Why haven't you learned the only worthwhile language besides English yet...

because asian languages, ESPECIALLY chinese, are woefully unsuited to alphabets. I mean, in a tonal language where every word has about 20 homophones, can you really blame them?

(every word in this poem is pronounced "shi", put it through a translator and you'll see)

Transcript (traditional Chinese):
《施氏食獅史》
石室詩士施氏,嗜獅,誓食十獅。
氏時時適市視獅。
十時,適十獅適市。
是時,適施氏適市。
氏視是十獅,恃矢勢,使是十獅逝世。
氏拾是十獅屍,適石室。
石室濕,氏使侍拭石室。
石室拭,氏始試食是十獅。
食時,始識是十獅屍,實十石獅屍。
試釋是事。

Phonetically spelled:
« Shī Shì shí shī shǐ »
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, shí shí shí shī shī.
Shì shì shì shì.

youtube.com/watch?v=vExjnn_3ep4

I'm interested.

How did you begin? Any recommended resources?

Well, I would start by learning the basic characters.

example:

我 is "I"
愛 is "love"
你 is "you"

therefore, "我愛你" means "I love you" If you want to ask a question, you must remember to put the particle "嗎" at the end.
tell me, what does this mean then? "你愛我嗎?"
it means, "do you love me?"

anyways, yeah, just learn basic words and start stringing them together. sentence structure is slightly different than english, but as a beginner you don't really need to worry about that.

Don't make my initial mistake, learn the pronunciation AND the written word together. For about a year, I was in a state where I could READ the language but couldn't actually SPEAK it.

You mean Cantonese? Don't tell me you fell for the Mandarin meme.

Redpill on that then:

pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

>Chinese characters can become a lifelong obsession, and you soon find yourself engaged in the daily task of accumulating them, drop by drop from the vast sea of characters
Holy shit is he me? Other than that he seems to be really driving home the "CHINESE IS SO HARD DX" argument which really isn't true - once you get a grip on things

>Straight learning Chinese
>Not learning Japanese and picking up how to read Chinese by osmosis

Japanese characters only vaguely follow the original meaning. For instance "私" which means "I" in Japanese means "private" in Chinese.

>Holy shit is he me?
So he is right? Hm..

I meant to say I do that too user

Yeah, and you came here to make sure you didn't just waste your 2 years, so you can continue studying without any anxiety-driven distraction.

????
It isnt't hard to memorize a few characters a day. I've had a fascination with languages, especially Chinese, for years; I'm not learning it because I have to user

>chinese is so hard there's like 800 kanji duurrrr

How is learning kanji any different than learning vocabulary words?

>He only speaks the Cantonese dialect
I feel sorry for you. But then again if you can only speak Mandarin and not know at least a few phrases in Hunan and Wuxi hua you're missing a lot of the mucho mainland fun

>calling chinese characters kanji
weeb detected. opinion discarded

????

I'm studying all Chinese, specifically written traditional characters and spoken Mandarin

Of course he's right, he has a Ph.D. in psycholinguistics and Chinese, and has lived in China for more than 30 years. He's written several books on the language and countless papers. He's the academic director at CET, a Chinese language program in Beijing. He knows more than a random user exhibiting the Dunning-Kruger effect on a tibetan basketweaving emporium.

This is bullshit. Every language has homophones and every language can use an alphabet, even if it has to be a newly invented alphabet (like Korean hangul). It is still infinitely simpler to learn an alphabet than to have to learn thousands and thousands of characters by rote memorization, for both foreign learners and natives when exceptions have to be introduced for homophones.

Just about every linguist (see John DeFrancis) who has studied the writing system has come to the conclusion that it is both unnecessary and about as terrible a writing system as could possibly be conceived. The only reason Asians hold onto it is out of a perverse "muh ancestors" cultural pride.

