wouldnt that be true with spanish, too? and sure, you definitely can pick up common phrases on the street. why couldnt you? come on now.

If you go to Shanghai, for the most part they are going to be speaking ‘Shanghainese’, which is a dialect of Mandarin, but the words they use and the way they use them are very different. My spoken Chinese is okay, but if I go down to Shanghai and someone tries to speak Shanghainese to me then I will probably have no idea what they are saying.

the fact that these two languages are not mutually intelligible should be the first hint that one is not a dialect of the other, i think. theyre both from middle chinese, just like nearly every other sinitic language/dialect spoken in china, and shanghainese and wu dialects as they exist today are influenced by northern languages but shanghainese is not a dialect of mandarin, okay?

Does the Chinese language have any influences from other languages, such as Japanese, Korean or English?

No, as far as I can tell. Historically speaking, both Japanese and Korean are derivatives of Chinese to different degrees. When it comes to outside influences, if you look at the actual language, Chinese is the mother language… it came before Japanese and Korean.

i dont know enough about the history of the korean or japanese languages to really go in on this but i korean and japanese fall outside of the sino-tibetan language family and to call them derivatives of chinese is even more than claiming shanghainese as a dialect of mandarin.

also, chinese doesnt have as many loanwords in popular use as english and unlike japanese the writing system and the deep history of the language renders the origins of loanwords opaque in most cases.

if you want to talk about words borrowed from japanese, var qing early republican intellectuals and writers either studied in japan or read japanese texts and took lots of words from japanese that didn't exist in chinese, esp literary , political , philosophical concepts that the japanese were exposed to because of japans intellectual climate and exposure to western philosophical etc works. so, 文化 民主 逻辑 资本主义 共产主义 革命 among many others were borrowed from japanese texts.

Do you think that young people will keep using the older, correct language?

Yes, they definitely will. Again, if you think about the role of education in Chinese people’s lives… in every public school in China they are all teaching the standard Mandarin, so that is definitely going to be a very strong force in the direction of the language. In the end, when you look at something other than internet slang, there’s really not that big of a difference in the way that the older generation and younger generations speak the language.

leaving aside the prescriptivist correct language line and leaving aside that he seems to be talking about both nonmandarin languages in china AND "slang," chinese is as dynamic as any other great big modern language-- there are hundreds of millions speaking modern standard mandarin-- the chinese language referring to modern standard mandarin has changed in major ways over the last eighty, ninety years....

MANDARIN CHINESE...
is over 6,000 years old
has over a billion native speakers
is China's official language
has over 20,000 characters

mandarin and most other sinitic languages spoken in china are from middle chinese, which isnt even 6000 years old by itself. its position as the standard chinese language is a relatively recent phenomenon.

it only has a billion native speakers if you really stretch the definition. if you run down the other languages spoken in china and assume and i think you can assume that speakers of those languages are native speakers... cantonese sitting at 50something million speakers, min chinese at 50something million speakers, wu / shanghainese at 80 million speakers and those are just the big ones, and then you have non-chinese languages like korean or uighur or uzbek. even if mandarin has a lot of native speakers, its wrong to position it as the native born language of every single citizen of the prc.

and wow, 20000 characters! jeez thats a lot.

brb going to burn down a confucius institute

expert who are not experts are the best

also lol @ shanghainese being a dialect of mandarin, whichever way you come at it

1. we knew there would be a 'written' exam first, but we didn't know what was in it, what we had to do, how long &c. it turned out to be 80 minutes long, all chinese questions (no pinyin) and handwritten answers about stuff we haven't even seen since last year.

2. that 10 minutes of dialogue i couldn't remember last night somehow became me delivering ~the whole thing~ without a script or cue cards or ANYTHING.

lol and to think i was going to defer this year because i didn't feel up to it

good work, big guy.

for written questions, what sort of material did they ask questions on?

i always felt envious of those students in my undergrad chinese classes that spoke another chinese language at home / went to school in canada and got around the rules about not racking up credits in lang courses for languages they were nearfluent in. but they had mostly evaporated, along with the business and international development students, by the final rounds.

i am really really really jealous of cantonese speakers

speaking of the beautiful linguistic diversity of china!

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/phonemica

this a site my friend kellen and other guys interested in chinese languages run (also involved w http://sinoglot.com/blog/): http://phonemica.net/

for written questions, what sort of material did they ask questions on?

• conversations (short answers/fill in the gaps): xmas holidays, food, day plan (先／在／然后／最后 structure), physical pain, working, meta stuff about studying chinese, buying gifts for a wedding, friends catching up
• direct translation from english: culture/arts/history, clothing (with 以防万一), opening hrs, visiting a place
• reading & answering questions about a chinese tourist brochure (a real one they picked up at the local visitors' centre), so stuff like how to get around, where to buy tram tickets &c.
• writing our own tourist brochure for a gold museum

but they had mostly evaporated, along with the business and international development students, by the final rounds.

yeah, we lost most of ours in the first year, probably because they couldn't write and were shitscared of trying

oh i know sinoglot and phonemica, they're great

先／在 "先..., 再..." ?

http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2013/03/27/chinese-grammar-funnies old jokezzz

先／在 "先..., 再..." ?

haha yeah, sorry, i didn't check my typing

When it comes to outside influences, if you look at the actual language, Chinese is the mother language… it came before Japanese and Korean.

this is completely wrong

the claims the author makes regarding the statuses of various languages in china, the relationship between sinitic languages and nonsinitic languages in china, the history of the chinese language, the relationship between chinese and foreign languages, the history of mandarin as the official language-- very few of them stand up to common sense, the most lazy cursory googling, or godforbid actual research, but they've been repeated so many times in the service of nationalist mythmaking that i guess they sound like fact.

today i asked someone a question in chinese without thinking about it or even consciously language switching. i don't think that's ever happened before.

also i learned how wechat works (asynchronous voice chat that lets you play each message repeatedly until you understand it) and am so getting on that bus. not wholly keen on giving my phone number to tencent but whatever.

my favorite feature of wechat is the find people near you function! good way to make friends.

i also want to say something about the use of weixin for meeting potential sexual partners without being crass.

my favorite feature of wechat is the find people near you function! good way to make friends.

omggggg i had no idea about this

i'm away from home and my qq user/pass is at home which is driving me insane atm

things i like about wechat:

1. proximity list. it's most useful in mainland china but if you're ever out and about and wonder, "hey how close is the nearest chinese person (that also uses wechat)?"

2. the group messaging feature.

3. qq mobile is pretty good now-- i've run it on the most basic phones available and i've run it on new age smartphones, and it works. but wechat is streamlined and built for mobile devices.

4. i have international text messaging in my phone plan but i like wechat because it's easier and cheaper and i don't need phone service to talk to people.

signed up again. good range of people nearby because melbourne has a decent sinosphere/abc population. not contacting strangers yet because i don't know where the crepey line falls.

there's an account name and a name and a wechat it and a qq id and a qq name and a qq account name (some of which can only be set once, i don't even remember which) and the qq/wechat values don't match up and i have nfi what i am doing with all this crap

chinese social media in general seems to have way too many settings and multiple things that sort of do the same thing and just dumb shit going on

right. with most of the chinese blogging platforms, the social networking sites there's a perfect storm of poor design and infinite user customization. qq's qzone is the worst example.

whoa that's just waterfalls of garbage

it's p much a generation of users who grew up on pirated copies of windows xp

starting to forget the basics now. i'm sitting there tonight, talking to a guy, forming like 对…感兴趣 sentences without a problem, and then he asks me how many people are in my class and i have nfi how to form the sentence. so dispiriting.

obv i should have spent 20% less time learning new words and more time just using the god damned language

http://www.failpix.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/bowling_balls_juggle.gif

me learning chinese

i'm not sure how helpful this advice is. with elementary conversations, answering those types of questions, the point is to work with your conversation partner's feedback and work off their grammar. so, if the question is "你们班有多少个学生?" go ahead and use that sentence patter, turn it into a statement formulate your response from that sentence pattern, "我们班有三十个学生." or! simply say "三十个"! that works just as well.

when talking to nonnative speakers, there's often the echo response that repeats and corrects your grammar without grinding the conversation to a halt. so, if you said, "三十," you'll likely get back, "哦, 三十个, 好多呀"/"三十个学生!" + leading question. your grammar or phrasing is corrected and the conversation moves on. even if you put your response into a sentence, you'll still get back something like, "啊, 你们班有三十个学生, 不少呀!" and that response will give you a polished, native model, with correct tones, etc.

the value of conversation with a native speaker is 1) hearing back the echo and working from their grammatical structures, 2) developing a feel for how the language is actually used.

thanks heaps for those tips, dylannn. it's an incredible blessing that chinese grammar is usually identical in question and answer form, because as a learner that thinking has already already done for you.

the big problem i had last night (apart from not being good enough at listening to keep up with whole sentences) is that he asked me in english 'how many people are in your class?' and i could not think of the correct word to use. i was struggling rather ineptly with 是 for a minute before he jumped in and said 'it's 有'. i mean obviously it's 有 in hindsight, but it's at this very basic level that i'm stuffing up.

another problem is asking someone to repeat what they said and getting a whole new sentence instead, but wechat should address that.

your second point (developing a feel) is something that will only come if i barrel on through all this ill-confidence and learn through my own mistakes. i don't think there's any other way.

verbal communication has a lot of room for quirky expression, grammatical indecisiveness and inexactness. i feel that in chinese, this is especially true.

there's a lot of room for mixing up word order, especially. "我们班学生有三十个" + "学生我们班有三十个" work in this situation. they might not be what you would find in a textbook and they don't even look great in text but in the flow of conversation, neither pattern would strike me as really strange.

even if you had fumbled out "我们班是三十个学生": it sounds a bit strange, if you take the time to consider it, and it isn't strictly correct grammar, but it also wouldn't bring the conversation to an abrupt halt, especially if spoken with some confidence. and there's the immediate echo effect to correct your phrasing if your partner finds it odd.

one problem is that as a non-native speaker your grammar is listened to a little more closely. the person you're talking to will be struggling to figure out what the hell you're trying to say, listening through all those horrible tones and weird grammatical constructions, and even if they'd forgive it from a native speaker your grammatical quirks aren't immediately taken as linguistic flavor or personal choice but as fucking up in a foreign language.

i hate the rah rah BE CONFIDENT / WORK HARD selfesteem attitude of language learners on the internet but that advice is valid sometimes.

at the end of the day, you can't even say that 是x个学生 is incorrect.

it does tend to work better when referring to the class more specifically, if that makes sense.

