Any advice on learning Mandarin as absolute beginner? I want to learn this language but I don't know what literature or materials to use (websites, apps, etc.).
Also how difficult is it? Will I be able to understand the basics by the beginning of this summer?
>>7786351
Chingy chongy chang chingy chong chong chong
Chingy lingy ling lingy ling lang long
>>7786351
>Also how difficult is it?
Hardest language, because the Chinese can't into efficiency.
>>7786359
I read somewhere that it is actually much more logical than most western languages, symbols are concepts, so one symbol can be combined to create many words, no genders, no conjugations, etc.
>>7786364
>memrise
It's free?
>>7786368
>He blames /pol/
>>7786351
Here's a Chinese poem:
Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī.
Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.
Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì.
Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.
Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shìshì.
Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shíshì.
Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shíshì.
Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī.
Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī shī, shí shí shí shī shī.
Shì shì shì shì.
>>7786367
>2016
>Learning a language that requires you to learn thousands of stupid, time-consuming symbols; rather than one of the many reasonable languages whose creators were smart enough to adopt a Latin alphabet
>>7786375
Yeah
memrise.com I use the app too.
>>7786382
What does it mean?
>>7786387
>Written language is hard
The easiest bit of all. Tones are the only difficult bit,
>>7786399
But this is only for vocab. I also need materials on vocab and logic behind symbols.
>>7786415
Learn the radicals.
>>7786415
*verbs
>People pushing the 'Chinese is easy' meme
Nah, that award goes to Japanese. Fucking simple shit.
Historically, its difficulty was down to the levels of politeness; what words to use depending on your social status/etc
>Watashi = 'I' for a normal person
>Wagahai = 'I' for a nobleman
>Etc
This pretty much doesn't matter nowadays, however; as younger generations don't bother as much. Get the basics, learn your 2000 redundant Kanji (which they'll hopefully fade out/simplify in the next century) and you're good to go.
Then again, everyone is going to speak English in the future. We all won the lottery of life.
how do i into french?
>>7786436
Yuck, what a disgusting roastie
>>7786439
It's okay to be gay but don't flaunt it
>>7786431
English is a lingua franca and will go the way of Aramaic and Latin.
>>7786447
English rules the world lad, sorry.
It's the lingua franca that comes to reign supreme.
>>7786443
Do we really need to see roasties on /lit/ in a thread about learning Mandarin?
>>7786451
I doubt it. The British Empire peaked for only so long. So will American prestige, and thus also English.
>>7786351
Why do /lit/ threads always derail up to the point of not helping out OP.
>>7786364
>>7786387
written by people who don't know chinese.
1000 characters won't get you shit and rote memorizing them is the equivalent to learning english by memorizing a dictionary.
there's a learning curve to written chinese, but it follows a logic. 80% of characters are composed of two radicals, one indicating meaning, one indicating sound. this means two things: 1. when you get the hang of it, you don't need to know how to write them all to know how to read them and 2. just like english, if you can't speak/listen, you can't read. it's called phonics. so speaking and listening come first.
as for that, virtually every book comes with tapes of the dialogues. listen to them and repeat after them. often. I mean for hours a day. As a tonal language, accent fucking matters. you can get around speaking bumpkin ass foreigner chinese, but only in contexts that are obvious (ordering food, paying for things, etc. the speaker can guess what you mean when you speak without tones). if you want to express anything even remotely unexpected (like, I want to sniff your panties), you'll have to speak with proper tones.
don't let idiots fool you by saying chinese has so many dialects that tones don't matter. it's true that sichuan people don't know how to speak mandarin, but they can only communicate panty-sniffing to other sichuan people - to people from beijing their communication is about as limited as a foreigners.
last: remember most importantly that chinese is not fucking english. 了 is not the same as the past tense; 是 is not a copula, word order is frequently different, even the choice of words used to express basic ideas is often different. In English, "you can't eat that" can express a range of meanings, from "the food has gone bad" to "it's fucking gross" to "you're full" "you're a pussy". In chinese you would not say "你不能吃" (难道你没有嘴巴?) but instead compliments like "吃不得“ or "吃不下" or "吃不了“ or "你不敢吃!"
