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!!!)

the other thing i noticed is that people are now speaking chinese to me nearly 100% of the time. not sure whether it’s my speech or my confidence improving. i’m now thinking completely in chinese a lot of the time, so maybe that’s helping things along too.

this week i came across a couple of foreigners whose speech was definitely worse than mine (not being a wanker, i could just hear the errors in their pronunciation and tones) who said most people in taipei were replying in english. that was definitely happening to me even last year but not this year.

i’m in taiwan again and i’m FINALLY breaking through the shitty listening comprehension wall.

well that didn’t last long. it’s not even two weeks since i left and it’s gone to shit again. what the fuck is going on.

is part of it taiwanese phrases or sentences in mandarin? i noticed that with taiwanese friends before, speaking mandarin, then i have to ask what a word/phrase is, and find out it's strictly taiwanese but still used when speaking mandarin (something missing from standard mandarin or slangy, whatever)?

also and i'm sure i've made this point on this thread before because i try to make it all the time. "standard mandarin" is basically like bbc english or received pronunciation, learned by almost everyone but not actually spoken by many, even fewer as their mother tongue or what they'd speak to their kids or parents. so, you're learning to speak and understand a language that's used by newsreaders and language instruction materials but few other people. everyone understands it but god help you trying to understand most people in china or taiwan or beyond. and also even that "standard mandarin" (modern written chinese, too) was never really standardized or is still in the process of being standardized where with english you're at the end of a long process of standardization (maybe from a north american perspective mostly where accents and dialects are harder to find).

but keep up the good fight!

i was just in shaanxi for a week and when i landed i was 60/40 on comprehension and by the end of it could pick up the bulk. slowly got the rules of shaanxi mandarin into my head, picked up the unique word usages, etc.

is part of it taiwanese phrases or sentences in mandarin?

nah because i didn’t have many problems in taiwan, it only collapsed after i left.

btw you are otm about “standard mandarin”, it’s so rarely spoken that it’s basically a con to tell students it’s the gold standard (it is as far as the chinese government and language bodies are concerned, not so much in the actual world where people say things). iirc everyone i’ve ever spoken to who speaks standard mandarin has confected it to some degree for my benefit, and even when they understand me they often don’t speak standard in reply.

at the moment someone online (in china) keeps sending me pure standard mandarin messages, but i can hear how hard she’s straining to make it sound standard. i don’t doubt she enunciates well day to day, but she still needs to put in some effort to go the full 普通話。.

unfortunately tough to teach a spoken language with a history of under a hundred years used as the lingua franca for almost 1.6ish billion people none of whom speak it as a native language (and some of those 1.6ish billion people, at least across the straits, disagree to varying extents on how exactly to pronounce it).

but it is a con to tell everyone it's the gold standard. i think there are lots of sociological issues related to class, identity, cultural hegemony and dominance with the way "chinese" is taught and some of that comes from the prc/rok directly and some of it from other sources, some of it from westerners engaged with china, etc. but i can't draw that together into something worthy of being posted to ilxor.com. i think part of that is expressed in the types of people chinese language programs even at elite institutions (a limited north american perspective here) hope to turn out, like, they don't necessarily aim to or expect to produce serious speakers and understanders of the language at a high level, and the people the language you learn is meant to help you talk to and understand are business/political elites/elites of other types. why the hell, the average professor of chinese would say and i'm sure the average confucius institute instructor would say, would you spend any time talking to someone that speaks nonstandard mandarin? maybe taking a taxi in from the airport, but otherwise why would that ever come up?

getting fluent in mandarin, you can figure out what's going on most of the time, and that's a high enough bar and one that most learners don't get over, so it's tough to propose and even harder for me at least to conceive of a program that could somehow prepare you to fly into a major city after learning chinese for years and find yourself barely able to follow the conversation. so, i suppose it would be nice, at least, if someone would tell you!