“我们老师挺好的，他那个班有三十个学生。但王老师，我觉得他不怎么样，你看，他那个班才二十个学生。”

"wǒmen lǎoshī tínghǎode, tā nàge bān yǒu sānshí ge xuésheng. dàn wáng lǎoshī, wǒ juéde tā bù zěnmeyàng, nǐ kàn, tā nàge bān cái èrshíge xuésheng." / "our teacher is fuckin great. his class is thirty students. but that mr. wang, he ain't all that. his class only has twenty students."

or the character of the students in the class.

“我们班是十个本地人，三个留学生，还有一些ABC。” or “我们班是三个男生，四个女生。”

"wǒmen bān shì shíge běndìrén, sānge liúxuéshēng, háiyǒu yīxiē ABC" / "our class has ten locals, three foreign exchange students, and a few ABCs." or "wǒmen bān shì sānge nánshēng, sìge nǚshēng" / "my class has three boys and four girls"

or a group of classes.

“在我的学校每个班一般是四五十个学生，学生太多了。”

"zài wǒde xuéxiào měige bān yībān shì sìwǔshíge xuéshēng, xuéshēng tài duōle" / "at my school, every class is usually about forty or fifty students, too many goddamn kids"

yo what you got at your house

a pig

oh cool, me too. you gonna eat it soon?

yeah

neat

― dayo, Wednesday, May 4, 2011 12:48 AM (2 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is beautiful

fuck. i accidentally converted the first example from 是 to 有.

我们老师挺好的，他那个班是三十个学生。但王老师，我觉得他不怎么样，你看，他那个班才二十个学生。”

I often think about picking this back up; I bet I could relearn a lot of it really fast if I studied hard.

It's so annoying that there's this extra dimension to learn. Like you can read and pronounce French; you just have to know what the words mean. But you have to learn symbols AND pronunciation AND definition, ugh

fwiw dylannn i don't want to render your efforts wasted, so am stockpiling it for the weekend when i can think straight and reply properly

alright!

i think lots of contact with native speakers develops not only a feel for the grammar + reinforcement of the rules of the language but ALSO gives one a feel for how far you can stretch grammar, word order and why you would want to do that.

my whole point beyond the grammatical distraction of that specific sentence is that the 1) chinese grammar has a great plasticity that forgives a lot, and once you know how to work with it allows an amazing range of expression and tone, 2) opportunities for informal contact with native speakers, especially if you live outside of a sinophone community are valuable.

it's funny you should mention that now, because i was out with a load of chinese speakers (natives and learners) yesterday, and after about four hours of pushing myself relentlessly i was having consistent and ~reasonably~ complex conversations with people for the following three hours. that block in my head that's been holding me back for ~18 months FINALLY started to disintegrate; i could (for the most part) follow people's speech and reply properly. i was making silly mistakes and nobody cared, but the point is (coming back to your point) that a lot of the time there were frequently a number of different ways to say the same thing, but it didn't matter so much because (a) they knew what i was ~trying to say~ and (b) i wasn't even technically wrong some of the time.

fwiw i'm having an easier time with native chinese speakers because they don't flub the tones. it's actually more work for me to converse with a particular subset of learners because they either lazily flatline their speech or just get all the tones completely wrong, and i find myself mentally translating what they're saying in 'chinese' into chinese before i can reply to it.

even if you had fumbled out "我们班是三十个学生": it sounds a bit strange, if you take the time to consider it, and it isn't strictly correct grammar, but it also wouldn't bring the conversation to an abrupt halt, especially if spoken with some confidence.

yeah, and the important thing is to just push through it and get better in time, rather than being a 普通话 master right from the start. i'm really seeing that now.

re your example: english is quite similar in this regard (the parallels between english and chinese are sometimes staggering imo), in that you can smash out a bit of a '30 people in my class' or '30 in the class' sentence fragment and the meaning is clear (again, this is a relatively new realisation for me). i found last night that chinese (here i mean wrt native speakers, not learners) breaks a load of its own rules in informal speech.

and even if they'd forgive it from a native speaker your grammatical quirks aren't immediately taken as linguistic flavor or personal choice but as fucking up in a foreign language.

another parallel b/n english & chinese is that we do the same when we encounter new english learners, probably because we want to help them form better english—we pick up on the uneasiness/lack of confidence and encourage them to learn/use better sentence structures. now i can see what a roadblock that can be when you just want to barrel through a paragraph of speech and worry about the mistakes later.

one of our teachers has so taken to assuming we're all going to fuck up that she actively interrupts us all the time. she'll ask us to answer a question/translate a sentence/correct some dodgy grammar, and we'll get literally a single word into our answer before she's butting in for some reason that isn't even helpful most of the time. it's so bad that we're all apprehensive when we try to answer anything, and she takes that apprehension to mean we can't answer the question. i've tried explaining why this is a problem several times but she just keeps talking over me. (one insane example: last week i pronounced 机会 as 'jīhuà', purely because i said the syllable wrong (i know the word ffs), but she assumed i meant '计划' and banged on for seriously five minutes about the difference between plan and opportunity, and just steamrolled me every time i tried to explain that i know the fucking difference.)

i hate the rah rah BE CONFIDENT / WORK HARD selfesteem attitude of language learners on the internet but that advice is valid sometimes.

p sure this sentence helped me yesterday, so basically i owe you a drink at some point

“我们老师挺好的，他那个班有三十个学生。但王老师，我觉得他不怎么样，你看，他那个班才二十个学生。”

“我们班是十个本地人，三个留学生，还有一些ABC。”

i'm popping these in the bank (esp. 不怎么样 which i don't think i've seen/paid attention to before now). also i need to be more familiar with stuff like '四五十个...' meaning 'forty or fifty'.

fuck. i accidentally converted the first example from 是 to 有.

interesting you should mention that, because using 是 instead of 有 in that context is exactly what led me to write my anguish post three days ago.

机会 as 'jīhuà'

actually you mean jīhuì

:>

gaagh

fwiw that's what i meant by 'i know the word' (机 jī and 会 huì are pretty basic), the wrong sound just came out of my face

(gr8 thread, not much to contribute apart from being so fcked for various tests in the next two weeks after letting my characters lapse wretchedly in the past four-six weeks via a whole lotta freelance work + partner in thesis-psychosis + workload for other papers distracting me)

i think my course is ending this year

angry baby dot jpg

learning with other learners is actively horrible, especially when they don't even fucking bother with the tones

i get loads more out of going to conversation meetups because native speakers don't stream a lifeless shitpile of monotone bullshit

here i am smashing the tones from day one and i have to listen to WOJUEDEWODEZHONGWENNENGLIHENHAO in middle c all god damned night

i am seriously on the warpath against people who claim to know chinese but (a) cbf with tones (b) pull that 'gah i don't need to learn how to read' garbage

you learn ~the whole language~ or you gtfo imo

it's a difficult language fuckers, harden the fuck up

i was lucky because i started learning chinese before i knew that each chinese character had a tone or several possible tones attached to it or even that tonal languages existed. it was just mimicry and then my friend karl from ohio--an american guy that i first took to be a missionary because he always wore stiff white missionary shirts and leather shoes and smart slacks and spoke great chinese--explained tones.

it does hurt to hear people speak toneless chinese but it's taken me years to get beyond the point of very intentionally attaching tones to words as i remember them and getting to where:

i can speak without paying attention to tones because the sound of a word is just the sound of that word and happens to include a tonal character in its pronunciation... meaning, i see, read, hear 我 as just 我... i mean, how do i even explain this? 我 is 我 and it sounds like 我, rather than a toneless wo and an attached packet of information that includes a dipping tone.

i have to consider for a few seconds, when asked, what tone is attached to which character, "hey, what tone is 棕???" it usually involves saying aloud, "zóngsè... zǒngsè... zōngsè... zōngsè! first tone." i know what 棕色 zōngsè sounds like as a compound but it takes a second to even attach a number to it.

producing the tones isn't the hard part for me--it's definitely hearing them. at the end of the day, if you're not raised speaking a tonal language, it's an uphill battle and i feel like even if i speak chinese that can pass for native speakerish (native speaker with a thick shaanxi accent, maybe), the tones will always haunt me because i'm missing a tiny lump of left temporal lobe that tonal language speakers grew in toddlerhood.

mispronunciation of tones by native speakers that elicit giggles from native speakers will often pass me by completely. didn't notice, didn't notice at all. but it makes comprehending those tonally shifted dialects easier because i'm listening far more closely to other things.

it's not even that i rely on the tones, it's that the language has a vital cadence that just isn't there when some lazy 老外 is halfarsing his/her way through speech.

i don't need 我 to be explicitly third tone either, but the language centre of my brain has developed an expectation that a full sentence will sound like chinese, and monotone delivery simply doesn't. it's sort of like reading without my glasses, in that the extra effort slows me down and wears me out.

re tones: i'm mishearing them all the time, but my brain seems to cope better with misheard tones than none at all.

wtf 're: tones', of course re tones

in northern jiangsu, there's a general rule that the second tone becomes the first tone and the third tone becomes the second tone, and the first tone becomes the third tone. hearing 北京 běijīng pronounced as béijǐng sounds weird, if i think about it, but i'm just not listening for it, usually.

videos of guys on youtube speaking chinese :(

"CRIMS0nHexAgON advanced polyglot speaks ARAMAIC, YORUBA, CREE, AND MANDARIN CHINESE"

in northern jiangsu, there's a general rule that the second tone becomes the first tone and the third tone becomes the second tone, and the first tone becomes the third tone.

oh jesus

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ep_II02ZZM4

:( fair enough buddy 2 months, but don't make youtube videos it you cunt

LET'S KEEP IT POSITIVE

http://tindeck.com/listen/gnff

no more negativity!

lol, the "fluent in three months" guy

"nī zhìdāo nī zhìdāo"

i actually want to kill that guy

tonight i was working with a learner who was doing all the right tones with her hand but *saying* the wrong tones, over and over again

bless

the three types by which i'm constantly surrounded are

1. those who genuinely think they're saying the right tones but are not
2. those who don't even try
3. people like that 3 month guy who make up tones like it's all just fucking decoration, "hey look at me i can speak ~chinese~ because i'm all Doing Tones and shit"

Not studying Mandarin but I'm down with
1) Thinking the hyper-correcting teacher who interrupts after the first word is spoken is a bad teacher
2) Being irritated by other students who babble and don't even try to get it anything close to what it is supposed to be.

this week i asked the coordinator of the whole course to be strict as hell on first year students' tones, because i am sick to death of dealing with their disgusting habits two years later

oh and i complained about hyper-correcto and was told that i'm several people deep in the queue to make the same complaint, so

Are these corrections made in English?

yeah

Yeesh.

