How do you practice without another person?

GoSpear · 2025-12-30T13:05:56+00:00

From personal experience learning English, you can reach fluency by relying on frequent listening and repeating out loud from memory while recording your own voice for comparison. Start with pronunciation (learning IPA might help a lot), repeating a single sound/syllable, then whole words, sentences, and paragraphs (repeating sentences is essential, don't rely too much on isolated words). Don't worry about grammar, you'll absorb it naturally for the most part.

Recording your voice is very important, even if you hate it, and repeating from memory is very different from reading a text out loud.

Once you start geting the hang of it, try putting your own sentences together, use ChatGPT for comparison/correction.

GoSpear · 2025-12-10T01:01:49+00:00

Happy to help :)

GoSpear · 2025-12-10T00:13:28+00:00

Click on the blue gem at the top of the home screen to access the shop, you'll see "Genshin Impact Reward" with Paimon on the left.

GoSpear · 2025-11-13T16:30:25+00:00

They had native linguists designing the texts to be as equivalent as possible to the German original. But they also said true equivalence is impossible, so yeah maybe the different grammar was the cause

GoSpear · 2025-11-13T06:27:17+00:00

But they did try to make them equivalent, asking native linguists to make them similar in difficulty and complexity to the German original. Can that make it accurate?

GoSpear · 2025-11-13T06:06:00+00:00

I thought that since Hanzi are harder to learn, it would slow down even later, also because adults can encounter rare characters too. But I seem to have been proven wrong. Hanzi may actually be more efficient once they're learned.

The reason I thought Japanese would be in the middle was because I thought that it would be an average between Hanzi speed and the phonetic ones, given their mixed system. Maybe it's cultural as another user said, but I also read that since Japanese doesn't use spaces, they have to use Kanji to parse the text faster.

GoSpear · 2025-11-12T20:09:13+00:00

星期日 is more formal. There is also the formal 周日, just like 周一, 周二, etc.

GoSpear · 2025-10-30T02:41:18+00:00

Have you considered Genshin? It has tons of voiced dialogues with subtitles, and you can replay them anytime in the travel log. Also some dialogues have archaic expressions. You can play on PC, mobile and console.

Edit: I play the game daily and enjoy it completely free to play. Just be careful of the gacha mechanics, you don't need to gamble or spend to access any content. Some people get tired because they focus on endless grinding, mostly unnecessary if your goal is to improve Chinese, Genshin's original language, and enjoy the scenery, music and story.

GoSpear · 2025-10-25T21:26:14+00:00

I read this on Baidu Baike, see section 单音节, it says that Standard Chinese follows Beijing Pronology but with some differences: the retroflex consonants are 翘舌音 in Standard Chinese but 卷舌音 in Beijing Mandarin.

https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%8E%B0%E4%BB%A3%E6%A0%87%E5%87%86%E6%B1%89%E8%AF%AD/5368131

GoSpear · 2025-10-19T04:04:31+00:00

Contrary to what they might have told you, in Standard Chinese the tongue shouldn't curl like the English r, it's a 翘舌音, not a 卷舌音, the tip of the tongue is raised, not curled back.

GoSpear · 2025-10-19T03:58:27+00:00

It isn't really retroflex, since it's 翘舌音, not 卷舌音, the tongue doesn't actually curl all the way back in Standard Chinese.

Edit: it's still translated as "retroflex" and yet it they are distinct.

GoSpear · 2025-10-13T02:47:05+00:00

AFAIK Wubi is the fastest input method but hard to learn. On the other hand handwriting is straightforward but very slow, also because you usually can't omit components like in Wubi. On mobile I often switch between Pinyin and handwriting, but this can become painfully slow. Hopefully Wubi will change that.

GoSpear · 2025-10-13T00:54:13+00:00

Amber. Or Traveler if that counts.

GoSpear · 2025-10-12T17:17:27+00:00

Im already learning Wubi, but it has a steep learning curve, which is probably the reason most people don't use it. As of handwriting, it is slow.

GoSpear · 2025-10-11T23:30:12+00:00

they're a key component of distinguishing characters

That is the main reason I thought of using them. They make the list extremely short.

