Anyone else studying Mandarin?
After reaching a certain point I feel like I'm never going to get any further. I'm wondering if I'm the only one.
Anyone else studying Mandarin? After reaching a certain point I feel like I'm never going to get any further.
Name one Chinese person that's worth talking to.
It's a trick question, there are none. If they were worth talking to, they'd speak English.
Yong
my mate ming
Unironically Naomi Wu
She speaks English. No need to learn Mandarin for her.
Unironically true. Same goes for Indian and European.
i just wanna be able to bang the hot international students at my uni
Da Wei
Isn't he not Chinese?
>t. ReYrded mutt boomer
he asked you to name one person
This is why Americans won't be able to speak to the UN guards at their internment camps in 2055.
how's that SighSee related?
anyway I started a couple of weeks ago, I studied a bit of Japanese before so radicals and hanzi are not that difficult.
even tones are really easy imo.
the most difficult part so far is learning vocabulary.
I'm studying it because I want to visit China this year.
they are nearly 2 billions, a lot of Chinese girls seems really educated, just like Russian girls.
even though you are absolutely correct, I hate this main character energy that foreigners have in Asia. I remember expats living in Japan as absolute c**ts who think that they are better that others.
Not yet, but I wanna learn it to a basic level at least so I can go to Taiwan on their Huayu Enrichment Scholarship.
If you use it actively, it's gonna be fine.
I know books are passé and whatever, but reading the news and reading books are the only way I know to keep improving. Unless you perpetually attend Chinese university courses or something.
If you do not move to a Chinese-speaking country, you are correct, there is a hard cap on progress. If you move to a Chinese speaking country you can be fluent in two years.
>t. fluent after 2 years between Shanghai/Taipei, native-tier after 5 years
Where is the cap? I'm a quarter way through Pimsleur.
I would argue that without living there you will never be able to speak quickly and correctly, without a heavy foreigner accent, and you will not be able to understand (or will at least heavily struggle to understand) the variety of non-standard mandarin accents, which you encounter more frequently than standard mandarin in the wild.
I've never lived there (I will next year) but I can speak without a heavy accent and mostly quickly and correctly. I have trouble with southerner accents and Sichuaner accents due to lack of exposure, but northerner accents I can understand fine, even with excessive erhua (probably because my gf's accent is like this)
>tfw no erhua accent gf to caress your 小鸡儿
pimsleur equals failure. stop now and just get a speaking tutor online on italki or whatever. you need to converse with a chinese person 100% in chinese. your tones and intonation are wrong i guarantee it. you are emphasising your sentences like you would in english.
How could my times be way off if they sound like the recording?
And that's a bold statement, have you or someone you've met not been able to learn the language because you used Pimsleur?
>我的声调跟录音一样,怎么还差呢
^vocaroo homie
Haha why do I have to bare myself to SighSee? You do a vocaroo.
A tutor sounds very expensive, you'll discourage people making them think they have to spend all of their money to get anywhere, like with everything these days
The pimsleur system is great but holy shit do the have the fricking dumbest conversations to listen to. There is one where they talk about finding a "wild man" (essentially a yeti) in some random park. Thank god i illegally downloaded that shit
Thank you lovely anon, I was about to become depressed, you've restored my faith I will persevere!
The conversation style at some points is the only annoying thing because of poor selection of words to incorporate (don't mind if they're just silly), why would you make "mung bean cake" a key learning word? For fricks sake, I could bet my life savings that I'll never use that word in my entire life. I've only got so much space in my brain and I'm already having difficulty so this is just wasting my time and energy, drives me mad, holy shit.
Don't you think as you get fairly far into the course they start to add too many new words too quickly, and I've noticed they don't keep repeating them like they did in earlier, that technique got me retaining things well and learning quicker.
The Russian pimsleur is godly. Chinese and Korean are completely dog shit.
>why would you make "mung bean cake" a key learning word?
yes. mung bean cake in chinese is either a lvdoubing or a lvdougao depending on its type. this is a green bean cake because mungbeans are called green bean in contrast to dried basedbeans which are called yellow beans. it teaches you the word for green, bean and one of 2 words for cake which can change depending on the makeup of the cake/pastry. i doubt they explained any reasoning or how either bing or gao means cake and gave examples of other cakes.
for a food vocabulary word it is quite useful to introduce or use several different words. bean appears often in chinese food words so you need to know 豆.
but pimsleur isn't very good so it won't have any box out segments to explain these things in detail.