'我对老师烦死了' probably wouldn't have cut it tbh

oh wait you said 'corrections' gah

yes, all made in english except the word she's correcting

they tell us what's in the exam, and then they send us off to prepare (which i spent seriously 40 hrs doing), and we get in there and it's suddenly OH THIS IS OPEN BOOK YOU JUST WASTED YOUR TIME WITH ALL THAT STUDY LOL and we basically just copy the course notes. then there's a whole surprise second part of the exam which is reading a load of junk about the spring festival (this is year 3 and we're STILL doing the fucking spring festival but they haven't told us what a chair or an elbow is) but FULL and i mean FULL of words nobody in the course has ever seen (i can pick up any old book and get the gist but this crap might as well have been greek, so much so that at one point the invigilator was suddenly and without provocation all 'oh no this might be too hard oh no sorry') and we had to answer the questions in chinese ON THE BACK OF THE SAME SHEET OF PAPER, so everyone spent the whole time constantly flipping the page back and forth trying desperately to copy stroke-for-stroke a pile of brand new characters. it didn't help that someone in the room had death breath. one question (a) didn't make sense (i put the whole thing into google translate and google couldn't even work out what it said) and (b) didn't seem to be addressed by the text. at all. i have never written I DON'T UNDERSTAND THIS QUESTION on a test paper before today. that was seriously the second stupidest exam i have ever sat in my entire life (and i probably passed tbh)

Yeesh, sounds brutal; fingers crossed my character exam on Thurs doesn't spring anything like that on me. Been spending a lot of time up at the library w/characters and wishing I'd started doing that a few months ago. Fingers crossed yr 40hrs of study isn't wasted time in terms of general proficiency, I guess?

oh it's definitely paid off in terms of proficiency, like a billion times

what's in your exam?

http://i39.tinypic.com/14m9rb8.jpg

Nothing fancy; the whole "create a dialogue" thing can wrong-foot me if it has to be done on a topic I've blanked (hai @ 京剧) or about some of the NPCR textbook characters whose, uh, characters I shouldn't have neglected.

ah yeah, it's easy to forget topics/chars when there's so much to absorb

sad lol @ 京剧

haha yeah

we did all that in first year too. too much chinese language instruction is backward looking imo.

slightly apropos of that: at the weekend i got trapped in a conversation with a guy about the 三国. on and on and on. that's all nice etc, really, but dude, my exams are about finding a job in network engineering in ~this millennium~

speaking of which, apparently i did all right in last night's exam (although why they're telling other students how i went i've no idea)

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!’”)

http://www.rectified.name/2012/04/30/peking-opera-masks-and-the-london-book-fair/

yes!! i use that term to describe the hideous bloody chop suey english fonts and ancient scroll backgrounds in every second piece of chinese language software

i spend like 80% of my mandarin exposure time listening to electropop and 0% of it studying the qin dynasty

2000 years of history
DOWN THE DRAIN

oh hey there's a baby down here

haha oh god

Bleak laughter, etc.

I feel you re: "Peking Opera masks" but I'm not sure if any culture really escapes that in the language-instruction field (based on my uh limited exposure to learning Dutch/German in NZ before my stint in Europe).

Got talking about 三国 w/a girl in my class who got into it via Dynasty Warriors. I wonder if I've still got my old PSX copy of Suikoden & if so whether I'd recognise any bits of 水浒传.

Wld be keen for an electropop YT/Spotify playlist or links to a mix or w/e, AA.

here's a few mainly taiwanese things to get you going (i love the crap out of all of these):

elva hsiao - super girl (disc 1 is great, disc 2 is all hideous ballads)

http://lightyearsofcy.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/elva-hsiao-super-girl.jpg

jamaster a - dong fang shen mi

http://mjchip.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/00-jamaster_a-dong_fang_shen_mi-front.jpg

da mouth - influenza

http://i.eimg.com.tw/d/alb/17/321917.300.jpg

da mouth (again) - one two three

http://music.yule.tom.com/uimg/2010/1/30/caiyingzhe/1264832880300_35468.jpg

girl and the robots - parallel universe

http://img001.photo.21cn.com/photos/album/20121202/o/29B53DC6BA0EC5214B1CCE179969EE35.jpg

a couple more that i love for some reason but might be difficult to find:

mosaic (马赛克) - self titled

http://www.mask9.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/thumbnail_150x150/mt0x0001/info_thumbnail/57713/57713_event-mosaic-chian-tour-bt-mask9.jpg

郭易yodai - if there was a time machine

http://m.yyq.cn/upload/avatar/504849657cdf8772903.jpg

no point in me looking for any of this on spotify etc because geoblocking is shit

nearly four years in, i go into a cafe and the lady asks me a question in chinese and i have not got any idea what she is saying

one day i am going to flip a table and walk the hell away from this fucking language

advice for learners

1. don't

advice for learners

1. move to china :(

fuck

like, i expect that by now when someone says 'are you learning chinese' in chinese that i can do more than stare back like a gormless fucking bell-end

if she had written down the finer details of last week's eye surgery i'd be sound as a pound

i have more to say but not out in the open like this

but it's probably more helpful to reflect on what you've learned after four years and what your longterm goals are. understanding cafe ladies might be part of the 5 year plan but it's not the whole package.

this is thin advice but i think the best way to advance is to:
-- quickly move from instruction in the language to instruction in the language. i like the idea of having a second year chinese course that's not CHINESE 201: YOUR SECOND INTRO TO ABSTRACT GRAMMAR RULES AND MORE LISTS OF VOCABULARY and more like... in my second year of chinese at school, we had a class that was an intro to chinese folk tales, where the goal wasn't the peking opera masks learn about chinese culture but more about choosing a neutral peripheral topic that just became the stimulus as much as chinese folk tales can be stimulating and the theme and vocab/grammar was something that students were pointed toward and even better encouraged to seek out for themselves to approach the topic. instruction started at 70/30 chinese-english slowly moving to 90/10, which is frustrating but helpful. in the third year, the topic advanced to, like, modern chinese short stories... international business? stuff like that.

the years at university i advanced most in spoken/written chinese was when we moved to what were simply undergraduate courses taught in chinese. so, the discussion at the start of class-- say, we were discussing yellow earth, chen kaige movie--became a moment of supreme personal anxiety. i'd carefully write out my talking points and work to come up with answers to potential questions lobbed into the group by the prof. i spent hours working on just the opening discussion, just to produce 2-3 minutes put together of cogent thought/reasonable responses.

-- move from instruction to use of the language. when i finally got a friend to translate my resume into chinese and scammed my way into a job where the people hired me thought i could read and write and speak chinese at a level that wouldn't embarrass their company and might make them money, i was in a daily panic and i was forced to do a lot of: 1) last minute research into a topic so that i would have the vocabulary to talk about, say, brake pads, 2) bluffing and learning the talent of bluffing. but if that's not possible, you could come up with some sort of personal project in one of your areas of interest. my interest was literary translation, modern literature, so deciding to sit down and translate abandoned capital (the great work of modern chinese literature, untranslated!) and just work through it and hope that i'd finish even a single chapter of it. that was crucial.

my chinese activated out of the blue is pretty weak, though. if you aren't speaking chinese every single day, hours a day, your language is going to be shakey mo collier.

just chalk it up to her nonmainstream accent. she's probably a primary school graduate from a village in guangdong, right? haughtily demand that she speak standard mandarin and then walk out of her shabby little cafe.

http://www.hdpth.com/upload/image/ubfkCr70.jpg

haha brilliant.

my chinese (listening and speaking) does improve after a warm-up, so i'm probably being too hard on myself tbh.

your lengthy advice is ace. thanks heaps. i must owe you at least 12 beers by now.

i've ramped up the learning pretty sharply just recently (going to way more language groups, going to way more chinese cafes, have started weekly (2 hr session) one-on-ones with a proper teacher) and might be being a bit impatient. also, this might be my last year in the course for a number of reasons raging from (a) it's shit now to (b) they're losing funding to (c) my ~grand plans~ re the language (that i really can't discuss until/unless something real happens).

re practising answers to questions &c.: that's a thing i plan to do alone in the form of drills, then roll out when i feel confident enough to freeball my way through a broad range of relatively simple constructions. doubly so in my field of work.

lengthy/detailed posting on a phone is still pants btw

http://i.imgur.com/sF77BKh.png

这张专辑献给所有告诉我我将一无所成的老师
献给所有住在我楼上的，因为我为了挣钱养我的女儿而作违法的事叫警察来的那些人
献给所有正在挣扎中的兄弟们，你们懂得？

http://rudb.org/img/2010_04/i4bc56a1dbde8a.jpg

http://ohverlycritical.com/news/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/tumblr_luzr7x2ZlQ1r5blq2o1_400.jpg

it sounds like you're taking all the right steps. learning a language isn't a four year process, especially a language that offers you the following challenges:

1) completely unrelated to your mother tongue + tonal,

2) a writing system that requires years of study and maintenance-study of already learned material in order to approach even simple texts (as i think dyao said the fact is that study of written and spoken chinese are "separate disciplines" but to learn the language, you have to grind away at both of them),

3) there are lots of materials for studying mandarin compared to other languages but opportunities for exposure to and use of the language are few and far between and require dedicated seeking-out,

4) teaching of chinese as a foreign language is a relatively new thing and your teachers/tutors won't have much idea about acquisition of the language by foreign speakers and will mostly be flying blind/teaching the language to you like it was taught to them,