*even when

>Every language has homophones and every language can use an alphabet
Holy shit do you not realize just how many homophones Chinese in particular has? How many do you have to deal with in english: 10, maybe 20 at most? Chinese has literally hundreds. Go ahead and read the phonetic version of the poem and tell me what the hell it says. Don't you realize that people have been attempting to translate written Chinese over to the roman alphabet system for almost all of the 20th century? There's a reason why romanized Chinese is not in regular use and that's because it makes it hard as shit to read, which incidentally is also the reason why the second batch of Chinese simplifications isn't in regular use either. That said, China already has an alphabet, and guess what? It's not used for reading, it's used for inputting Chinese characters into computers and phones. The truth is while Chinese is clunky, cumbersome, and difficult for foreigners to learn, thanks to Pinyin and some of the other input methods, China has found a bizarre workaround and created a sort of hybrid alphabet/logogram system that seems to be working so far. Seriously, why fix what isn't broken? China almost has a 100% literacy rate (at least that's what the Party tells us).

>The only reason Asians hold onto it is out of a perverse "muh ancestors" cultural pride.
I guess you just forgot about the Cultural Revolution and the countless attempts to abolish Chinese Characters huh? Remember, "If Chinese characters are not abolished, China is doomed to perish". - Lu Xun, one of the most prominent Chinese writers at the time.

Because I'm german and thus the japanese pronounciation is basically already natural for me. Speaking chinese on the other hand is hard as fuck. Learning alphabets is only some work either way, with japanese having the nice perk of being able to start with hiragana only and then include katakana and kanji much like japanese kids do. And if an easy alphabet was my top priority, I'd just go korean. Also completely new grammair is kind of interesting for me. I can imagine the chinese poetry is very beautiful though with all those similar sounds and stuff, so this would definitely be something that makes me want to know chinese.

>chinese pronunciation
KEK I gave up a long time ago. I'm doomed to always sound like a stupid american pigu

It's easy and natural to learn new characters once you have the foundation in place.

>terrible a writing system as could possibly be conceived
You are really overselling it and it makes me very suspicious of your motivations honestly.

not him but what are his """motivations"""

How hard is it to learn Chinese if you already know Japanese (not as a native speaker)?

Supremacy.

That sounds a bit like me when the kids are playing nearby and my wife's boss calls her on the phone.

Japanese and Chinese are totally different. The only thing they share is a set of Chinese characters, and more often than not the meanings are significantly different. In all honesty, the only benefit I could see is that you probably already know a few basic characters like "fire" and "tree" and that you probably also are familiar with the most common radicals and know the proper stroke order.

>Holy shit do you not realize just how many homophones Chinese in particular has?
It literally doesn't matter. Either context makes the meaning obvious or the spelling changes to indicate a different meaning or the pronunciation changes to distinguish the words. Every language can be written with an alphabet, but that's not to say that the transition would be painless (imposing Mandarin on all of China itself is an enormously painful process). It's not like Mandarin has the most homophones in the world. Japanese has three times as many.

>I guess you just forgot about the Cultural Revolution and the countless attempts to abolish Chinese Characters huh? Remember, "If Chinese characters are not abolished, China is doomed to perish". - Lu Xun, one of the most prominent Chinese writers at the time.
No I remembered them just fine. Lu Xun was right, but what is right and what the powerful implement are not always the same thing.

Read: TL;DR: it's a ridiculously difficult and time-consuming writing system to learn (orders of magnitude more than an alphabet) *even for native speakers*

I guess you just forgot about the Cultural Revolution and the countless attempts to abolish Chinese Characters huh? Remember, "If Chinese characters are not abolished, China is doomed to perish". - Lu Xun, one of the most prominent Chinese writers at the time.

>
>I guess you just forgot about the Cultural Revolution and the countless attempts to abolish Chinese Characters huh? Remember, "If Chinese characters are not abolished, China is doomed to perish". - Lu Xun, one of the most prominent Chinese writers at the time.
?????

Okay, you see kind of buttman. Calm down.

??????????

Isn't there a Chinese poem where the only word is "Shi" pronounced 36 different ways?

Yeah I think I read about that somewhere.

Higher in the thread

I've just been in this place before!

