ixmike

[saviour]

Note: If my memory is wrong then please disregard but I'm 95% sure it was someone on this forum (I'm pretty sure it was you) who was like "wtf why can't you just teach me chinese?"

So for some fucking reason this kept popping into my head while I was running my 2.5 miles today. I remember when (presumably?) you said that and I thought "there's no fucking way" and, why that is is because teaching a language isn't easy. It's not really like learning to do something new so much as learning to learn the world again from a perspective very different from the one you have right now. You can't just translate everything word for word, you know that sort of thing, that's why translators get paid a lot of $$ because it's hard to translate from one world view to its equivalent. Like, when you grew up (presumably) in the USA in a presumably in an English speaking household, how long did it take until you could make sense of the world around you, understand how others expressed themselves and how to express yourself in turn? We're probably talking a lot of years of people talking in English around you and interacting with each other with American mannerisms and social norms for you to observe and emulate not to mention formal schooling and more practice interacting with your classmates. You can't really appreciate a language without a context, a world for it to live in and you can't really remember arbitrary things and apply them easily without a context either.

I like metaphors so the metaphor I was thinking about this was, that learning a language wouldn't really be like, if I were to ask Demon or some big pro to teach me how to play some hero I don't know in Dota since that would be teaching me to do something, and I already have a partial context since I have a bit of competitive experience but I have a really rough grasp/shaky mechanics. Learning Chinese from English would be like if my grandmother who doesn't know a world of English (I tried -_- ) asked you to teach her how to play Dota. Realize that this woman doesn't know how to use a keyboard/mouse, turn on a computer, read English etc, there's just all this, extra stuff you'd have to teach her first. I remember inK^ said he could take any random person off the street and make them into a half decent Dota player if they'd listen. I asked him if he could do that with me but, the answer was basically no. That's fine, it makes sense since it's kind of a waste of his time I think, since our skill levels have such a gap. I just went on a tangent and forgot what was the point. Damn.

Anyways, since you want to l2Chinese and I feel like getting you started, let's start by providing you a hopefully not terrible context in lieu of you growing up/living in China for a few months/years. Lesson one will be the word ?, pronounced "jyah" or "jiyah" (idk I'm bad with phonetics sorry, but it's one syllable)

? means family. It also means home and by extension can mean house/residence. Chinese people tend to think of family as extended rather than nuclear. The family, the group is more important than the individual. When you eat a meal, you put the plates with ? ("tsay" which means vegetables and also just, things that are not ~bread, rice sort of thing that are the ~base of a meal) in the center of the table and people scoop portions, however much and however often as they like, into their own rice bowls. You have to share the group food. You treat guests well and lavishly, take them out to nice restaurants and tours and blow a lot of $. Otherwise you live much more ~stingy, unless you are really rich then you do w.e the hell you want but still go out of the way for your guests. Chinese hospitality is supposedly legendary according to wiki. There's probably more examples I can think of but it gets to be that you don't think about yourself a lot. You don't even think in terms of yourself. When my American friends in middle school explained the concept of an allowance, they would say it was their money but in my mind I thought it was money that their family allowed them. Do you see how our perspectives are different on the same thing?

Ask any Chinese person, they will tell you that Chinese people are the smartest in the world. There might be an air of arrogance in this but, there are valid points in this. Chinese people are in general incredibly rational with the exception of loving their families too much. ??? "dong shi qing" is literally understand situation/affairs, it means to know how the world works. It's a compliment to young children/dumb Chinese American young adults like me, usually when they do humbling/humiliating shit for favor/money/prestige reputation for/from someone who can make their world better. Basically China is kind of fucked because there are too many people so you can't get a decent job/position without someone helping you because you know them or you gave them a donation/favor. Public places in China wouldn't be able function if they were run the same way they were here because Chinese people pretty much just look out for their family/friends (and pretty much say fuck it to everything else so parks/museums shit like that would be littered/stolen out of functionality if there weren't authorities present/on call all the time). It actually kind of reminds me of the internet in this aspect. China has like, in proportion to population 5 or 6 times the number of police as the US because the government is run by Chinese people who are incredibly rational (and corrupt) and they don't want to deal with riff-raff (remember they sent fk'ing tanks to stop the TianAnMen protest which was done by un-armed but pissed off students, government's policy is prevention > cure, which is a cultural thing as well). Police aren't allowed to have their weapons issued to them for about the first 5 years of their job. Regular citizens are not allowed to have fire arms. Ever. China would become a war-zone if that were to happen because there is so much bottled up anger in everyone. This anger comes from there being too many people for you to make a difference individually, lack of avenues of individual expression, lack of opportunities for 95% of people who don't have connections/$$. People, particularly school children get attacked a lot by angry people like this.

Everyone looking out for themselves tends to fail in a lot of unpleasant ways that you probably don't have experienced here. For example, Americans don't really drive aggressively and they get fined for it. It is the norm in China. Everyone is always cutting everyone else off and because there are so many cars, if you don't do it yourself, you probably won't move much if at all. Traffic accidents are much more common, obviously. Another example is fires. In America, we have fire drills where everyone calmly lines up and co-operates by exiting the building/airplane/theatre whatever in a calm manner, we may or may not get out slower individually, but everyone gets out faster on average and it is organized. Chinese fire alarms, people have the same mentality as driving, this calm sort of looking for the best interests of all your fellow man thing doesn't work, everyone fucking runs as fast as they can. People get left behind. People get trampled to death. My great-aunt died in a fake bomb alert in a movie theatre because she was trampled.

That's enough for today.

If anyone else here is Chinese/CA and would like to help teach Chinese feel free.

Best,
saviour

[Gankster]

tl;dr

[carebear33]

what the fuck

[Colmo]

what do we do if that symbol is just a box with numbers in it

[FnC_dArKsLaYeR]

shooo homo your lineups suck

[WTFDUSAMAGIC]

LOL

[ixmike88]

hi

[bombas]

!? tldr plz

[saviour]

LOL

[Burntout]

tl dr;
Primary Chinese Lessons

[IcyLogik]

tl dr;
Primary Chinese Lessons

ty

[sohighandmighty]

http://www.purepwnage.com/teh_tv_show/e ... mail-sac-6

[Risk]

weird

[Forbs]

Not really a language lesson, more of a cultural one.

[saviour]

If there's even one person who's actually interested I'll keep writing. If you have boxes Colmo, you should go dl a thing that enables you to type in Chinese or allow it by going to language settings in control panel (assuming you are using MS Op System).

[sohighandmighty]

If there's even one person who's actually interested I'll keep writing. If you have boxes Colmo, you should go dl a thing that enables you to type in Chinese or allow it by going to language settings in control panel (assuming you are using MS Op System).

I'm interested, keep on writing!