5) "chinese culture," and i mean the real difficulty of approaching a language esp the written language that's tied to a different culture and there's lots of necessary background study to grasp shit sometimes and also the emphasis placed on the chineseness of chinese, teachers trying to instruct you in the crazy bullshit idea of/glory of 5000 years of chinese history instead of things you actually need to know to communicate in mandarin chinese to normal people in 2013.

if you want something concrete to direct your energies toward, you could think about doing the hsk. it's easy to study for-- okay, not easy to study for but easy to know what to study, i mean, because there's lots of hsk material online. the hsk level 1 is probably too basic for you; level 2 is the last test that has pinyin for everything, so level 3 is probably what you'd want to shoot for unless you're feeling really ambitious: it has no romanization and it's the first level that has a writing component but it's still very approachable. the writing component is made up of short questions, rather than a lengthy composition. i think hsk 3 is doable with, i don't know, minimum 300-400 characters?

you are so great with the lengthy advice. beer/beer substitute forthcoming. i'm on a tram (out every night studying like a mad bastard atm) so can't reply fully but will chuck in these for now:

- i have hsk 2 and am going for 3 in september (and possibly 4 in china in april) – i can do around 1,300 chars and have maybe another 100 to make up for hsk 3

- the newness/immaturity of chinese instruction to laowai intersects nicely with the thing i can't talk about yet (if only this were ~secret borad~)

- two languages otm, and every single learner i have ever spoken to about this has excelled in one and lagged in the other

- i knew this language would be a slog when i embarked; occasionally i have a mini-meltdown but dust myself off pretty quickly

also just throwing in quickly that the single best thing about learning chinese is dealing with unbelievably friendly and warm and wonderful chinese/chinese-descended people who seem to be in abundance (even the apparently taciturn people open up like a flower when they know i'm learning 中文)

broke through the conversational wall in malaysia of all places. now i'm starting conversations like a trooper. i suspected it'd be a sudden jump and that's pretty much what it was, even though my speech is hacky in places. tonight in class i was ahead of a classmate whose ability left me flat-out intimidated last year.

it also helps to know that i can't understand some people merely because (a) they've got like a guangdong accent or something or (b) they talk too damn quickly, and that it's fine to just ask them to say it again.

cctv declares a crisis in chinese characters/fills their summer schedule with a 中国汉字听写大会/chinese character spelling bee.

only 30% of adults could correctly write "toad"/"癞蛤蟆" and even more excitement: http://news.china.com.cn/live/2013-08/01/content_21430735.htm

the contestants are kids... the 30% came from people playing along in the audience...

mark your calendars, august 2nd:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh7Arjm52Cw

http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XNTg5NDUxMzQ4.html

Oh god, measure words. This trimester's class is half the size of the last one, which is a lil' bleak, but I guess it's better to have smaller classes?

i'm not sure how i feel about teaching measure words. it usually teaches into an exam-focused exercise in drilling a list, without teaching how they actually function in spoken chinese/how they actually function in written chinese.

for spoken chinese at an informal + basic level, five or six tops are sorta necessary, and knowing how they work. they're easy to learn, though, and they look and sound nice in formalish spoken chinese and written stuff.

you know, even on the hsk, i believe, 玩儿 wánr is, like, given as the correct form. i've never really heard anyone, at least inside china (except in written form, where it does seem unusual to add the 儿 to words except when it's necessary or in literary works to show pronunciation, whatever), do without the rhotacization. so, it's really vexing to be corrected when i say
"你玩儿得开心吗？"
"玩."
"啊？"
"你玩得开心吗?"

same issue has happened with 聊天儿. i mean, first, it's in the damn rulebook of standard mandarin to add it! and it's not a local dialect quirk or something. adding an 儿 can change the meaning or tone of a word or a whole sentence. it's so strange to do away with it. southerners are barbarians.

i am going to defend my use of 儿 to the death.

Additionally, some words may sound unnatural without rhotacization....

otm, southerners give me a headache

there was a weird incident today, just bullshitting with someone, and they asked me something about learning chinese. i said, "i mean, it's all good but i find southern accents pretty hard to decipher. like, for example, i always have to remember that the pinyin initial n will be pronounced as l... like, bù kěnéng becomes bù kěléng." dude was just like, "nah, never heard of that" and pulled the same consonant switch in that very sentence.

and goddamnit, it still confuses me to have sh, zh, ch, etc. sounds elided to s, z, c. 那个，我不能吃 "nàge, wǒ bùnéng chī" suddenly becomes "làge, wǒ sì bùléng cī de la"

but that is mostly my perspective as a 2nd lang chinese speaker that has a hard time understanding unfamiliar deviations from standard mandarin. and the deviations are different if the speaker is from hunan or jiangxi or guizhou or guangdong and it can be hard to figure out what rules to listen by.

it's impressive and comforting that most people in the entire south, even if they got instruction in mandarin at school (and depending on where you are, the teacher will still be using either local dialect or something far from standard mandarin), mandarin is still a second language, which they didn't use at home, very likely don't use among friends, and don't necessarily use at work.

i can use mandarin to order in a restaurant and make small talk at a bus stop but both of us will be doing it in our second language. walking down the street, sitting in a restaurant listening to the conversations around me, i can only understand 40, 50% of what's being said, whereas in nanjing or beijing or even, say, xi'an, or, hey, even shanghai, it floats 75-90%, depending on the city.

what i'm saying is: years of studying chinese, a complete waste.

wow

fwiw i agree with you completely about the s/z/c thing. kills me, even though i know it's coming. the 'bù kěléng; thing i've not picked but will listen for it now.

'bù kěléng', even

Really wish my motivation to practice characters was higher // I wasn't taking so many other papers atm.

http://cantonese.ca/tonechart.gif

learning mandarin at first without a textbook and just picking it up and not knowing anything about tonal languages, it was quite obvious that certain words had a tonal quality in spoken chinese. or, like, i could hear that 你是哪国家的？nǐ shì nǎ guójiā de? even if i didn't know exactly what tones looked like on a graph, i could hear that 你 sounded like nǐ all the time and the 的 was spoken in a neutral tone and after hearing the sentence repeated and other common words from the sentence repeated, i had a good idea of what each tone sounded like, before ever being sat down and having māmámǎmà explained to me.

and when i've explained the four tones of mandarin to people new to the language, they pick it up quite quick and can produce the tones correctly in isolation, even if using tones while speaking eludes them maybe forever. with cantonese, for the life of me, i cannot distinguish between most of the tones, even when someone is speaking them to me in isolation, in order, very slowly. and in spoken conversation, i have even less hope.

for a speaker of a nontonal language, i feel like mandarin is approachable and it's a language that's easy or as easy as any other language to attain fluency in... but cantonese, i don't know.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/02/Cantonese_tones.svg/400px-Cantonese_tones.svg.png

w/ cantonese 6 and 4 are the hardest to distinguish between imo

real heads will tell you there's actually 9 cantonese tones

but it's actually the three flat tones (1, 3, 6) w/ some kind of clipped consonant ending i think

i've grown to love cantonese though... beautiful language to listen to

if you are an inveterate complainer, like i am, there is probably no better language to complain in than cantonese. people really get into it

right 9 tones, 9 tones... i don't even want to see where those other two fit into the diagrams above. there's enough!

although mandarin is fine and you can continue just speaking mandarin in guangzhou and communicate with everyone and soak up compliments about having a northern accent and standard mandarin,
it's 1) a good opportunity to learn another language, 2) definitely opens up new friendships and social opportunities, 3) shows that you care about the city and i definitely care about the city, 4) a vote of confidence no matter how inconsequential for the idea of linguistic diversity and what preserving local languages means-- and lots of cantonese feel passionately about their language/culture, 5) makes everyday life a bit easier.

my first goal is no longer whining to my friends when they switch to cantonese and i lose track of the conversation and have to say, "do you guys mind speaking MANDARIN????" and i feel like a boorish northerner.

Just done my second class of Intro Mandarin, I feel at the bottom of a very tall mountain. I'm trying to back up the classroom learning with Flashcards (Anki) and Pleco, downloading skritter right now. I'm trying to do a lot of listen and repeat right now, really trying to get comfortable with the tones, it seems to be pretty unforgiving if you don't get them right or at least close and just getting the ear settled into them is hard.

I feel its pretty daunting, when I've learnt european languages reading has always been the skill that has led the other ones, that doesn't seem to be an option in Chinese.

Teacher seems good though, native chinese speaker, firm on drilling the tones.

are you in melbourne now? where are you studying?

At the UniMelbourne CAE. I guess I should have asked for some advice before I picked it but it seems reasonable although at two hours a week I think I'll be learning this till doomsday.

hey, if you want to ilxmail me i can give you some fairly useful melb-related information re studying

...really trying to get comfortable with the tones, it seems to be pretty unforgiving if you don't get them right or at least close and just getting the ear settled into them is hard.

this might be me contradicting things i've said above but:

i hear foreigners and native speakers of other chinese languages speaking mandarin everyday with very lax attitude toward tones or speaking mandarin with tones realized in odd ways or with consistently "wrong" tones and they manage to be understood quite well and any misunderstanding is usually caused by non-standard pronunciation (or unusual word choice/grammar in rare cases).

the thing about "if you get the tones wrong, you might be telling your chinese friend to molest a camel instead of wishing him a happy birthday!" is not really true. you can get deep, deep in the chinese game without being able to tag words with tones.

it's good to know the tones and it is a tonal language goddamnit and don't forget it but even if you drill those tones into your head, it's a different world when you're trying to use the language and produce legit fresh language in your head rather than just reading a page of tonemarked pinyin.

this might contradict the above paragraphs again: correctly deploying tones when you get to the point of speaking chinese is fucking tough and it starts with grinding into your brain the correct tone for each word/character you learn. 我/wǒ/i needs to be carved in your mind as wǒ and not wo with a third tone-- if that makes sense! i think part of the reason that foreigners have a weird approach to tones has to do with standard pinyin romanization! i think it's cool that other romanization forms have different romanization for different toned syllables, like gwoyeu romatzyh!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwoyeu_Romatzyh

Most learners of Chinese now start with Hanyu Pinyin, which Chao himself believed easier to learn than GR. Chao believed that the benefit of GR was to make tonal differences more salient to learners: “GR makes the spelling more complicated, but gives an individuality to the physiognomy of words, with which it is possible to associate meaning … As an instrument of teaching, tonal spelling has proved in practice to be a most powerful aid in enabling the student to grasp the material with precision and clearness.”

that's what i wanted to say: tones are hard to learn working with pinyin and it takes a lot of work to overcome that. and i still struggle with deploying correct tones and attaching tones to words, even after half a decade learning chinese.

correctly deploying tones when you get to the point of speaking chinese is fucking tough and it starts with grinding into your brain the correct tone for each word/character you learn.

indeed, but over time you can also adapt pretty well to hearing and remembering tones. brains are incredible that way.

ed, you won't get it in a week or a month, but with persistence it'll come. having the tones ground into you now is an excellent starting point imo.

i have a load of chinese-learner friends who pick up a lot of their tones by just saying certain words the way they've always heard them, rather than trying to consciously break down the tones.