It's only easier in some ways

but the pronunciation for example is much harder

Chinese is grammatically pretty similar to english tbqh though.

sounds awful

fucking atrocious

>wanting to deal with subhumans

Wew.

That's fucking awful.

I know this guy and he is a real piece of shit who bears the blame for his own failures. He hates Chinese as a race, because hates being forced to deal with he global south, and he's an orientalist. Can't you tell from reading it? I mean come on, the first complaint he has is that there is a Chinese phrase exactly equivalent to "Caveat Emptor". Please don't peddle this crap around. I know that SJWs have inflamed your sensitives to these labels but racism is racism, and when the first line of a post is someone shouting in all capital letters about how much they hate people as a whole race and is reposed by people who calls them subhuman, you should know what's up.

but chinese ARE insectoids

>Why haven't you learned the only worthwhile language besides English yet?

Because if I cannot pronounce English right in spite of writing it well enough to be understood, I have no chances of learning a language where how you say the same word changes the meaning.

yeah but what can i do with chinese? japanese opens the door to extreme cartoon porn and videogames

That 'poem' is a pretty bad example given that it's obviously specifically written to demonstrate the number of homophones- nobody will produce anything like that number either in natural speech or in literature.

Having said that, a lot -would- be lost by romanising Chinese. You could write most modern Chinese without too many ambiguities, but classical texts would become largely unreadable.

noticing a lot of china related threads on Veeky Forums recently...very suspicious...

what was that really good mobile app where you can draw characters and type in sentences in english and shit? can't remember the name but it's awesome, better than any PC software i've found

they're not kanji and they're not letters

白人不懂

It is true. Anything before Early Modern English is almost unintelligible. Li Bai, on the other hand, wrote his famous poems in 700 AD.

Chinese in the modern day is useless. Mao pretty much murdered every relevant Chinese philosophers and other intellectuals during the cultural revolution. Seriously just search up 'Chinese philosophers' in google, it's like if Europe still boasts about 'muh Plato, muh Aristotle', the communists has made China an irrelevant anti-intellectual shithole, there's no point in learning Chinese.

>Chinese pronunciation is nearly impossible for the Western pig due to the congenital malformation of his overgrown tongue
Fuck you Qing Zhong, no sane language has such a high amount of voiceless post-alveolar affricates.

if europe was still all about muh greeks they wouldn't be importing shitskins in some kind of thanatropic frenzy

philosophy was a mistake

>if europe was still all about muh greeks

They would be exactly like East Asia, a stagnant shortsighted shithole who's best achievements would be just assembling and improving European /American concepts and technology, then dying from overwork.

>Mao pretty much murdered every relevant Chinese philosophers and other intellectuals during the cultural revolution.

meme tier knowledge of China. Why even post?

I post because freedom of speech and expression. Learn it chink. Yes mao did drove off(to Taiwan and other parts of Asia) and murdered countless of intellectuals.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Rightist_Movement

cyka blyat

You're right that most of the fascists did run off with the KMT to Taiwan, and from there tried to pretend that all of China was destroyed and the only real part of it left was their island of true Chinese, in order to claim legitimate government over the whole thing. But they're wrong, and so are you. The Culture Revolution did not destroy Chinese culture despite the decades of propaganda that insisted otherwise. I'm not Chinese, by the way.

>The Culture Revolution did not destroy Chinese culture

When did I claim that? It didn't destroy the culture, it just stagnated it indefinitely. The thoughts and views of Luo Longji, Chen Mengjia and thousands of other unnamed intellectuals, erased from history will forever bite China in the ass. For this, you'll forever be a bunch of filthy roaches.

youtube.com/watch?v=LdqtN9AO6YM

>it just stagnated it indefinitely
No it didn't, no matter how much you copy things from the wikipedia article you just linked to pretend you are not ignorant of what you are talking about. History is full of philosophers, writers and thinkers who lost, reactionaries who are forever on the dead side of history. The anti-suffragettes, the slavers, those western critics of democracy, and a hundred thousand nameless others. You're a small-minded racist, who doesn't know a thing about China but who won't stop yelling about their stale boogeymen until they're blue. And again, I'm not Chinese.