It's lvdougao. Fair enough, I usually ignore it when the word comes up but I'll learn it next time I listen then.
I've been studying Mandarin in the UK for 6 years (most of that quite low intensity) and my level is around HSK 5
I think it depends on how much work you put in and how many Chinese people you practice talking to, also reading books in the language
I'm doing half an hour a day.
Amazing
Immersion would definitely be the best way, I've tried to find Chinese people to make friends with but there are fairly any here, and the wankers I meet here are from Hong Kong when I do get to meet one, maybe I should just never come back to England, no idea what I'd do there though
Frick you
>Frick you
Dont be mad mane. Just go to China
I'm going but I'm not a human being, I can enjoy my life for two weeks before being forced back into a prison
Can't relate.
IME, it's easier than you think. But learning from textbooks or language software is gay. It makes more sense to read contemporary literature with a translation, a rollover dictionary (like a browser extension), and an audiobook of the text. Also just getting a conversation partner. IME, your brain eventually catches up to their speaking speed and it clicks, but it took me like 10 sessions despite having autistically learned lots of vocab (Do not recommend this method of pre-learning vocab before use, btw). You learn by using it for things that actually matter (Conversations with the China-folks and reading literature.). Also memes.
You could always learn Guangdongnese with the Xianggangers.
I'm trying to remember the name of the website, but there's a site that lets you meet with people in your city who speak particular languages and are looking for language partners. But if you're brutally autistic (me) you can probably just walk up to people speaking Chinese and befriend them. Or it will spark romantic interest.
Suffering
I have personally found it pointless other than being able to accuse people of being American in Arabic.
I have been walking up to Bug people, I'll carry on, sooner or later it has to work. I less they find my comments on these thread hahaha
China has to have the worst diaspora in the world. I'm stuck in Hongcouver so Chinese are everywhere, but for the most part it's Hong Kong twats and liberal aids riddled Taiwanese.
I've been to both Taiwan and the Mainland, people over there are overall friendly and kind. So different than the entitled rude buttholes that live here. Hong Kong can get fricked though.
No different than any 3rd/2nd world diaspora.
yeah, couple years and just went to China, it was really awesome being able to chat with the locals, they really love it, it was just a way better time all around. got to date a woman who can't speak English, wouldn't have been possible without my Chinese
From my experience learning wapaneze, you really, REALLY need to have daily immersion where you're forced to piece things together in your head, test it out, and do that dance. I can study all fricking day and night and I'll get nowhere; but whenever I'm in Japan trying to navigate the place and talk to people, I improve much quicker. You gotta find a way not just to immerse yourself, but have those moments of "ahhhh frick what do I say here, fricking, uuuuhhh" and you figure it out
I started HSK 1 this week. I like how straightforward the grammar is and how there is a logic to combining characters to make new words (like diàn shi/ying/nao) but I struggle to memorise the characters themselves. They don't resemble anything that I can see. I think it's easier to remember something if you can connect it to something else that you know.
>I struggle to memorise the characters themselves. They don't resemble anything that I can see.
memorise the radicals and then you will have an easier time
>I like how straightforward the grammar is
for now
>for now
I just finished the Michel Thomas Mandarin course and I feel literally unbeatable. Don’t tell me this language gets hard. I choose not to believe that.
remembering simplified hanzi by Heisig, is a good book, but it stupidly only has the pinyin in an index in the back. I would write the pinyin in the entry that introduces the character. also the meanings can be a little wonky, since characters have different meanings depending on which character it is paired with
don't learn any hanzi until you can speak HSK 3 level fluently. the Hanyu Industrial Complex wants you to take classes and buy books and listen to teachers because there is an economy behind it.
it is wrong. you need to listen and to speak. you need to remember words and their tones because you use them.
watch videos where it is clear what the speaking is about. listen and repeat.
This is good advice if you live in China and can easily max out speaking/listening practice. If you live in the west its really only viable to get good at reading first
中国辣妹最爱白人的大肉棒
can I get a grammar check here?
This is probably fine but I would say 中国的辣妹
Correct. And no need for 的 as other poster suggested. It wouldn't be wrong but its unnecessary
Studying now. Where can I find some children's books to help me study?
I need to get back into studying Chinese used to do it a lot, covid killed it for me + now busy with school. Will maybe visit China to get back into it.
Anyways, the written language is 100x harder than the spoken language.
Make sure to focus on the spoken, unironically watch children's shows like Peppa Pig in Chinese to build understanding.