Oh hey, had the final test for my Chinese paper today & I think I managed to not fail the course after a rough run w/things mid-semester; cramming in the library for 8-10 hours per day for a week giving myself blisters writing out characters paid off and you start to get that giddy feeling when you can figure things out from phonetic or semantic components or w/e (+ the "why haven't I been writing characters on the regular w/a decent daily routine zzz" etc).

Anyway, glad this thread exists; helped me through some pretty bleak wtf-am-I-doing moments.

excellent!

i guess i overlooked a big part of tones, which is learning to hear tones
that's a big thing

listen to double A

if any of you learners are keeping at this, get yourself on a scholarship. i'm in tianjin having the best and most rewarding time of my life. dooo eeet.

You enjoying some 狗不理包子 mate

i almost went there yesterday! going back late next week though (to beijing/qianmen)

It's not a place it's a food

oh! because there's a place called 狗不理 that sells 包子

Yeah it's named after the 狗不理包子　

The food

oh crap i just worked out what you're talking about. a friend was even 'oh you're going to tianjin! 狗不理 is a thing there, you must try it' and i've since got my wires crossed

cheers for uncrossing my wires, and for planning tomorrow's delicious dinner

Yeah I bet you don't need to go to that place to have delicious 狗不理包子

Just go to any stall on the street

this is good, AA. how long are you going to be in china?

how's the air? how long have you been there? have you stumbled on any underground 相声 clubs? how's your language level improved?

Oh, nice, AA! Who's the scholarship through / how long are you there for?

I didn't fail the course, though I got the fourth worst mark in the class on the oral exam, hue. Keeping on w/it next year + doing a 20thC Chinese lit paper involving translation, guessing there's a bunch of Lu Xun in my future. Hopefully the rest of my marks keep me in the running for any potential scholarship things.

Skritter and eating at dainty Sichuan has enabled me to dazzle my class mates by ordering 干煸 四季豆 合 家乡 泡菜 合 尖椒 牛仔骨 during the class on restaurant ordering last night. I haven't actually tried this in a restaurant yet but probably should.

what is the 狗不理 in 狗不理包子?

You should definitely order the first one

Pro tip you don't need to have any spaces at all in between your character groups

Nobody really knows

It's like asking "why are snickerdoodles called snickerdoodles"

good tip, I was wondering about that.

What is the pinyin for 狗不理?

gǒu bù lǐ

based on my ham fisted translation best not to speculate.

乒乓: thx for tip. last night 10 of us went to a 狗不理 place near 和平路 station. bloody delicious.

dylannn: until the 15th. back to beijing this tuesday iirc. yesterday the air was up to 380 wotsits on the magic 污染 index but it's back below 100 now. not seen (or heard of tbh) underground 相声 places but some of the group ended up at a slightly terrifying massage parlour flat. my language level has exploded: on the second day (alone in beijing) i didn't speak a word of english (i.e. only chinese all day), and now i'm understanding some people some of the time. sometimes i find myself lapsing into chinese because it's easier, which is a fantastic surprise. nobody has chronically misunderstood my chinese yet.

etc: i shat it in on that hsk 3 exam i thought i'd fail, and china hanban gave me this, with tjnu hosting the whole shebang. the scholarship lasts 10 days, but i added an extra few days to wing it alone.

oh and etc, don't let shit get you down. speaking/listening is a silent killer.

oh god, it's 10.45 pm and i'm still wandering and typing

oh, 'how long have you been there': since friday last week

such a short amount of time but good that you got your chance to employ mandarin in its native environment.

got a chance, i mean.

now you'll want to go back!

i already want to come back!

right now i'm on top of tianjin tower and i seem to have worn out a load of 25 year olds

fuck. that was one of the best days of my whole life. when i have to say goodbye to the tjnu friends i've made i am going to cry like a god damned baby.

i came to china with zero interest in the country, its history, nothin, and i've never been able to permanently leave.

what has the setup been for classes or whatever? how much chance for on-the-street improvisational speaking/listening have you gotten?

http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/language-difficulty

Lol Chinese is basically the hardest language you can learn as a native English speaker

japanese is the hardest -_-

dylannn: your story is fantastic. how long have you been there now?

we have classes in the mornings and solid mentor time in the afternoons. the classes are great but feel a bit token; it's the mentoring that has really made this worthwhile. all the mentors volunteered, and push us really hard (i even speak to a few of them on wechat until 11 pm/midnight every day). they take us to various places around the city, but where we're going almost doesn't matter at all.

on top of that stuff, some of us spend all our spare time (which is usually after 7 pm, and skipping the odd tjnu-provided lunch/dinner) going out and finding as many opportunities as we can to speak to people. almost everyone in tianjin seems to know no english at all, so every encounter is a learning experience. i've been going out alone heaps, too; my only downtime is sleep, which is about 6 hrs a night atm.

my first time in china was 2006 and i've lived four years outside china since then, i think-- something like that.

based on this visit, could you ever see yourself living in china?

'er indoors has plans in aus so it's not likely, but otherwise i'd do it in a heartbeat. i'll definitely come back for months at a time, work/study here for extended periods, etc.

i.e. i've a feeling tjnu is about to flog us some language courses, which would be just brilliant for say 1–3 months.

i think i'll probably make the leap to beijing early next year. i don't really want to but every reasonable job offer i've received in the last six months has been beijing-based. come back soon.

i'll say something about learning mandarin:

outside of the northeast, dialect and local language and indigenous weirdness with regard to the pronunciation of mandarin has always been an issue. in guangzhou, it was less of an issue than i thought it would be. maybe because everyone treats cantonese as very distinct from mandarin, mutually intelligible and when people switch into mandarin, there's less of a tendency to borrow in cantonese phrases or pronunciation. so, you get a lot of young people codeswitching between pure cantonese and an actually really textbook mandarin that sounds cctv quality minus rhotacization. and even with older people that might function in cantonese 99% of the time and consume mainly cantonese-language media, it's easy to catch the pattern of grammatical quirks and nonstandard pronunciation that native cantonese speakers slip into when speaking mandarin. maybe it has to do with a lot of internal migration to guangdong and mandarin always acting as the lingua franca of people with their own local and mutually unintelligible languages.

back in my new home of shanxi right now, the local language might be as distinct as cantonese is from mandarin, but the jin language is never described as anything but a dialect of mandarin. cantonese is rightfully treated as a language separate from and mutually unintelligible with modern standard mandarin, while jin is usually treated as a dialect of mandarin. and geographically, the south is far away from the lands where modern standard mandarin is treated as the local language, while jin is spoken right on the doorstep of beijing and the northeast.

in shanxi now, you've got people speaking a mandarin-influenced version of jin that's basically removed the entering tone (marked by syllables with a consonant final, still a major feature of cantonese and min and other languages but not present in any dialects of mandarin) and phonological differences like split up single syllable words, and then some people speaking straight jin with its consonant finals and profoundly distinct from mandarin tonal character preserved.

anyways, unlike cantonese, jin is not really treated by locals as a language that's distinct from and mutually unintelligible with mandarin, and there's nothing like the same pride in or interest in preserving or producing media in jin.

what i'm saying is, it's startling to arrive in a city five hours away from beijing by train and discovering that everyone is still speaking a language mutally unintelligible with mandarin and i often have no idea what the hell people are saying to me.

As mentioned above, Jin preserves the entering tone category from Late Middle Chinese. In addition to this feature, Jin dialects tend to have a tone-sandhi system that differs significantly from that of Standard Mandarin. This is one reason given to support the position of Chen (2004) in classifying Jin as a separate language. Specifically, the Jin dialects have a sandhi system that depends on the grammatical structure of the phrase. Typically, there are three possible types: Subject-predicate or verb-object forms as one, reduplication as another and everything else taking a third form.

http://phonemica.net/page?name=recordings&sub=languages&fy=jin

if the glottal stops aren't enough, here's TONE SANDHI THAT CHANGES BASED ON THE GRAMMATICAL STRUCTURE OF THE SENTENCE

here's TONE SANDHI THAT CHANGES BASED ON THE GRAMMATICAL STRUCTURE OF THE SENTENCE

x_x

i'm going back with 'er indoors in april, and hopefully again later in the year for a summer or winter 4–6 week course (the current plan is for tjnu but i'm open to options). by the end i had hooked up with all my tjnu friends on wechat (utterly utterly indispensable, wechat), and even though i've gone back home we're still talking for hours every day.

re accents, tones, dialects &c.: that hurts, even where i was in the northeast. in beijing i could have a perfectly normal and reasonably detailed discussion with one person (e.g. the time i had a cold and spoke to a pharmacist about my symptoms) and completely fail with another (e.g. one time i bought meat on a stick, of all things) due to the heaps strong beijing accent. because i'm not used to 北京话 it's still all 'warrarr-arr-arrarr' to my ears.

tianjin was generally a bit harder for me because a lot of people just stuck with the local dialect. one day in a park an old bloke came up to us and talked for like 10 minutes, but even my tianjin-born tjnu friends couldn't really understand what he was saying, so there seems to be some generational breadth in the dialect as well.

perhaps a lot of the successful exchanges were down to people leaning into 普通话 for my sake, so the unsuccessful ones were probably down to people who weren't up to that or couldn't be bothered.

also, we ate literally sixty eight billion 狗不理包子, and i did stumble on a handful of 相声 clubs but didn't go in.

tone sandhi that changes based on etc etc: oh god. like standard chinese isn't hard enough already.

http://blog.angryasianman.com/2013/12/that-funny-chinese-homework-assignment.html

Can anyone recommend a good mandarin grammar reference? Book, App, website whatever.