Right, because imperial China was such a bastion of progressive thought. Those subsistence farmers without education sure were advancing society, educating and providing security to them totally stagnated Chinese society.

Monarchists and their mental gymnastics.

because imperial China was such a bastion of progressive thought.

The commie roaches didn't just imprison monarchists/fascists, they killed and imprisoned everyone that stands against the party. Especially liberals who advocated for freedom of speech and human rights.

>reactionaries who are forever on the dead side of history.

I'm not disputing that at all. Some culture just suppresses better than the others, philosophy and differing points of views are not very valued in extremely collective societies especially in East Asia.

>And again, I'm not Chinese.

Number one wumao tactic or you're just an English teacher in love with a china woman whatever.

for anyone getting into chinese or for someone who has been learning the language for awhile, i'd recommend david hinton's 《Existence: A Story》. even as a foreigner who has been learning chinese for 10 years, i found the book illuminating w.r.t. the interconnectedness of chinese painting, calligraphy, and grammar. also conviced me that 气 is "real".

- read the original DBZ
- read on taoism so you can be a metaphysical troll
- read on confucianism so you can tell people what to do
- read the chinese buddhist canon so you can join that sweet aristocracy of the soul
- notice when you're being called a gweilo
- wearing chinese clothing will feel less like apropriation
- tons literature
- tons of tv shows and movies
- and more

Oh, 气 is very real. I play with it with my hands every night, if you catch my drift.

Japanese and Chinese are almost different languages.

ok you have me interested with the first three
>- wearing chinese clothing will feel less like apropriation
what the fuck dude

Dragonball Z is Japanese, idiot

ever hear of the journey to the west dude? jeez

That would be more like the original Dragon Ball though, no?

so if i want to learn chinesse to read romance of three kingdomns, journey to west etc it should not be so difficult?

Can Chinese people understand this just by listening to it?

it'd be almost impossible lol

i found it, it's called Pleco for anyone interested.

youtube.com/watch?v=troxvPRmZm8

>two women have an argument
>three women is adultery

What did China mean by this?

...

...

What's modern Chinese literature like? By modern I mean anything written since 1900. I read Romance of the Three Kingdoms but that's so old I don't think it would be a good representation of modern Chinese literature.

>Cat Country
Science fiction reminiscent of Brave New World and Animal Farm about a Chinese guy going to Mars to find a race of cat people that mimic Chinese culture at the time
>Rickshaw Boy
Incredibly depressing story about how poverty destroys a person's morality
>Fortress Besieged
autistic college professor has an unhappy marriage
>Soul Mountain
experimental novel that alternates between first and second person that is partially autobiographical, inspired by the author being falsely diagnosed with lung cancer
>Beijing Coma
guy who participated in the Tienanmen Square protests goes through a 30 year coma and tries to adjust to modern Chinese society
>The Dark Road
the last descendant of Confucius tries to protect his wife's fetus from the one child policy

Those plots sound fantastic actually. My college offers courses in Chinese and Russian and I've been torn which over which to take. Now I think I'm leaning towards Chinese

But does China even have modern fiction worth reading? I know for a fact that Japan has plenty.

these are all basically the same in Japanese too. I'm pretty sure 家内 is considered outdated though

>Main, Person
>Master
what did he mean by this

I'm not an SJW, I just can let myself wear anything if it doesn't have any meaning to me, I'd feel like a poser.

No, being stupidly OP was always part of "Son Goku"'s character. If anything, the newer Dragon Ball stuff that's all about gods is actually where JttW starts, with Sun Wukong rebelling against heaven until the Buddha slaps him down.

Women only care about men because they have nothing to tell each other.

>isolating languages
I really hope you guys don't do this

Who will stop me, the police?

What does Japan have?

So a wife I basically "person inside the house"
Kek and Western language is one of the most sexist they say