i was lucky in that i went to china first, picked up the basics without a grammar book, then decided to study chinese, so i had some idea that yeah i can study this for over a decade and not be able to understand most people outside of a big city or over the age of 45.

going to study in nanjing for a year. i've been before, but i really only remember going to librairie avant-garde, that cafe named after the tarkovsky book, and basic tourist stuff. any tips on things to do/places to see?

i want to offer something since i lived there, went back two years ago but changed too fast to keep up. good city to live/study in if you're not stuck out in the suburbs. monohouse is cool (might be closed). have the duck blood soup at liu yi wan, near daxinggong station and nanjing library (there's a branch of the more famous yadebao nearby) or xujianping for duck blood + tangbao.

cool, thanks! i'll be at 南大, gulou campus. looks like monohouse is still open, so i'll definitely check it out.

Are you guys familiar with 怎么老是你?

"how old are you" or is it an actual thing called 怎么老是你

That’s a word for word translation but apparently the real meaning is “why is it always YOU?” or something to that effect.

right like 怎么老是吃馒头 why are you always eating steamed buns 为什么这个APP老是连不上网络 how come this app never connects. i think it's a northern thing?
the chinglish joke comes to mind first

For my sins, I’m getting back into the game after my conversation-level chinese has deteriorated over the past 2-3 years. Does anyone have any recommendations for good beginner/intermediate readers/books? Something to slog through w Pleco or a dictionary? Speaking of which, is there a particular dictionary anyone recommends?

I’ve been an ILX/ILM lurker since the NYLPM days but have very much enjoyed this thread since I started “learning” mandarin in 2016.

i always use new practical chinese reader when i'm trying to teach someone the very basics because it's fairly sound but also because you can find pdfs online easily + videos of the dialogue are on youtube, but i think integrated chinese is still the most frequently recommended by people that know what they're talking about.

for a dictionary, i don't know what you're looking for, but i've always used wenlin which is incredibly useful at an intermediate level, if you want to try working your way through actual texts or throw in a short story, since it has mouseover definition at the bottom, and you can pop up detailed definitions for any character or phrase in the text, and also things, like, take a character and see all characters built from it, and phrases containing the characters, etc. you can also look up by radical or components or stroke number, so it feels as close as you can get to fooling around with a paper dictionary, without having to have a dictionary at hand. and as you get deeper into it, it remains useful, because the key dictionary database is from john defrancis' abc chinese-english dictionary but it also folds in information from shuowen jiezi and points to the correct entry in kangxi zidian, hanyu dazidian, karlgren's grammata serica recensa, etc. but maybe nciku if you want to download something, and that one is good because it'll give you a whole bunch of example sentences for terms or phrases you're searching for. BUT this is dark ages stuff, honestly, and everyone is probably using some cutting edge app.

is there a way to figure out how to transcribe text for somebody who doesn't know any of the characters ?

i'm looking at a singaporean LP from the 1970s and i'd just like to be able to have the title and track names (have already figured out the artist) so i can enter it into discogs.

i just don't know where to start !

OCR phone app (usually Pleco) + google translate to get the pinyin = the tedious way I've done things like this

thanks !

really having a hard time with this cover art. if anybody wants to take a stab at the curved lettering above the guy's head, i'd really appreciate it.

https://i.imgur.com/ZvSkHQv.jpg

it's actually kind of a cool pop / beat record with some good fuzz !

i'll even send you a vinyl rip of the record if you help me out :)

all i know is it's this guy:

https://www.discogs.com/artist/3206423-%E8%AD%9A%E9%A0%86%E6%88%90

fuzz guitar*

it says 风雪情未了

i mean 風雪情未了 if you want to be precise (traditional 风）

thank you !!!!!!!!

So I am doing this.

HSK vocab list in ANKI, averaging about 300 cards per day, aiming at 20-30 new vocab per day.

Retention was rough at first but getting better.

Using strokeorder.com to write out characters.

Posting a lot on RedNote and trying to only write in Chinese, using DeepL to check for mistakes.