The texts I have from my course don't really cut it when I want to remind myself of sentence construction.

chinese grammar wiki?
http://resources.allsetlearning.com/chinese/grammar/

what text are you using, out of curiosity

http://resources.allsetlearning.com/chinese/grammar/Yale_Chinese_Usage_Dictionary

cgw also includes an index to the yale chinese usage dictionary

It's something produced by the Centre for Adult Education here in Melbourne. I like my teacher but the course leaves a little to be desired. Given I'm not working, I can study more than others so I could hack something a bit more intense.

I'll check out those links, Thanks.

Keepin' on keepin' on; still around the lower half of the class re: language (still not putting enough time in actual conversation or writing characters) but doing really well in the lit paper - while I've got the worst Mandarin in the class, having read more modernist novels/plays/poetry than the rest of the class combined gives me an edge in the "into English" part of things compared to the Taiwanese exchange students looking for a blowoff class; it's given me a lot of practise looking characters up by stroke order. Idioms are p.rough, though.

Might be able to get a CI scholarship to head to Xiamen for a semester next year, if I play my cards right.

AA, how hard was HSK L3 compared to what you'd been learning in yr classes?

Just signed up for HSK L1. Feeling pretty good about my skills relative to others in my class but still at a really really basic level.

I was in a chinese supermarket the other day looking for some 甜面酱 and realised I don't even know how to say 'Where is the...' or 'Can you help me find...'. I have now learnt 这儿有没有....

So many things to learn.

etc what sort of works are you reading for class? i was in the same situation too when it came to 400level chinese lang classes - content was modern chinese lit where we had a discussion at the start of class, paper to write etc. i struggled hard in the language part of it, preparing my supposedly off-the-cuff remarks for the discussion, but being familiar with literary language in engl and having contemporary literature as something i knew about made it easier and less awkward and easier to predict what questions the prof would toss out.

go to xiamen, too.

Translation from Chinese workshop stuff: Lu Xun's preface to Call To Arms & Kong Yiji, Cao Yu's Thunderstorm, and we'll be doing Mu Shiying's Ye; stuff already translated to English has been Yu Dafu's Sinking (which ... whoa), Ling Shuhua's The Night of Mid‐autumn Festival, a bunch of poetry from the era (Wen Yiduo's "Dead Water" is the only one I already knew), and we've got stuff from Shi Zhicun, Mao Dun, Lao She, Ding Ling and Zhang Ailing coming up (+ general coverage of May 4th writing). First assignment was translating some poetry which I was pretty happy to do; currently finishing off translating the last part of Kong Yiji which has been pretty rough re: my poor Mandarin + figuring out idioms/etc; last time I read the story in English was two or three months ago and I'm not going back to look at it again so as not to defeat the purpose, but I'm often going through multiple dictionaries trying to suss out character combinations/idioms (or figuring out, uh, spatial stuff - IIRC at the end he's below the counter w/his legs wrecked, but does 门槛 mean he's in the doorway, or near the sill of the counter, etc ...). Not being familiar w/frequently used stuff like 便 is a pain, too.

The uni's Chinese Language Club organised this "Cheers Chinese" thing on Fri where a bunch of us (students of Chinese and Chinese students, as it were) sat around talking for 10mins in Mandarin and 10mins in English; a little bit musical chairs-y but really good for actually forcing conversation (or at least drinking), which I'm in p.dire need of. Talked to a rad dude from 福州市 who also recommended heading to Xiamen while getting teased by the northerners for his accent. Also talked a little bit about music (I'd interviewed 唐朝乐队 via a translator a few months back); one of the girls was excited that I knew about G-Dragon and, uh, the Cranberries.

Dreading the mid-terms that start tomorrow. This year's 京剧 equivalent seems to be 兵马俑.

word. when i got to more advanced authentic literature, it was past the point of having someone explain small grammatical elements, so things that crop up in earlier (esp early vernacular works, anything written before the 40s on the mainland-- and lots of taiwanese or diaspora work or cod-classical writing or stuff that tries to go for a classical tone). so yeah stuff like 便, you end up learning how it works only by reading.

spatial stuff is still an issue, too. it can be skimmed over usually in reading but translating things makes it especially hard because maybe writing in english it's more common to be more specific about where things are in space or something....

English is definitely prepositionally more diverse imo - things are always in, on of, about, under, over, out, etc

That NYT article about how languages affect our brains (sorry that was really vague - think Sapir-whorf style analysis) confirmed this I think. It was from a few years ago

门槛 i think right away of the threshold step-over thing in chinese doorways, so if he's on 门槛上, i feel like he's on the thing. but not always.

狗尿苔怎么也不明白，他只是爬上柜盖要去墙上闻气味，木橛子上的油瓶竟然就掉了。

这可是青花瓷，一件老货呀!婆说她嫁到古炉村的时候，家里装豆油的就一直是这瓶子，这瓶子的成色是山上的窑场一百年来都再烧不出来了。狗尿苔是放稳了方几的，在方几上又放着个小板凳，才刚刚爬上柜盖，墙上的木橛咔嚓就断了，眼看着瓶子掉下去，成了一堆瓷片。

婆在门槛上梳头，她的头发还厚实，但全白了，梳一会就要从梳子上取下一些脱发，绕一绕，塞到门框边的墙缝里。墙缝里已经塞有一小团一小团的头发窝子，等着自行车上架着货筐的来声在村口的石狮子前一吆喝，他便能拿着去换炝锅糖了。哐啷一响，婆问：咋啦?狗尿苔说：油瓶掉啦。婆头上还别着梳子跑进来，顺手拿门后的笤帚打他。打了一笤帚，看见地上的一摊油，忙用勺子往碟子里拾，拾不净，拿手指头蘸，蘸上一点了便刮在碟沿上，直到刮得不能再刮了，油指头又在狗尿苔的嘴上一抹。狗尿苔伸舌头舔了。婆说：碎爷呀，就这点油了，你给我打碎了?狗尿苔说：我去闻气味，它就掉下来了。婆说：闻啥气味，哪儿有啥气闻?!狗尿苔说：有气味，我闻到着一种气味

他只是爬上柜盖要去墙上闻气味，木橛子上的油瓶竟然就掉了 = he'd only been searching for the scent, climbing to the top of the shelf to find it, when the bottle of oil hanging on the peg had suddenly fallen. but 去墙上 sort of makes no sense translated, so i skip it. how do you say he was climbing up the wall? was it a wall with a top, maybe? or just a regular wall that meets a ceiling. again, i get it but trying to actually break it down into english, it gets unclear.

and look another situation of 门槛上. 婆在门槛上梳头....

and 便! 他便能拿着去换炝锅糖了.

i hate chinese characters in italics

狗尿苔怎么也不明白，他只是爬上柜盖要去墙上闻气味，木橛子上的油瓶竟然就掉了。

　　这可是青花瓷，一件老货呀!婆说她嫁到古炉村的时候，家里装豆油的就一直是这瓶子，这瓶子的成色是山上的窑场一百年来都再烧不出来了。狗尿苔是放稳了方几的，在方几上又放着个小板凳，才刚刚爬上柜盖，墙上的木橛咔嚓就断了，眼看着瓶子掉下去，成了一堆瓷片。

　　婆在门槛上梳头，她的头发还厚实，但全白了，梳一会就要从梳子上取下一些脱发，绕一绕，塞到门框边的墙缝里。墙缝里已经塞有一小团一小团的头发窝子，等着自行车上架着货筐的来声在村口的石狮子前一吆喝，他便能拿着去换炝锅糖了。哐啷一响，婆问：咋啦?狗尿苔说：油瓶掉啦。婆头上还别着梳子跑进来，顺手拿门后的笤帚打他。打了一笤帚，看见地上的一摊油，忙用勺子往碟子里拾，拾不净，拿手指头蘸，蘸上一点了便刮在碟沿上，直到刮得不能再刮了，油指头又在狗尿苔的嘴上一抹。狗尿苔伸舌头舔了。婆说：碎爷呀，就这点油了，你给我打碎了?狗尿苔说：我去闻气味，它就掉下来了。婆说：闻啥气味，哪儿有啥气闻?!狗尿苔说：有气味，我闻到着一种气味。

Ooh, thanks. Which reminds me...

oh, i think this looks sort of interesting, too.

An Anatomy of Chinese:Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics

it could be terrible but perry link is reasonably trustworthy.

― dylannn, Thursday, 22 August 2013 17:14 (7 months ago)

Did you end up reading this?

perry link isn't trustworthy. what was i talking about.

it's good but clunky. he's good when he confines himself to tracing chinese literary or linguistic forms up to the present and the way they're still found in modern chinese. some of the analyses of modern political language in china are interesting-ish. his points about modern chinese as the result of a maoist restructuring are stupid but actually common among academics that came of academic age before the opening up of the country.

I have a strange request. I volunteer at a steam railway and we get a lot of chinese visitors. We often let them come into the cab and take photos, even ride in the cab sometimes. I'd love to be able to point out the controls and other parts of the loco in mandarin.

I'm looking fora diagram that labels the controls in mandarin so I can learn what they are. I've tried searching the chinese web but don't know enough terms to do so. To date I've been working with the dictionary to try and translate the terms but have no idea if Im getting them right.

I'm looking for diagrams like this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_locomotive#Basic_form
http://i59.tinypic.com/245lkph.png

any help finding an equivalent much appreciated

http://wenku.baidu.com/view/75f5c61714791711cc7917ed.html

33 pages of railway vocab

i'll keep looking for a diagram. but if that's the exact diagram you want, i'll translate those terms/look up those terms and give them to you to make your own diagram, if you want.

Wow, that is pretty much exactly what I wanted. Actually way more comprehensive than I wanted. A diagram would be helpful but don't sweat it.