another example, in english you might call someone an idiot for saying something idiotic. in chinese you might say "你思想不科学" (lit. your thinking isn't scientific).
the examples are basically endless. chinese =/= english, so start from the beginning. if you don't know how to say something, don't try to translate, just wait until you learn.
also: start with shit at your level. Confucius and all the shit you started learning Chinese in order to read won't be at your level for 5 years at least. When in doubt, just imagine asking a Chinese language learner (think of all the Chinese retards at your uni who spoke virtually no english, despite studying it for 20 years and getting perfect SAT/GRE scores), then think about asking them to read Chaucer.
TLDR / best advice: don't learn Chinese. Chinese people are fucking horrible, the literature is awful, and you'll never, ever, ever get good enough to read the classics. Even Chinese people can't understand that old shit.
>>7786351
NCPR (New Practical Chinese Reader) or Integrated Chinese are both fine. The divide between mainland/taiwan. NCPR will teach some slightly less useful shit (especially at the higher levels) and integrated chinese will occasionally teach slightly taiwanese ways of expressing things, but either of them are totally fine and you'll learn Chinese from either. by the time you get good enough for differences between them to matter, you'll be good enough to know what shit is useful and what is taiwanese, etc.
at higher levels, almost every major chinese university publishes textbooks, most of which are pretty shit, but that's about the only resource that's available. This series is pretty ok: http://www.34ce.com/book-5/ppt/18173/ (the advanced book is not very good, however)
>tfw I will never be able to read the Qíwùlùn of the Zhuangzi in the original Classical Chinese
>>7786431
>Get the basics, learn your 2000 redundant Kanji
>take Japanese class
>during the second week they want us to to be able to read and write stuff like 炊飯器
This isn't what my JLTP N5 test said it would be.
>>7786777
Good advice but not very convincing. Im intermediate and now i want to go study
>>7786777
I enjoyed this post a lot as someone who has flirted with the idea of learning Chinese for fucking years now. And yep, exactly because I want to read classical lit, though partly also because I want to understand if the Sapir-Whorf thing is true.
>don't learn Chinese. Chinese people are fucking horrible, the literature is awful, and you'll never, ever, ever get good enough to read the classics. Even Chinese people can't understand that old shit.
Could you elaborate a little more on any of this, or on your personal experiences?
Related to the Sapir-Whorf thing, I honestly hate East Asians from what I can tell about their culture/minds. Is their shittiness ingrained on a deep deep level?
>>7786777
So much info conveyed, yet you're still an idiot.
>>7789858
>I honestly hate East Asians from what I can tell about their culture/minds.
Really? How so?
>>7789865
I live in a very multicultural city where they are the vast majority of immigrants. A lot of people are at least a little racist against them. There is a tacit assumption that they are subtly soulless on some level, which is a prejudice with a long history in particular. "Mindless Asian worker drones who don't need sleep or culture or human emotion are going to breed us out" = 200 year old racist belief that came 100% true to an extent, seeing as its epicentre is now half-Chinese, and undergoing a massive crisis as they buy up all the real estate.
Part of the problem is that more recent immigrants are extremely pushy, rude, inconsiderate, reflexively selfish. This is probably a shallow cultural issue, and I've been told that the kinds of Chinese nouveau riche who are capable of emigrating in the first place tend to be from recently brutalised, post-Cultural Rev backgrounds, so it's somewhat understandable that they aren't polished Westerners, or that they are fine with elbowing a 95 year old woman into traffic to steal her spot on the bus. I guess.
They don't have much respect for local traditions. There is admittedly a certain instinct to look at them like vermin whose breeding is out of control. As I type this I'm surrounded by about 94 of them. Fundamentally I think they'd be happy to burn down every historic capital in Europe, replace it with Soviet-style tenements, and fill them with their own kind.