Any good drama recommendations?

he is helping

https://i.postimg.cc/jdhRyPvH/20250224-113938.jpg

https://i.postimg.cc/jdhRyPvH/20250224-113938.jpg

how the heck does 着 mean literally anything

i just take it as present/present continuous. i don't know grammar well enough to give a good answer. 她说着说着，但还是没讲出道理. she was talking and talking but never managed to make a bit of sense. well. i never thought much about it.

it's not a cool show or anything but not bad and a window on 2000s upwardly mobile middle class life, and trying to teach someone chinese, i found they could follow 家有儿女 after a couple months and it's available with reliable subtitles on youtube.

this is fairly clear, if not very helpful

https://resources.allsetlearning.com/chinese/grammar/Aspect_particle_%22zhe%22

i guess it is like a particle, just need to see it in more sentences and it will make sense

i was having trouble retaining a lot of hanzi until i tried learning multiple words that contain them so i see them in context and that's been the main thing to make em click for me so far

xp

It came to me in a dream but I have a feeling that dyl has a 北京儿儿儿儿 accent.

🤔

well actually. i never picked up the beijing accent but i did learn chinese from cctv broadcasters with downtuned beijing accents, and in the north and from northern teachers, so there is some rhotacization going on. when i'm away from the north, i am praised for having standard mandarin. but i commit peculiar, mismatched errors like turning the flat tone into a slight rising and occasionally pronouncing bai as bei, both from too much time on the central plains, and consistently pronouncing w as v, which i picked up from a professor from heilongjiang, and being too soft on the sh initial, which might be from time down south... a while back, probably during the pandemic, i gave an online talk in chinese that ended up being posted on bilibili and an anonymous commenter pointed out many quirks and errors that i don't notice and am too far gone to correct.

i like that kind of mismatched accent when people speak my native language. i don't think anybody minds it for chinese either.

i am at the point where i don't even claim to speak chinese anymore. i'm glad i learned it young enough that the basics are forever locked in my head.

would i be crazy if i tried to end up in qinghai? maybe sichuan or yunnan is more doable...

i posted on rednote asking about if i should live in inner mongolia and basically the response was "too cold, go to yunnan"

inner mongolia is not that cold. it's not warm. it's dusty. the season lasts too long. it keeps people indoors too much. but it's not that bad.

outside of extremes like comparing changchun to hainan, i might choose winter in the north with the benefit of insulation and heating, warm restaurants, appropriate food, than almost anywhere in south china, everywhere drafty and wet.

it would be other factors before climate that would lead me to suggest people not live in hohhot or xining. lanzhou is nice.

when i first moved around china i looked for places that i thought nobody would want to go. that's why i never lived in beijing. i lived on the edge of inner mongolia. i went to guizhou. i went to dalian. i was on the border with henan. i probably would have had more fun and a more rewarding life if i had chosen still peripheral but somewhat happening capitals, like xi'an or chengdu.

good to know

sounds like you have had a rewarding and fun life though

to my surprise i'm learning HSK3 vocab words in ANKI now, got the reading and spoken of 1-2 down and mostly can write correctly, still make a few mistakes here and there but the fact i can read around 300 hanzi already is insane to me. gonna keep it going.

unrelated what's with the weird transliteration at the beginning of this thread? not to mention the borderline racist shit is not cute

is there a functional difference in the pinyin "can" vs "kan" what is the reason

i want to answer simply both are pronounced differently, tsan 餐 and hard-k kan 看, but i'm worried i'm missing something

yeah theyre pronounced differently

thanks! for some reason i hadn't encountered "can" in my ANKI decks yet and the audio on the cards (sounds like AI) is kind of crappy, i played it over and over trying to hear the difference between that and "kan" and couldn't hear it.

this kind of thing makes me wish i could just take an actual course with a teacher and a curriculum.

and this pimsleur chinese audio course sounds very dated (do people still say "xie xie ni"?) and the audio quality is awful. what are some better resources for self study?