Post: #26

This isn't as much of a trick as you might think it is. Second language learners often know all kinds of trivia that a native doesn't, just because we make a systemized study of the language whereas natives learn it through repetition and absorption.

Imagine an Indian guy coming up to you on the street, and in thickly accent English, asking you the difference between "Hangar" and "Hanger" or "Discrete" and "Discreet", and you'll have a pretty good idea of what this would be if repeated with English-speakers.

Post: #27

(04-29-2017 07:08 PM)nomadbrah Wrote:  

(04-29-2017 05:41 PM)Lunostrelki Wrote:  The only thing that makes Chinese a single language and not 50 is the writing system, so they aren't getting rid of it as long as there is still a China, "efficiency" be damned. As for the spoken language the ones who can't speak intelligible Mandarin are all either over 30 or couldn't make it past middle school.

That being said the only people who naturally speak "proper" Mandarin are in the North China Plain and Manchuria. So maybe a fifth of the population?

How different are the Chinese dialects? Are we talking like Romance languages, Slavic varieties? Scandinavian?

The phonetic differences between different dialects of Mandarin (about 800 million native speakers) are like the differences between Slavic languages, but the vocabulary and grammar are more or less the same except for some localisms. Aside from the northern, northeastern (Manchurian), and Sichuanese standards, there are the Jin, Gan, and Xiang subgroups that used to be their own dialects but are being subsumed into Mandarin. There are also dozens of regional accents that can get pretty heavy if you go into the sticks.

If you take a step back and look at the non-Mandarin dialects of Chinese, then you have Wu (Shanghainese), Yue (Cantonese), Hakka, and Min (Fujianese/Taiwanese). Each of these has between 50 and 100 million speakers, and they are not mutually intelligible with Mandarin or with each other. The phonetic differences are like those present between French, German, English, and the Romance language. And like Mandarin, they each have their own subdialects that vary from being differences in accent to full-on other languages.

The reason why there are so many dialects in southern China is because historically there were more ethnic minorities there that had to be assimilated into the Han race, and because the mountainous geography helped separate people longer.

Post: #28

(04-29-2017 04:55 PM)General Stalin Wrote:  My biggest takeaway from this video is that logography is an inefficient form of writing. It shouldn't be that easy to confuse native speakers and literates on their own words/phrases. I would think this game/demonstration may be similar to showing English speakers difficult words that are not used so often and asking them to pronounce them? Like "Hey mate, how would you pronunce 'acquiesce'?"

https://theslittyeye.wordpress.com/2011/...-sh%C7%90/

Post: #29

I just find this sort of foreigner to be aggravating.

I have several friends who have lived in china for 10+ years and speak Chinese fluently (i have even one close friend who studied chinese at fucking oxford) and we all cringe and laugh at this sort of stuff when we see it in person. I know the video is meant to be funny, but it just comes across as cringeworthy for me.



"Congratulations bro, you can speak the language of the country that you live in. Achievement unlocked."

Like suits said, this guy speaks the Chinese equivalent of Spanglish. It's correct but only like 10% of the population speaks that way and even they would think he sounds odd.

I simply don't find it impressive when people speak Chinese in China when they're not Chinese.

Yes, chinese has tones that you must say, but if you're listening to Chinese people speak they're not saying all these tones perfect and it's often up to the other Chinese person to just use the context to figure out what's going on.

Post: #30

(04-29-2017 11:09 PM)Fortis Wrote:  I just find this sort of foreigner to be aggravating.

I have several friends who have lived in china for 10+ years and speak Chinese fluently (i have even one close friend who studied chinese at fucking oxford) and we all cringe and laugh at this sort of stuff when we see it in person. I know the video is meant to be funny, but it just comes across as cringeworthy for me.

It's a fine subject for a youtube video. They're by nature kinda goofy, and this one's inspired some interesting discussion, particularly for people who've never thought about something like this before.

If I saw somebody doing it in person I would laugh at him behind in his back, and probably to his face, too.

Post: #31

Sure, I'm not saying you guys shouldn't find joy and amusement in this, just giving you another take.

Post: #32

(04-29-2017 11:27 PM)Fortis Wrote:  Sure, I'm not saying you guys shouldn't find joy and amusement in this, just giving you another take.

I think it serves as a cautionary tale for anybody who wants to be an ex-pat.

DON'T BE THAT GUY. NO ONE IS IMPRESSED, AND NO ONE WILL LIKE YOU.

Post: #33

I don't understand the point of this video.

Chinese is a damn hard language with some 30,000 characters and they just achieved universal literacy a generation ago. A good chunk of the population that lives in villages still speaks crappy Mandarin.