All this is partly why I want to understand their culture and mindsets from the inside. I don't even necessarily want to like them and revert to some multicultural "we're all really the same deep down!" thing. I don't mind if their greatness is alien to me, as long as I can identify SOME greatness. So far all I can see are selfish, awful vermin, and I don't like it.
>>7788615
The Kanji actually aren't that difficult. The only reason they're still around is because it used to be the only writing system before Hiragana/Katakana; and some upper-class noble fucks wanted to keep them around when Hiragana/Katakana came into full swing, just because they liked them.
I learned Japanese over the course of several years, which also involved a lot of history/culture. The funny thing is that Japan is literally NOTHING without China. China is the Britain of East Asia; that is, the father of their civilizations.
Even when Japan established itself as a nation, they were always living in the shadow of China; with China so deeply ingrained into everything they are, be it the language/religion/etc.
What's worse, the independence they forged for themselves was completely smashed by two big ol' nukes.
Mishima was absolutely right when he warned that newer/younger Japanese generations would become nothing more than 'American mercenaries'. Scratch the veneer of all things Japan (which is absurdly Chinese to begin with), and your left with a nation of what are essentially American consumerists; minus the skin colour/etc.
>>7789902
i think that's a problem with immigrants in general, not necessarily inherent east asian (lack of) values. america's first colonists were desperate and petty vagrants, but their descendants, on average, have enough morals to set a good example for others. and while there are idiot tourists and at-home bigots, overall, the country is slightly welcoming to immigrants (when I grew up america, most people were kind to me, an east asian).
immigrants tend to be the losers of their native country, so it's understandable that their behavior tends to be less than ideal. they never learned any better, from better examples, so i personally don't fault a petty indian/bangladeshi/arab/polish, when i have to deal with their rudeness or duplicity. china without doubt has its cultured people, but there's no incentive for the better of them to move in crowded urban areas in other countries. most people will encounter the remainder of chinese immigrants who are desperate enough to do so, and not say, the occasional chinese surgeon or 3d artist. i hope you meet some quality east asians that help change your mind, but ultimately your decisions are yours to make.
ic you're wondering, yes, my shift keys are broken.
>>7789938
if by britain, you mean rome, then china is the rome of east asian civilization. japan is more like britain, with the nastiness and feeble desire for recognition of belgium.
japanese aren't american in their loyalties, because as soon as america pulls out its military bases in okinawa, expect japan to resume its imperial desires. i mean, at one point in the 80s, they did own 1/50th of the land in the usa (enough for a whole state).
>>7789972
Britain had a much greater effect on the Western world than Rome.
This is pretty indisputable.
But I agree; hopefully Japan finds its balls again, but unlikely with American plants like Abe.
>>7789986
britain and japan are both island nations known for their industrial efficiency.
france, germany, britain, and russia all attempt to trace their lineage to rome. they do not attempt to trace their lineage to britain.
korea, japan, and vietnam, were all sinic-influenced early in their history, as rome was to european culture. my sorting of them is geographical and genealogical, but that's just me.
japanese imperialism is a bad direction. despite providing an internationally admired culture, the japanese are creepily xenophobic, though with their limited base resources, that's somewhat justified. they might be able to chew some land off of russia or australia, but it's hard to dance around nuclear arsenal.