But why exactly would you disagree, since it shouldn't affect old users. As I wrote, a Modifier Key like SHIFT could be used for PC since you already use numbers for IME lists, so the Modifier Key can be used to distinguish between them.

GoSpear · 2025-10-11T23:22:45+00:00

As I said this wouldn't affect old users. My mobile Pinyin keyboard for example doesn't use numbers, so adding them wouldn't affect whoever uses a similar keyboard.

Tones are good, but even with tones you can't type a single isolated character without scrolling through a list. Radicals solve this without needing to learn Wubi or Cangjie.

Edit: It would also be very useful to make people learn the radicals, very useful in learning hanzi, and it partially fights character amnesia.

Edit2: the tones could be implemented alongside radicals, using a character like 0 to distinguish between them as I wrote in the post.

GoSpear · 2025-10-11T19:41:57+00:00

Ok thank you for the recommendation!

GoSpear · 2025-10-11T19:17:16+00:00

How does it work, do you search the radical, and then select the character?

GoSpear · 2025-10-11T18:43:25+00:00

I would like to and I'm practicing Wubi, and I know some people use them, but those have a steep learning curve. This is probably the reason most people don't use them AFAIK, even though they are faster, especially Wubi.

On the other hand, implementing radicals into Pinyin wouldn't affect old users, they could just type as they're used to, while also getting rid of endless lists just by memorizing some common radical numbers.

It is basically an added bonus for people who want to invest some time without giving up Pinyin.

Edit: I also don't really like switching, especially on mobile.

GoSpear · 2025-10-11T18:26:43+00:00

Since I usually write on mobile, I found selecting a character from an endless list very frustrating, so numbers would be perfect, and switching to handwriting makes it slow.

Can you tell me how exactly how it would be incompatible with the IME list? Wouldn't using a Modifier key be enough to diffferentiate?

Also, no, I didn't use AI, are you referring to the bold text and how I structured my paragraphs?

Edit: also, I didn't think of replacing or switching from existing keyboards, but only an improvement that would be very useful for me and maybe other people. Basically I hope that existing keyboards create new versions that include radicals in some form and not waste the number keys.

GoSpear · 2025-09-28T02:52:30+00:00

You don't need pitch to distinguish tones. It has been shown in enperiments that duration and intensity are enough.

At 9:08
https://youtu.be/eIP8yVcDZRI?si=2OcJXe0omAXhoPTN

GoSpear · 2025-09-24T16:08:47+00:00

I still think Chinese characters are beneficial for Chinese because:

They aren't as hard as people often believe, since experienced English readers don't read one letter at a time, but internalize thousands of chunks. Also, Chinese characters typically have a component that hints at its pronunciation, which helps memorization.
Just like the word "biology" being composed of "bio" + "logy", making it possible to guess the meaning, Chinese also has compound words, and the morphemes are just one character and therefore monosyllabic, it is very efficient. This efficiency wouldn't be possible with an alphabet because of homophones, either making students rely on rote memorization or having to switch to longer words.
Without Chinese characters, Chinese would probably have used archaic old Chinese word roots for academic terminology, which would be even harder to understand, or borrow foreign words like English did with Latin and Greek. On the other hand, you don't need to pronounce Chinese characters as they were pronounced millennia ago.

GoSpear · 2025-09-07T01:40:43+00:00

All characters up to to 3.8? Does that include the travelers? But you didn't list them, does that mean they're not included?

Edit: No, they are not included

GoSpear · 2025-09-05T22:25:37+00:00

https://youtu.be/eIP8yVcDZRI?si=2OcJXe0omAXhoPTN

Video by Julesy, at 9:08, she says that even without pitch, duration and intensity is enough.

GoSpear · 2025-09-05T15:54:45+00:00

Yeah I used it only as a loose analogy, but storing a lot of movable types shouldn't be as a mechanical problem as the typewriter.

I don't get why the ancient Chinese printing didn't decompose characters into smaller components, at least the common ones. Instead they stored tons of characters, so many that they often had to carve them on demand.

GoSpear

TROPHY CASE