I actually started looking at chinese second hand bookstores and found many copies of many editions of 蒸汽机车乘务员手册, presumably produced for chinese railways over the years. All for 10-20元 No idea how I would order up a copy and get it shipped.

googling for things like 铁路机车 驾驶室 图表 brings up results for similar diagrams in german, english... but no chinese language version of similar. so one might not exist on the internet, i dunno.

Challenge now is creating a baidu account so I can download the text file. I've got as far as having to do a verification using a text message and can't get it to and to either my Australian or US numbers.

They might charge you money to download the document even if you do get registered

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/05/23/what-its-like-to-live-in-china-and-speak-the-devil-language/

Not sure if this has been discussed before. The Nation piece has given me a bit more impetus to start learning traditional characters. I have been thinking that trad characters might be easier a lot of the logic of the characters seems to get lost when simplified.

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/17/u-s-professors-call-on-colleges-to-re-evaluate-confucius-institutes/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

http://www.thenation.com/print/article/176888/china-u

eh leaving aside the way that character simplification is discussed in the china u piece.

if you know enough simplified characters to be able to sit down and read a text comfortably, you will probably be able to figure out a similar text written in traditional characters. the more obscure characters you'd have to look up probably weren't simplified.

i never made a serious attempt to learn traditional characters and i'd still rather read a text in simplified characters and write simplified characters but i can read traditional characters just fine.

Unable to read the classics except in versions translated and interpreted in the PRC, cut off from the dissident and popular literature of other Chinese communities, students in CI courses cannot even access “the large and growing corpus of material on Communist Party history, infighting, and factionalism written by mainlanders but published exclusively in Hong Kong and Taiwan,” Churchman argues. Rather, they are subject to the same policies of language standardization (Mandarin) and literacy (simplified characters) by which the regime seeks to control what can and cannot be discussed in China.

this is very wrong.

9 GREAT REASONS NEVER TO FOCUS ON LEARNING TRADITIONAL CHARACTERS

1. you'll end up learning all the traditional characters you need from movie subtitles, karaoke subtitles, old books-- end up learning enough to read them, and there's no reason to learn to write them.
2. traditional characters are hard to read on a computer or phone screen and we should just stop using them online.
3. if you're in a chinese program of some sort, you'll probably be learning simplified characters anyway, whether your teacher is a confucius institute cadre or not. are you planning on going to school in taiwan? maybe it's worth it then.
4. if you're in a chinese program of some sort, you're going to be writing a lot by hand and it's a bitch writing traditional characters by hand, and you're going to forget everything you learn anyways but you'll forget less if you're trying not to forget 书写 instead of 書寫.
5. the same people that don't use simplified characters also won't use pinyin, so i tend not to trust them and i won't ever use bopomofo or cangjie or whatever it is they're doing.
6. how about you just go all the way back to oracle bone script? the world has moved on.
7. taiwan BANNED simplified characters until, like, a few years ago-- but the prc never banned traditional characters, they just started using simplified characters because they're better for most things.
8. knowing enough to read texts in traditional characters if you already have a good knowledge of simplified characters is a snap. by the time you learn enough characters in simplified or traditional that it will matter, you'll be able to figure things out.
9. whatever, even if you learn simplified characters and all of a sudden you're only reading rare early texts or taiwanese literature or hong kong menus or something, you'll pick it up fast enough.

10. when taiwan is liberated, the whole issue will be moot

To be frank, Chinese texts about Tiananmen/CCP skeletons/infighting/factionalism etc. is also among the texts most likely to be translated into English

Haven't heard of Chinese classics being censored, are the versions of Plum in the Golden Vase more licentious and racy down in HK and Taiwan?

AA, how hard was HSK L3 compared to what you'd been learning in yr classes?

― etc, Wednesday, 9 April 2014 12:45 (2 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it was about level because that's where my classes were at that point. hsk 3 is more words and faster speaking, but not overwhelmingly complex. best way to know for sure is to do a practice exam. did you end up sitting hsk 3?

re traditional characters: i could not be arsed with them until i went to taiwan last month. going from china (where i could read most things) to taiwan (where i could read bugger-all) convinced me to at least learn some basic traditional so i wouldn't be so confused by everything (and as a bonus taiwan publishes loads of decent comic books and ~uncensored~ everything else). if you narrow down the list to just those characters which don't merely have a different radical it's not that big an undertaking, but imo you should be comfortable with simplified first.

I passed my HSK Level 1

Can't sit HSK until ... December? They only run the tests twice per year here, April & Nov/Dec. Wouldn't have been prepared to have sat it earlier, but I've got a lighter courseload coming up, will be looking to head to China next year (Xiamen? Tianjin? Wuhan? Need to get onto applications &c once I've had my final exam on the 30th) , and felt like I salvaged the first half of the year after doing p.badly in the midterms - ended up falling asleep to visions of writing 懂 &c. Trying to make more of an effort to grab some Mandarin-only children's books from the local library, watch some random TV shows a language buddy has given me.

Our textbooks show traditional characters alongside simplified in the vocal lists, which is nice. Ran across Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora while browsing in the library; looks interesting + covers a bunch of Malaysian-Chinese writers I know v.little about.

excellent

this new utterly essential site appeared the other day: http://characterpop.com/

Hey dylannn, you know anything about the Guangdong University of Foreign Studies as a place to study Mandarin / in general?

Got to blag my way into this this conference due to a friend speaking at it; had no idea about Gu Cheng in NZ - written out of local literary history.

That site's really fun, AA!

That site is great, I've actually been thinking a lot recently about how characters break down and wondering with the was a neat way of exploring characters. Now there is.

i know people that went/go there but i don't know anything about it!

i'm of the belief that studying chinese as a foreign language anywhere in china will suck pretty much equally.

by that i mean i don't think a lot of study in china programmes are useful and have effective committed teachers that understand teaching chinese and most of the benefit would be from just being in china and immersed for a while.

so instead of saying they equally suck, i should have said they are all of about equal value but choose based on what city you will have the most fun in.

but yeah go study mandarin in china. for sure. even if the actual school situation might not be ideal.

the thing is miss about living in china most is being able to speak in chinese. i miss the feel of it, the interesting situations it led to and all that but also just the feel of speaking it, the way things can be expressed in chinese but not english sometimes or the way you work toward the same expression in another language and the way it seemed like i was talking from a different part of my brain, the feel of my mouth while speaking it. i just agreed tto some serious translation work, a story in a clt anthology and a novel so i'm looking at chinese all day all day but i do miss speaking it.

if you want to see characters broken down get WENLIN

for the main example from characterpop

你

you get to learn that 你 is

From 亻(人 rén) 'person' and 尔 ěr 'you'.
Etymologically 你 nǐ is a "colloquial variation" of 尔(爾) ěr; the two sounds nǐ and ěr both derive from ancient nzie (--Karlgren).

which you can follow through to learn more about 尔/爾

Which came first, 尔 or 爾?
Wieger cites this explanation for 尔:
“从入丨八, 会意。八者气之分也。”
Then 爾 came from 尔 (phonetic), 巾 ( = 两 a balance) and 爻爻 weights on both sides, to give the meaning "symmetry, harmony of proportions".
Karlgren(1923) says of the form 爾, "...original sense and hence explanation of character uncertain", and considers 尔 an abbreviation.
The pronunciation was once something like nzie. This produced both ěr and nǐ, the latter written 你 nǐ, which is the modern word for 'you'. Now 尔 is only used in a few adverbs and archaic expressions, and in foreign loan words.

and 好 shows the same notes and has pictures of pre standardized writings of the character

and you can also click through to characters containing 你 as a component (您 obv) and 孬 for characters containing 好 as a component

and you can check for words/compounds containing 你 or 好 ex.:

重修旧好[--舊-] chóngxiūjiùhǎo f.e. renew cordial relations; become reconciled
创三好[創--] chuàng sānhǎo v.o. 〈PRC〉 achieve the three goods of ideology, academics, and work
六好职工[--職-] liù hǎo zhígōng n. 〈PRC〉 a worker in the commercial sector who has done well in six key areas M:ge/¹míng/²wèi
绿林好汉[綠--漢] lùlínhǎohàn n. ①forest outlaws ②bandits entrenched in a mountain stronghold M:ge/¹míng/²wèi
结秦晋之好[結-晉--] jié Qín-Jìnzhīhǎo v.p. marriage between two families
干你屁事 gān nǐ pìshì 〈derog.〉 v.p. It's none of your business; What has that got to do with you?
真有你的 zhēn yǒu nǐ de intj. 〈coll.〉 You're really something!

Deadline for exchange applications in tomorrow; going to pick a destination for six months then decide whether to stay put or relocate (also depending on CI scholarships). Main value is getting over there and hopefully immersing myself / not getting stuck in an expat bubble while getting the NZ govt to pay for things, tbh. Dropped a math paper this semester to give myself more time to spent on Mandarin, spending more time reading/writing so far but need to get speaking.

Grabbed some random TV shows (+ uh ChineseP0d stuff) to practice listening w/Mandarin subs assuming I can get into a routine - 北京青年, 爱情公寓, & 魔幻手机. IDK, picked pretty much at random. My 2002 Nokia brick is starting to fritz out; guess I shld investigate smartphones for pleco/Skritter or w/e.

My lecturer wrote something on 小时代 ... can't tell from the article whether the vibe is more Gossip Girl or Tao Lin.

Backing away slowly from
"The cultural class is an optional course which is open once every two weeks. The topics include Kong-fu, Hands-on (e.g. calligraphy, making dumplins, tea ceremony, mahjong, Peking Opera Masks Painting), Chinese Idioms, Lecture Series (e.g. Culture behind Characters, History of Shanghai, Chinese Modern Society, Movie Industry, Traditional Customs, etc.). The students can select the courses in the first week. The cultural course with less than 15 applicants will not be opened."

小时代 is definitely more Gossip Girl than Tao Lin

I've been reading 'Brothers' by Yu Hua in translation, not sure how I feel about it yet but I'm getting the sense that Chinese literature doesn't translate that well into english. Anyway at some point during the narrative Song Gang looks for something in his 'dictionary of aphorisms'. A few questions

1) Aphorisms - 成语？
2) How relevant is learning 成语 to learning 汉语？

Some unrelated questions.