I lived a few years in sichuan china. The main reason asians or indians or whoever seem so crude is simply because of the populatIon. If you wait in a queue, youll never get served. If you let someone cut, youll always be last. You must self assert or your fucked, unless you are a white skinned of course, then you are both all set and fucked but for different reasons
>>7789823
>>7789858
>>7789860
i'll admit that it might be different in taiwan, but mainland is a nightmare. i've been here for five years (culture notwithstanding, the pay is fucking great) and there's a direct correlation to chinese level and disdain for this country. that's because the better your chinese, the more you realize that chinese culture is entirely devoid of anything even remotely meaningful. whether this is because of chairman mao blowing everything up or it dates back to confucius, i can't say. but some examples:
fast and the furious 7 holds record for highest box office, recently beating out "transformers: age of extinction." chinese culture only enjoys michael bay
chinese music gets about one hit a year, which they play ad nausium (stores will literally put it on repeat and play it on loudspeakers outside their shop): www.youtube.com/watch?v=23-6WVTINZw
chinese tv is 1/3 shit costume dramas (where even the costumes aren't good), 1/3 shit anti-japanese propaganda and 1/3 shit korean soaps.
the above 3 are what 100% of young people consume. no one reads books, ever. what "books" they do read are "internet novels" which are basically what you'd expect.
western greats don't translate at all and when they are read (which is never), it's either to pose as a cool westerner (take-a-selfie-next-to-a-book coffee shops abound in cities like shanghai and nanjing) or to "practice english" because parents think that middle school chinese kids who can't conjugate verbs should be able to read hamlet
confucius, daoism, and everything else great is tainted by rabid nationalism and only read by children who are made to memorize those texts without any sense of meaning.
>>7790183
chinese people consume almost all of their media over "wechat" which has not even the remotest standard of accountability and is consistently rife with completely bogus information that people swallow whole sale. here's an example pulled from the first five of my wechat moments about how awesome chinese is vs. english
在这个人人学英语的时代,大家似乎都快忘了,我们汉语有多美多强大!这里有一段英文的诗歌,用中文翻译了一下,结果所有人都惊呆了!不信?您请看!
you say that you love rain,
but you open your umbrella when it rains...
you say that you love the sun,
but you find a shadow spot when the sun shines...
you say that you love the wind,
but you close your windows when the wind blows...
this is why I am afraid;
you say that you love me too...
followed by about 15 different translations into various styles of chinese, most of which either alter the meaning or radically alter the voice.
not to mention that this isn't even an english poem to begin with, or is it fucking good.
also, notice the preface "我们汉语". that's the kind of language that's inescapable in chinese. everything is us them. "our chinese" "our china" "our confucius", followed usually by some ludicrus statement about how china has 5000 years of history while poor little america has no culture because its only 200 years old. or better yet how western history is so "easy" because its not so complicated as chinese history and therefore children are better first instructed in the history of europe.
none of this is even to mention that chinese people are pushy, rude, loud, obnoxious fucks. they throw trash everywhere, they honk their horns constantly, they flaunt their wealth, they give no consideration to anyone around them. think of every idiot you've encountered in a grocery store blocking the aisles with their cart while jabbering on a cellphone. now magnify their idiocy by 5 and you have 75% of people in mainland
so if you want to waste years learning a very difficult language in order to talk with selfish, mindless fucking idiots about the latest transformers movie or how cool kobe bryant is, then yes, by all means, learn chinese. otherwise, take it from me, it's not worth.
>>7789946
not true. almost all chinese immigrants now are fucking loaded. once upon a time maybe they were poor people working in restaurants, but now they've gotten extremely wealthy by scamming and cheating their countrymen and now buy their way into western countries because china is intolerable. immigration to the west out of this polluted shithole is the chinese dream
Literally all subjective. No doubt its shit, but for the sake of completeness and universality i would qualify that with something like 'compared to my experience' or 'in light of western culture'
I do know its retarded to say 'in my opinion' before everything you say and that it is always already implied; regardless, its important to remember that fact if only for your own understamding's sake.
But yeah im the sichuan guy, boy i sure did get fed up with many things there and certainly had to strongly express that sentiment publicly to some choice grown ass random fuckheads
>>7790183
stop interacting with the peasants and meet up some of the richer chinese then. not guaranteed to be rational, but at least they're less crude.
as for trends, the number of chinese visiting libraries or attending university is only rising. they'll be up to par soon enough.
>>7790218
that still makes them nouveau riche and not genuinely cultured. stuff money in a hog and it's still a hog.