So a foreigner that had the luxury of devoting time to studying the language for years because he gets paid a salary (perhaps from English teaching) higher than locals because he is white now finds some obscure characters and tries to prove how knowledgeable he is by showing locals that they have some gaps in their knowledge.

In a good chunk of the world, the average person is functionally illiterate and would fail even with language systems that are alphabet based and phonetic so I fail to see the deeper meaning in this.

Post: #34

This not exactly the same context, but for example in France you can have people from West or East Africa (like Senegal, Cameroun, Mauritania etc) who are teaching french to youngsters in high school. It can feel a bit odd to hear traces of African accent, but make no mistakes: 99% of the time they speak french (at last grammatically and orally) way better than natives.

Actually it is a bit funny when I use some expressions (huge nerd when I was a kid, only spoke French to my family, not even my mother tongues) and I have to explain what they mean to french people. By the way, this is something I have to pay attention to when I am gaming (we all know that being knowledgeable on vocabulary does not make the pussy wet).

The problem is when someone goes out of their way to find obscure nuances and expressions to tell to people. That is just counterproductive, and you end up looking like a fool.

Post: #35

Fortis Wrote:Eh, I turned this off about 30 seconds in when he's correcting those people on tones.

This sorta stuff makes me roll my eyes. There is this really weird sub-set of expats (usually white) who are SUPER DUPER into the language to the point that they study the language to the exclusion of everything else and are really pedantic about it.

Think about that guy who learns spanish (spanglish) in high school who goes into south American and can say everything but still just sounds weird because he sounds like a textbook instead of a living, breathing person.


The whole tone thing was made just to be able to teach the language to other groups of people. I have coworkers who speak several dialects of Chinese who look at me funny when I ask them about tones in Chinese. Many of them just speak the language and don't really give much thought to "perfect" pronunciation.

Like Cascade just said, this is the equivalent of saying a Bostonian doesn't speak "proper" English because he saws "cawfee" instead of "coffee."

Tones are an essential part of pronunciation and when locals refer to "lazy pronunciation", this doesn't mean they are getting tones wrong, just that certain syllables and enunciations change or become slurred (like consonant initials like "s" instead of "sh" in the South). Ask them to slow down though and the tones will always be right. So no, this analogy with the Boston accent does not work because a different tone is, technically, a different word. Although context can help to maintain understanding in many cases, misunderstandings because of tones do happen all the time as anyone who's ever studied and used Chinese for a reasonable time in Asia will be able to confirm.

In fact, you can often observe with very small Chinese children that they start imitating tones before they learn the actual pronunciation of the word. They might mess up the latter but the former will nearly always be on point. As has been pointed out, just being a native speaker of a language does not entail having any knowledge of how it works or should be taught.

The English analogy that always made most sense to me is if you have an English word, let's take "coffee" again, but stress the wrong syllable - "cofFEE", like perhaps a foreign learner might do at some point. It doesn't completely work because in English we don't have words whose meaning becomes different when you stress a different syllable, but it probably gets close to what a native speaker experiences when they hear a wrong tone.

In short: A local with "lazy" pronunciation sounds completely different than a foreign learner with insufficiently learned pronunciation. Only the former sounds like the "living breathing person". The latter just sounds like, well, a foreigner with bad pronunciation that people have a hard time understanding.

Quote:Something that I've never understood about tonal languages : how do you vary your tone in speech (as people do, depending on their mood or whatever) without changing the meanings of of the words?

Tones don't completely eradicate any semblance of sentence melody. It's just that the internal relationship between the tones needs to be maintained while the overall melody goes up or down. There's also a ton of different sentence final particles to express mood and similar things (sort of like "It's been a tough day, eh?" in English). It becomes pretty intuitive after a while.

Quote:Language evolves from need. Sarcasm is not really big in Asia.

The word that comes closest to it is 諷刺 which I guess refers more to satire if you're anal about the distinction. It's true that it's not a widespread stylistic device as we tend to use it, but it absolutely exist as even classical Chinese literature already has many examples of it and these days we have a metric fuckton of memes on WeChat/Weibo and related internet humor that are undoubtedly sarcastic. I guess it's less often used in direct conversation compared to the West. But when a Chinese person doesn't get your sarcasm in English, that's because their English is shit, not because they don't understand the concept of sarcasm.

Post: #36

Kind of reminds me of this video from ADVChina: two expats talk about China and differences with the west.

They had an Englishman professor who actually taught Chinese in a Chinese university. Yet in spite of these credentials, people he met on the street would still correct his Chinese or explain to him how he's wrong - even though he could explain the Chinese characters in perfect detail, their history and origin, etc.