1) I can't seem to get a proper job right now some I'm thinking about an intensive mandarin course in China. Any thoughts or advice on where to go, who to do it with or what to look for?
2) What are chinese equivalent sites for tripadvisor and photo sharing sites such as flickr/instagram etc.?

Talking of TV shows, can you recommend anything with really basic or repetitive language? I occasionally watch 非诚勿扰 on SBS and I'm starting to pick things up because the themes and questions are really repetitive. Possibly I should just find dora the explorer, I picked up a fare amount of dutch from that when I was broadcasting Nickelodeon NL.

one of my univ chin100 classes was all about chengyu, so i have those couple dozen most common ones in my head, and they pop up all the time in all kinds of writing. unfamiliar chengyu are sometimes easy to decipher within context or they'll be a seemingly random grouping of four characters. i'd say... you'll remember some, guess some, google a few, and skim over a lot.

when i write in chinese, i never deploy chengyu, but when i let a native speaker edit my writing, they'll invariably insert a few in instances where a chengyu is commonly used to describe what i've spread across an entire sentence worth of characters.

Thanks, fancy sharing your dozen or so? There's a couple of skritter lists, one seems to be based on textual analysis of chinese newspapers and is a little on the large size. There's a few smaller ones; how does your mental list mesh with this one?

http://www.skritter.com/vocab/list?list=276970241

I guess I could just share the list:

//成语: some basic and easy to use chengyu /March 2013
心满意足	xīnmǎnyìzú	perfectly contented; perfectly satisfied
无论如何	wúlùn rúhé	no matter what; anyhow; anyway; in any case
苦尽甘来	kǔjìngānlái	sweetness comes after bitterness; the hard times are over and the good times are just beginning
不知不觉	bù zhī bù jué	unconsciously; unwittingly
丰富多彩	fēngfùduōcǎi	richly colorful; rich and varied
老马识途	lǎomǎshítú	lit. an old horse knows the way; an old hand knows the ropes; experience is valuable
骑虎难下	qíhǔnánxià	lit. if you ride a tiger, it's hard to get off; impossible to stop halfway
狗改不了吃屎	gǒugǎibùliǎochīshǐ	a leopard cannot change its spots
一路平安	yílùpíng'ān	have a safe journey; bon voyage
乱七八糟	luànqībāzāo	at sixes and sevens; everything in disorder (idiom); in an awful mess; in a hideous mess
一毛不拔	yìmáobùbá	(saying) stingy; miserly; parsimonious
礼尚往来	lǐshàngwǎnglái	courtesy requires reciprocity
生老病死	shēnglǎobìngsǐ	birth, age, illness, and death
孤掌难鸣	gūzhǎngnánmíng	(literally) a lone hand cannot clap; hard to achieve by oneself
入乡随俗	rùxiāng suísú	when in Rome, do as the Romans do; (literally) when you enter a village, follow the local customs
谈何容易	tánhéróngyì	easier said than done
胡说八道	húshuōbādào	to talk nonsense
虎头蛇尾	hǔtóushéwěi	a fine start and a poor finish
一分价钱一分货	yìfēnjiàqiányìfēnhuò	you get what you pay for
二话不说	èrhuàbùshuō	without delay
不由自主	bùyóuzìzhǔ	can't help (doing something); involuntarily; ;
愚公移山	yúgōngyíshān	old man moves mountains (idiom); where there's a will, there's a way
杀鸡给猴看	shājīgěihóukàn	make an example out of someone to frighten others
不醉不归	búzuìbùguī	not return without getting drunk
心甘情愿	xīngānqíngyuàn	totally willing; perfectly happy to
妻管严	qīguǎnyán	hen-pecked
妻管严	qīguǎnyán	hen-pecked

Typically a chengyu is associated with a story (i.e. 画蛇添足), phrases like "无论如何" are more accurately classified as four-character vocab words imo

1) For language programs, how long? Think the typical intensive programs like Princeton in Beijing, Harvard in Beijing, ACC, and IUP are all very good

It's worth going to one where students are actually serious about keeping language pledges, all of the above attract quality students

CTrip has reviews although a Chinese person's standard of what's acceptable may be lower than an equivalent Westerner's

Haven't used eLong in a while but that's another choice

For Flickr/Instagram, you can try nipic maybe? I don't know of any instagram equivalent, most photo sharing my friends do is over WeChat

how is this going for you all?

i just spent a week in china with the express purpose of speaking no english. day one was horrifying but the last few days were incredible.

oh and i failed hsk4 because my listening's shit. so there's that. listening is now my last big roadblock so i'm throwing everything i can at it atm, and restarting tutoring in december. also studying to attempt hsk5 next year (should be able to leapfrog hsk4 if i can sort out my 听力).

I've been using pop-up chinese to work on my listening. The free stuff is on iTunes, I haven't stumped for a paid account yet.

http://popupchinese.com
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/popup-chinese/id292036117?mt=2

Had a brief break after my (shaky) EOY Mandarin stuff to deal w/my other courses; now I've got the summer to study/practise before heading to Guangzhou in Feb to study for at least one semester.

Where in China did you go, AA, and did you travel in a group or solo?

Cheers AA, haven't heard from you in a while and was wondering where you ended up on this

Good luck w/ the HSK4 and drill those tones

sup AA????
probably not being in a sinophone country the listening is the hardest part. as much as my spoken chinese slides, i think living in china for those years has stuck the ability to hear + understand chinese in my head.
and yeah where did you go / what did you do?

cheers 龜. i'll keep hacking at vocabulary while i get my listening sorted, so i should be able to pass hsk5 and 6 on a pretty normal line of progression.

etc:

before heading to Guangzhou in Feb to study for at least one semester.

oh man, that will be incredible. guangdong university of foreign studies?

Where in China did you go, AA, and did you travel in a group or solo?

solo. went to beijing and shanghai because that's how the flights worked out, but also beijing is my equal favourite city in the world atm.

dylannn:

probably not being in a sinophone country the listening is the hardest part.

it is incredible how quickly my listening improves while i'm there. i've only started watching ~television~ in the last couple of months because it's only recently that i've understood enough speech to build on.

i think living in china for those years has stuck the ability to hear + understand chinese in my head.

did you find that getting over that listening hump was a permanent achievement? obv there's stuff like vocabulary and accents to deal with, but do you feel now like the basic comprehension part is a skill you won't lose?

and yeah where did you go / what did you do?

i stayed out of tourist areas nearly the whole time and tried to find ways of having conversations. the most successful was on the 高铁 when a passenger saw my study books and insisted on making me talk for 2–3 hours straight. the scariest was when i was fully hit on in a cruising park (i didn't know it was a cruising park) and had to 说中文 my way out of it. everything else feel between those two points and the whole thing was just brilliant.

dylannn i'm sure you know this all too well, but all I needed to do was say '你好' or buy a ticket or order a basic dish and complete strangers would light up. i had so many conversations just by saying something really simple within earshot of a local.

what do you love about beijing?

yeah of course. and trains yeah when i flew back to china the last time i took a 24 hour train from shanghai to guangzhou and had no seat, stuffed in the space between cars. it was like an intensive refresher course in speaking/listening after too much time away from the language-- and you can't leave!

did you find that getting over that listening hump was a permanent achievement? obv there's stuff like vocabulary and accents to deal with, but do you feel now like the basic comprehension part is a skill you won't lose?

i've been doing a lot of sideline grinding commercial translation and big personal literary project translation work (I HAVE A STORY IN THE NEXT ISSUE OF CHINESE LITERATURE TODAY BTW), communicate with friends/colleagues in china, so i'm immersed in the written language day-to-day. but even talking to sinophone friends i've become incredibly lazy about actually speaking chinese and my flow has suffered quite a bit. but listening, it's stuck in my head, just an unloseable passive skill.

what do you love about beijing?

it's unlike any city i've ever seen; it's almost completely foreign to a non-chinese speaker from p much any western country; the scale of the place is utterly overwhelming; it's almost impossible to get lost; it's relaxed cf. shanghai, hong kong &c.; every district feels completely unlike every other district (at least inside 四环); it's cheap; and it feels so safe for tourists that i never have to worry unduly about anything i.e. standard precautions are enough.

when i flew back to china the last time i took a 24 hour train from shanghai to guangzhou and had no seat

oh man. i've not yet done that, but everyone i know who has has said it's the most fun way to travel. this time around i only got the 高铁 because i didn't have heaps of time.

how did you sleep without a sleeper? was there at least room to lie down somewhere?

(I HAVE A STORY IN THE NEXT ISSUE OF CHINESE LITERATURE TODAY BTW)

!!! please bump the thread when it's published (i assume it's this and there's no publication date for the new one afaict)

but listening, it's stuck in my head, just an unloseable passive skill.

oh that's excellent news. cheers.

the train leaves shanghai at 7 pmish so, there's a few of settling in and making friends so you can catch 10 minute bursts of sleep later that night leaned against each other, jostled away by stops in middle of nowhere jiangnan and people stepping over you to get through to the bathroom. then by southern hunan enough people have gotten off, it's afternoon and you can lay out on the floor. but i wouldn't say it's much fun.

i will yeah i have no idea exactly when the next issue is out.

xp wow

http://www.fluentu.com/chinese/

i did some work for them recently -- translated captioned usu non boring video content SIGN UP FOR FREE

Oh hey dylannn, just lifted the edition of Chinese Literature Today w/yr Dong Xi translation from the waiting room of our local CI. Guess the issue came out late Dec?

Flying to GZ in ~2 weeks on Malaysia Airlines.

AA - yep, GDUFS.

hey cool. glad to know the folks at the confucius institute are reading it too.
have fun in gz. business or just going there or what

if u need some tips

Studying Mandarin at GDUFS/广东外语外贸大学 for a semester. Tips welcome! Only know random bits & bobs from random people who've toured here or bookstore recs from academics. In the NZ's-a-village stakes, it turns out an ex who's been living in Melbourne for a few years is moving to GZ at the same time to teach music in an international school.

cool cool. yeah if you want to see shows c-union + 191 space are probably the best. c union is located in like the backyard of an office building in this piss smelling public park you have to walk past a traffic gate thing to get to but you can drink outside and listen to 80s dancehall mostly at night. not mentioned is loft345.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGfBO9Byov8