>>7790229
rich chinese are the worst. they believe the stupidest shit and only care about looking wealthy. i enjoyed china much more back when i hung out with peasants who at least acknowledged that they didn't know shit and liked to have a good time.
>>7790232
aye, poor people that happen to have cash and will lose it soon enough. just like most black rappers.
>>7790239
just googled fuerdai. i like how the chinese are as barbaric as europeans when it comes to responding to new found power.
>>7786351
I took it for 3 years in high school.
The symbols were easy but the spoken language all sounded same.
The tone marks, pinyin and shit were impossible to remember. I ended up associating the characters with English words and completely bypassed the spoken language so I could pass.
I've forgotten almost everything now.
>>7786351
http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
>>7786351
Learning Chinese is difficult because their culture is practically built into the language.
The symbols act as memetic references to a number of different things that will instantly be obvious to you if you were raised in that culture, but will prove to be a lot of work without that foreknowledge.
If there's any advice I could give I would recommend drowning yourself in Chinese culture while learning the language, it will help you immeasurably.
>>7790183
>whether this is because of chairman mao blowing everything up or it dates back to confucius, i can't say.
Fuck this is maddening
>>7790512
Probably dates all the way back. Lv Xun's mocking portrait of Chinese character in Ah Q and Kong Yi Ji is almost pitch perfect for China today. All Mao did was destroy what modicum of patrician culture China once had, flattening everyone to pleb.
>>7786382
what did he mean by this?
>>7786777
Celestial trips confirm.
>>7786777
Helpful post but why are you so bitter?
As for me, currently taking entry level Mandarin courses, with a chinese teacher who cant speak my native language and can barely speak English to boot, so you can imagine my situation.
The most I can contribute to this thread is this website that I found yesterday - https://chinesepod.com/
>>7786436
ive taken french for five years
its really not hard, especially since more or less all of our words are stolen from it.
>>7786479
given the fact that english is the only language with translations for all of the worlds greatest literature and most relevant knowledge, i doubt its going anywhere. good luck translating anything culturally valuable into moon runes- english will be the language of high culture for the rest of time.
>>7786403
>>7791197
In a stone den was a poet called Shi Shi, who was a lion addict, and had resolved to eat ten lions.
He often went to the market to look for lions.
At ten o’clock, ten lions had just arrived at the market.
At that time, Shi had just arrived at the market.
He saw those ten lions, and using his trusty arrows, caused the ten lions to die.
He brought the corpses of the ten lions to the stone den.
The stone den was damp. He asked his servants to wipe it.
After the stone den was wiped, he tried to eat those ten lions.
When he ate, he realized that these ten lions were in fact ten stone lion corpses.
Try to explain this matter.
>>7789938
Pls gib tips on how to memorize Kanji better.
>>7786777
>2. just like english, if you can't speak/listen, you can't read. it's called phonics. so speaking and listening come first.
That's quite wrong. I was able to read English quite well before being able to listen/speak it. In fact, 4chan is one of the things that helps me a lot in writing. The same goes for Japanese and Russian, I can read, but not speak/listen to it as good as reading.
chinese(whatever variant) is hard, the tones, thousands of character and general cultural difference makes it very hard for westerners
whole lot of shitting on chinese people itt though, and a lot of it can be applied to almost any population in the world, particularly poor ones + ones that have a lot of new wealth
>>7791514
I agree with you. I'd think it's actually easier to read Chinese or Japanese than it is with other languages, since you don't need to know how a kanji is pronounced in order to realize its meaning.
>>7791277
English is already splintering into dialects--spanglish, ebonics, californese for example. it will not last and will be absorbed into larger languages.
>>7789902
>post-Cultural Rev backgrounds, so it's somewhat understandable that they aren't polished Westerners, or that they are fine with elbowing a 95 year old woman into traffic to steal her spot on the bus. I guess.