In this context, correcting Chinese natives on their language could be viewed by them as very insulting.

Sorry, the original video is long and I don't recall where they speak about this case, but here it is nonetheless:

Post: #37

(04-30-2017 12:36 PM)AFS Wrote:  In this context, correcting Chinese natives on their language could be viewed by them as very insulting.

Absolutely. It's a horrible idea, and it NEVER fucking works. Ever. They're not going to believe you, and even if they do believe you you'll come across as an argumentative dick.
I've done it a couple times, only when I really, absolutely had to, (The native was making a grammar mistake on an important report, for instance, or something else that was similar. I remember one time I tried to explain to a Japanese person that two areas in Kyoto, 'Katabira-ga-tsuji' and 'Katabira-no-tsuji', were actually the same place because the word 'ga' was the old word for 'no'. I really wanted to go to Katabiragatsuji, and they kept trying to tell me that no, no, Katabiranotsuji was a different place. They were my guide for the day so I couldn't just ditch them. It took a half fucking hour, and they still didn't believe me. I think by the end of the day they were completely sick of me.)

Just don't do it.

Post: #38

Impressive display of linguistic ability even though I sort of agree it's heavy handed...

Strangely, I'm more interested in where this guy's native accent is coming from: he sounds like someone from the Northeast region of the US, but then weird Kiwi elements and non rhotic r's randomly come into play..

Post: #39

(04-30-2017 01:58 PM)SamuelBRoberts Wrote:  

(04-30-2017 12:36 PM)AFS Wrote:  In this context, correcting Chinese natives on their language could be viewed by them as very insulting.

Just don't do it.

To their credit, the Chinese actually find it amusing when foreigners have suggestions about their Chinese.

I can see that the Japanese would be less accepting of this sort of thing.

Post: #40

(04-30-2017 02:14 PM)Suits Wrote:  

(04-30-2017 01:58 PM)SamuelBRoberts Wrote:  

(04-30-2017 12:36 PM)AFS Wrote:  In this context, correcting Chinese natives on their language could be viewed by them as very insulting.

Just don't do it.

To their credit, the Chinese actually find it amusing when foreigners have suggestions about their Chinese.

I can see that the Japanese would be less accepting of this sort of thing.

I'll defer to you there, since I don't have any direct experience with Chinese.
Japanese people have a certain mode where nothing will get through their heads no matter what you say, and it's just not worth the time.

Post: #41

British guy living in the US here, do I correct the locals on their pronunciation? No..why cos I don't want to sound like a dick and I also don't want somebody to take a swing at me. I am aware that there are differences in pronunciation and I leave it at that.

(04-29-2017 07:56 PM)SamuelBRoberts Wrote:  Imagine an Indian guy coming up to you on the street, and in thickly accent English, asking you the difference between "Hangar" and "Hanger" or "Discrete" and "Discreet", and you'll have a pretty good idea of what this would be if repeated with English-speakers.

I once walked into an English class in LA by mistake. The teacher said that many Americans pronounce the following words identically, whereas somebody from UK would pronounce them differently - "Marry", "Merry", "Mary". Who's correct here? Well both are because it's a different accent.

In UK, just about every kid calls the letter H "haitch", which incorrect. It should be "aitch"..just because somebody is born and raised in a country, it doesn't necessarily mean that they know the language.

As for Indians, there's so much languages and dialects there that the only language which is acceptable everywhere is English. Hindi is popular in the north but a lot of Southerners push back against it.

As for Mandarin, here's an article from 2014:

400 Million Chinese Can't Speak Mandarin and Beijing Is Worried

Quote:Sure a lot of people speak Mandarin—also known as Putonghua, China’s official language—but it’s still not enough, say education officials.

About 30 percent of China’s 1.3 billion population, 400 million people, can’t communicate in Mandarin, according to Li Weihong, director of the State Language Commission, the official Xinhua News Agency reported on Sept. 21. Include only those who speak the official dialect fluently, and the number shrinks further.

“About 70 percent of the total population can speak Putonghua, and 95 percent of the literate population knows how to use standard Chinese characters. However, only 10 percent [of that 70 percent] can speak standard Putonghua fluently,” Li told reporters on Sunday at an event promoting “linguistic unity,” held in Shijiazhuang, Hebei.

China has seven major dialects, including Cantonese, Hokkien, Xiang, and Wu, as well as thousands of smaller ones. The Chinese Communist Party named Putonghua—what China’s Constitution refers to as “common speech based on Beijing pronunciation”–the official dialect back in 1955 as a way to promote national unity.

