I’ve studied it off and on since high school, but really struggle with speak. I get anxious about the times and accidentally saying something nonsensical. But we had a family show up that didn’t speak English, and I was able to do more than crank out 谢谢。
I really want to learn enough Chinese to have a conversation with the family that runs the buffet in my small-town hometown. I speak to them quite a bit in English - enough to know which dialect they speak and that they are in fact Chinese immigrants (in case anyone thinks I’m making assumptions).
They’ve always been so nice, and I know it’s got to be rough being immigrants in the middle of one of the more stereotypically racist states - although, the “Mexicans” (which are actually mostly Guatemalans, but nobody here knows the difference or cares) take the brunt of the hate. Anyways.
What was I saying? I guess I just hope that they’d see my learning Mandarin and having a small conversation in their native tongue as a nice gesture that might mean more than eating their crab rangoon more than I should. Or maybe that’s just me being white 🤷♂️ I can’t tell anymore.
As a beginner level speaker of Mandarin, I have never once had a negative reaction from those I’ve attempted to speak to. It was nearly always appreciated by the recipient. The language is also richly linked to the culture so also learning that at the same time is helpful to learning the language. Speaking the language is a sign of respect of the culture.
Just be prepared for the universal questions you get:
What I really appreciate about the language is how different in structure and grammar it is from romance languages. Not having to conjugate verbs is wonderful. No word gender makes learning easier too. What you gain in ease there you pick up in difficulty in learning the verbal tones and the writing system. Mandarin doesn’t use an alphabet so its a whole new world of writing to learn for romance language writers.
Go for it! Just get started learning!
Well, have you been to China?
我 还没 出国. 我很想出
Wǒ hái méi chūguó. Wǒ hěn xiǎng chū.
I have not yet gone, but I would love to go.
(One of those hanzi may be wrong. My writing is horrible.)
I will commit this to memory - with horrible pronunciation, I’m sure.
This is another cultural thing. No matter how good or bad your speech is, they will almost always say “Your Chinese is very good!”. American’s like myself, steeped from birth in exceptionalism, would normally think “ha! I’m awesome at this!” and say “thank you!”. That is NOT the appropriate reply. One, your Chinese (like mine) is likely pretty bad right now and nothing worthy of praise. The culturally appropriate way to respond is to deny its good or say how bad it actually is.
我的中文不好
Wǒ de zhōngwén bù hǎo.
My Chinese is not good.
This is what I meant when I say the language is tightly linked with the culture. You could learn grammar and pronunciation perfectly, but still give a “wrong” answer. I don’t say any of this to discourage you though. Jump in! Make mistakes! Learn! Its a wonderful ride and you’re a better version of yourself for the effort you put into it no matter how little or how far you go.
Sounds similar to Japanese on that front. I took a course years ago and it was like: Here’s how to say “Excuse me,” here’s how to say “Thank you,” and here’s how to say, “No actually my Japanese is terrible and I am like a baby” lmao
I have a feeling 我（的）中文不好 is too much of a statement of fact to work here, but I’m not good enough at Chinese to provide a good alternative. Maybe a simple 还不好啊 would make more sense? I’m not sure, but “when in doubt, put 啊” seems to generally be a good rule of thumb in Chinese.
I would personally say 我(的)中文還不怎麼好啦/我的中文还不怎么好啦 (wǒ de zhōngwén hái bùzěnme* hǎo la). 啦 carries a bit of humbleness and is often used when denying a praise. 啊 wouldn’t really work here, though I can’t really tell you why. Might be because it can (depending on tone) sound like you’re denying sth impatiently and that it should be obvious, I think? … sorry I don’t really know how to put this into words precisely.
*Although 怎麼/么 is usually said to be pronounced as zěnme, I have always felt it’s more aptly described as zeme.
That makes a lot of sense, thanks for the tip.
I believe it should be
我還沒去過。我很想去。
我还没去过。我很想去。
wǒ háiméi qù guò. wǒ hěn xiǎng qù.
I have not been [there] yet. I would love to go.
出國/国 (chūguó) means to leave the country (presumably your home country).
Thank you, I appreciate the correction.
Please do try going to China or Taiwan! It’ll be fun, I guarantee!
I don’t know how I would decide where to go in China, given it’s such a huge place. Part of it is straightforward, in that if you’re learning Mandarin, it wouldn’t make sense to visit a place where Cantonese is primarily spoken, but that doesn’t narrow it down much
Maybe you could go to Shanghai. I heard the food is quite good there. Maybe even Singapore, though you risk everyone switching to English upon hearing slow Mandarin. Maybe you could also check out Chongqing. Basically just stick to the big cities, unless you’re mentally prepared to have to do everything in Mandarin. In any case you don’t have to commit to one city; just use the rail to visit multiple cities.