-it is not an excuse
chinese are farmer and the children who enjoy the liberal societies now are children of farmers and have no manners (not even in China).
so once they earn money to fulfil their desire, like any hedonist person, they go wild and learn the manners, the restrain that the bourgeois enjoyed, in taking pride to appear, in society, less hedonistic than they are.
But this restrain is learnt only if people tell the chinese that they must seek a public decency, which nobody does today.
>>7786359
This is the dumbest post I've ever seen
Spoken Mandarin is quite efficient time-wise: it doesn't have to be spoken as quickly as many languages need to be spoken because it transmits much more meaning per sound unit.
Once you learn the characters, efficiency isn't the problem. I can write just as quickly in Chinese as in English, if not writer. I often write characters in my notes instead of words if I think of them first, because they can be written much faster.
It's also not the hardest language, so stop propelling this stupid myth. It's difficult, but it's not the hardest language, nor is there a "hardest" language, since everything is relative you fucking idiot.
>>7791631
lel, spoken language can't overshadow academic writing.
if anything the splintering of these megalithic languages into regional dialects would be a return to normalcy- we've only had unity since the invention of the radio. also you're tripping if you think people will ever NOT speak the language their favorite tv shows/etc are broadcast in
>>7782069
gna bump this thread with some of the recs from the other archived thread
>>7782467
>阿城《棋王》 is the best work of Chinese fiction I've ever read. Aside from one Daoist/mystic section about chess, it's very readable. 《孩子王》 is alright too.
>鲁迅 is not very difficult and《阿Q正传》is hysterical (especially if you've ever spent any time with mainland Chinese)
>《活着》is pretty easy. Neither 王朔's nor 莫言's books are difficult, but I find both authors juvenile.
>If what you're really after is 武侠 shit like Crouching Tiger, just watch a bunch of 武侠剧 and maybe listen to a radio drama of 水浒 or 西游. That'll build up a concrete kung-fu vocabulary that'll enable you to read stuff like 雪山飞狐 (better than crouching tiger) and maybe eventually 水浒.
>Last note: bail on the thought of ever reading 红楼梦 and probably 三国 in the originally. Too fucking hard. But the other two are fairly approachable.
>>7785366
>>>7785033 (You)
>I didn't save the thread, but I wrote down "A New Practical Primer of Literary Chinese" by Paul Rozier and "New Practical Chinese Reader" by Liu Xun as recommended textbooks.
Japan took the best that china had to offer and made it better.
Japan > china
>>7793821
This would be relevant if you said Japanese > Chinese and perhaps explained why.b-but that's what i did!
>>7786777
>then think about asking them to read Chaucer.
To be completely honest with you it is dreadful to listen to anglos attempting to pronounce Chaucer as if it wasn't written in a different language from theirs. They chant it like a Bahmin chants his Rigveda: never mind that the metre is off and that he has to picture a FOWL maken a melodye. This, to him is all because Chaucer was such a great early modernist.
>chinese =/= english
quit confusing the burgerclaps.
>>7794071
If anything this proves that the native English speaker will never be able to read Zhuangzi or Three Kingdoms in original. Neither bears tremendous resemblance to modern Chinese.
1.5 gen Chinese American here, ask me anything.
>>7791496
Don't know japanese well enough, but memorizing hanzi is probably the same ideas Find patterns in the kanji so you can sort of predict what it means/sounds like. For instance, stuff like 冻 and 东 sound the same, but the left radical of the first one indicates it's water-related so you can memorize its meaning based on that. Once you have a set of basic kanji down, it gets easier.
>>7794248
that isn't a kanji you mao-fellating pleb
>>7794281
Fuck off
>>7790183
>>7790785
it is very funny how similar self-hating chinks are to self-hating russians. young people are shallow and prefer pop to schubert? blame the bolsheviks. without them everything would still be like in my favourite costumed drama. and it's funny you are doing this to feed an aussie trolling going lol-chinks-soulless.
>>7794951
>Implying the Bolsheviks were right