“The standard spoken and written Chinese language shall be used in such a way as to be conducive to the upholding of state sovereignty and national dignity, to unification of the country and unity of the nationalities, and to socialist material progress and ethical progress,” states China’s 2000 Law on Standard Spoken and Written Chinese Language.

But while Mandarin has become the official language of instruction in schools and among government officials, many families prefer to speak one of the dialects when home. And in recent years, local dialects have gained popularity in music, movies, and television programs.

Beijing has pushed back. Early this year, China’s media regulator announced that all television anchors and even TV guests must speak in Mandarin. A notice issued on Jan. 3 by the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television warned newscasters against “using Chinese dialects or expressions that are region-specific,” adding that “television stations are required to guide [TV pundits and guests] on the proper use of language during live shows,” Xinhua reported in January.

TV stations should use Mandarin as “an important assessment criterion” for anchors and broadcast reporters, the notice stated. Meanwhile, programs that did not get in line linguistically would be pulled off the air, the notice warned.

I'm certain there's a lot of the older generation who do not speak any Mandarin at all because they were not taught it as kids. You also can't change what people speak at home. I have a friend who was born in China but she left when she was 9, she's fluent in Cantonese because her parents spoke to her in that language but her Mandarin is so bad other Chinese laugh at her.

In my family (in India), people of my grandparent's generation didn't speak a word of Hindi because they went to school before it was taught there. When i bump into Indian FOBs and tell them that I don't speak Hindi they find it mind blowing, but then I have to tell them how the fuck do I learn Hindi if my parents spoke to me in Punjabi all the time and I was never taught Hindi in a school?

Languages change and evolve all the time. The version of Punjabi that I grew up speaking was over 50 years old - my parents moved to the UK in the 1960s. I couldn't even have a proper conversation with my late grandmother because her version of Punjabi was nearly 100 years old, and a lot of words hand changed since then.

Chinese kids are also forgetting how to write

Quote:CALLIGRAPHY has been a revered art form in China for centuries. Children are taught to write with brushes; endless copying of characters is a rite of passage in their schooling. Writing is a feat of memory. Mastery requires learning thousands of unique characters. Despite these ordeals, literacy rates have increased from around 20% in 1949 to over 95% now. But computers, smartphones and tablets are posing a new obstacle to progress. Penmanship is on the decline. Reading skills may follow.

Pundits the world over blame a reliance on computers for shoddy handwriting and spelling. In China the problem is particularly acute. The number of primary schoolchildren with severe reading difficulties is rising, according to a 2012 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The authors linked poor reading scores to increased use of keyboards.

One reason is that learning to write is so arduous. Because Chinese uses ideograms, or characters, rather than an alphabet, to represent each syllable, it takes six years of primary education to master the 3,000 or so characters required to read a newspaper.

Nowadays Chinese can use keyboards to type a word in pinyin, a Romanisation of Chinese words that reflects sounds but not appearance. They then select the right character from a list. This process does not reinforce how to write the separate strokes that make up a character, and may even disrupt the process of remembering, says Wai Ting Siok of the University of Hong Kong. Ms Siok predicts that on current trends literacy levels will begin declining within ten years.

The problem is already evident. A government body helped to launch a popular television spelling show that pits middle-school students against each other to write difficult words; in one episode in July more than 50% of the adult audience incorrectly drew a two-character word meaning “gossip”, feiwen.

Over the past century some have campaigned to raise literacy by replacing characters with an alphabet. That remains unlikely. Homophones are so common in Chinese that many different words would be spelled the same. And China views its script as near-sacred.

Abandoning its written form would be entirely out of character.

Post: #42

(04-30-2017 02:56 PM)WalterBlack Wrote:  Chinese kids are also forgetting how to write

I don't know about China, but in Japan this is just because nobody writes anything anymore, just like nobody writes in the states. Everything is done on computers, which generate the kanji for you. (You just type in the pronunciation and hit space, and a list of possible kanji comes up)
When's the last time you wrote something down in English that wasn't 1.) Your address, name, and date on some piece of paperwork or 2.) A short memo, like a shopping list or a note to someone else at your work?

It's easy enough to remember the twenty-odd letters in the alphabet, but it's almost impossible to remember 2000 or so Kanji without regularly writing them down. So the Japanese learn the kanji in school and then almost immediately forget how to write them, since they never have to write anything in real life.

Post: #43

I'm neither skilled or rude enough to correct a native's Chinese, but copying and exaggerating their regional accent can get a good reaction.

Post: #44

Good video to watch.