Though not in China, my personal recommendation would be to try going to Taipei. It’s a cozy city with nice people. Taiwan’s the first in Asia to recognize same-sex marriage, which is quite something. The boba tea there is also awesome. Affordable and so much better than whatever they’re selling over in the States.
I think that’s supposed to be 去 (to to) rather than 出国 (to leave a country).
I’m from a pretty racist state and speak Spanish fluently, my wife is from Mexico City too!
For learning Mandarin as an adult I’ve had good results with mandarintutor.com.
¡Yo estudie Espanol para una pequeno momento en DuoLingo! (Muy pequeno, lmao) I stopped when the whole AI thing started. I swapped to Language Transfer, but never actually picked it back up :-/. How’d you go about learning Spanish?
I’ll definitely look into mandarin tutor.
I’ve been learning Spanish with Language Transfer too! I’ve only just recently completed all 90 lessons of it. I’ve also been watching Dreaming Spanish to get more of that juicy comprehensible input.
I’ve been very bad with my lessons. I did really well with Duolingo because it made it kinda competitive (which is odd in itself because I don’t really like to compete), but when Language Transfer told me to take it at my own pace, I really took that to heart. I think I’ve done 3 lessons in as many months… :-/
I could make excuses, but the reality of it is that I just find other things to do. Been burning it up on Fusion 360 for the past several weeks now - designing all sorts of stuff to bolt onto my fourwheeler fenders and handlebars. I was actually about to go make an account and upload everything to Thingiverse so that they might do someone else some good when I decided to check my Lemmy notifications, lol
https://www.thingiverse.com/oldmanbombin/designs 👍
I’ll upload more tomorrow, but here’s what I got uploaded before the sleep took me.
I did the LT lessons at 1 lesson a day, sometimes 2. Once I even did 4 while walking back home at midnight lol.
Cool thingiverse you got there! Maybe it’s time for me to buy a 3D printing machine though I’ll probably just borrow it from my friend haha.
I had planned to watch a lot of (easy) videos in Spanish, but this week Stardew Valley got the better of me and I have been hooked onto it the past week. What I’m doing is setting the game language as Spanish. I have to put in a lot of effort to understand the in-game dialog (written, not spoken) and look up a lot of words, but it has actually been quite a good experience and I’ve learned quite a bit of new words. The cognates with English words really do help a lot.
Did you start learning before you met your wife, or after? That lesson schedule sounds like a man on a mission 😂
Thanks :-) I’ve got several more moderately useless things to put up there, my eyes just started burning last night and I had to hit the hay. 3d printing is fun, but it can be very frustrating. If you’re trying to decide, I’d say make sure you can put it in a place that doesn’t experience much fluctuation in temperature, preferably with no humidity (or at least on the bottom half of the percentage range). Also, tighten your belts and level your bed. And don’t let cats near it. And keep your filament in a drybox of some kind - I keep mine in a lunchbox with a bunch of salt and silica packets.
When it comes to reading romance languages, I’ve been blessed with some innate ability to mostly decipher the overall meaning. I don’t know if it’s a lifetime of picking things up subconsciously or what, but I can usually look at a sentence and have a feeling for what it means. Speaking and writing is a completely different story. Maybe we should combine ourselves like Station from Bill and Ted in order to make one massive, hairy, language interpreter.
Lol I don’t have a wife or a husband (nor am I in a relationship, for that matter)! I simply sort of found the lessons fun so I felt the urge to do them. It’s not even a habit thing where there’s a fixed schedule and that I don’t feel comfortable not doing it (in fact I have missed multiple days) but rather this… thing that calls on me to do it. Though after finishing the lessons I have sort of lost a sense of where to head next on my Spanish journey. Probably gonna make some flashcards for words.
I just realized that there’s a 3D printer that I can use at my club (extracurricular group activity thing at my university where we do game dev, web dev, server management, and almost everything computer-related). I haven’t really gotten around to using it though. I’ll check that one out too.
My ability to grasp the gist of a sentence at first glance has also been improving. Hopefully it gets even better as I read more. It has also been the same for me with Japanese - reading is just fine but actually producing output in the language is another thing.
Edit: Oh I just realized you thought I was the other commenter because you were talking about their wife. Sorry for having bamboozled you haha.
Oh yeah, lmao. Totally my fault - I get confused sometimes.
I understand the urge thing - I get that with things sometimes, but almost never for long enough to become “accomplished” at anything. I’m a dabbler - I dabble with game creation, CAD, languages, music, writing… pretty much anything that randomly catches my fancy.
Here’s the game I was working on if you wanna check it out: https://old-man-bombin.itch.io/ragegame
It’s probably as finished as it will be.
The university club sounds awesome. Tell everyone there that I said hello.
Yeah now when it comes to languages outside the romance category, I might as well be looking at Martian runes. Especially if not written with English characters or whatever. Even if it is, though, it’s still basically gibberish to me. French, Spanish, Italian, German - stuff like that I’m pretty good on. For your average redneck anyway.