On the one hand, I have to give this guy respect for putting in the effort, time, and discipline to learn Chinese. No one imagines that's an easy thing to do.

But at the same time, it's not exactly the most diplomatic thing in China (or any foreign country) to tell people the mistakes they're making in their own language. Chinese are very nationalistic about their language (like everyone) and doing this just makes everyone feel uncomfortable.

That was the feeling I got watching this...very uncomfortable.

He may know the language, but he has still to learn the most important lesson that any Westerner should learn in Asia.

And that is: respect. With a capital R. This is true everywhere, but in Asia it's even more true.

You're the odd man out there. Shut your fucking mouth, don't skyline yourself, and be very, very humble.

Very humble.

Post: #45

QC, come on man. We're not girls or manginas, so we are not "uncomfortable", except when lounging in an ill-designed recliner. Use that cant term, and before you know it you're finding what some other dude is doing "not ok" or even veering into "creepy". We shouldn't let this kind of baby talk pollute our speech.

To your point, it all depends on social calibration, confidence and other intangibles. The guy in the video has GREAT social calibration, and I did not see a single negative interaction -- all the Chinese were very into it, did you see the little kid high-fiving him? Some other guy doing it may well have had a very different reaction. He is also in a highly cosmopolitan city where the locals are very used to westerners (and most of them are themselves tourists from different parts of the country). In that context, and with the way he carries himself and his overall vibe, there is absolutely no problem with what he was doing.

Post: #46

He did it in a cool way and the Chinese were enjoying the little test. It had nothing preachy about it.

What I find more interesting how much high-grade Chinese pussy his calibrated look and Game net.

If he approaches girls in the same manner, then he must be approaching 4 digits soon.

Post: #47

(04-30-2017 05:48 PM)Zelcorpion Wrote:  He did it in a cool way and the Chinese were enjoying the little test. It had nothing preachy about it.

What I find more interesting how much high-grade Chinese pussy his calibrated look and Game net.

If he approaches girls in the same manner, then he must be approaching 4 digits soon.

Very very possible, but also who is going to get visibly upset when they know they're being filmed?


So you're telling me correcting a chicks manner of speaking is a panty wetter?

Post: #48

He should come to my home town and hold up an English sign with "Australia" written on it...

Straaaya!

Fuck yeah!

Post: #49

(04-30-2017 05:41 PM)The Lizard of Oz Wrote:  QC, come on man. We're not girls or manginas, so we are not "uncomfortable", except when lounging in an ill-designed recliner. Use that cant term, and before you know it you're finding what some other dude is doing "not ok" or even veering into "creepy". We shouldn't let this kind of baby talk pollute our speech.

To your point, it all depends on social calibration, confidence and other intangibles. The guy in the video has GREAT social calibration, and I did not see a single negative interaction -- all the Chinese were very into it, did you see the little kid high-fiving him? Some other guy doing it may well have had a very different reaction. He is also in a highly cosmopolitan city where the locals are very used to westerners (and most of them are themselves tourists from different parts of the country). In that context, and with the way he carries himself and his overall vibe, there is absolutely no problem with what he was doing.

I'm not really knocking the guy, man. As I said, I'm giving him major props for his language skills. Much respect for that.

All I'm saying is that it comes across as awkward. I've lived in Japan for two years (three, if you count the time when I was 10) and for Korea in one. One of those years was at a Korean language institute in Seoul. I know what the Asian--Westerner dynamic is like. How much time have you spent in Asia?

Samuel Roberts gets what I'm talking about, as well as other guys who have some experience in this sort of thing.

Bottom line: this sort of thing may be harmless up to a point, but you don't want to be the guy on this video. He's beating his head against the wall. No matter how good his Chinese is, he's always going to be seen as the outsider, as the foreigner, as the inferior one. Why bother? They're not worth it. A Westerner in Asia is circumscribed by very narrow boundaries. The racial caste system will never let you breathe easy. And they will never let you forget your place on the food chain.

This was one of the major reasons I gave up my interest in Asia. I was beginning to hate the bastards. You will never, ever be accepted. No matter what you do or how hard you try. And when I see this guy, I am reminded of an organ-grinder monkey, frantically doing tricks for tips or for shelled peanuts.

Asia is fine for a few years. But eventually, a self-respecting man with a strong sense of pride and identity has to move on. I've moved on.

That's my point. You can agree or disagree. It doesn't matter to me. But I believe I know what I'm talking about. My views are based on my own experience.

Post: #50

I once met a British dickhead in Mexico and he corrected my English by telling me that I was envious and not jealous, his name was JJ Roberts, he used to hang out around here.