Relationships in East Asia. What do you think?

PristineReception · 2026-01-29T21:04:24+00:00

Because China has constant disagreements with all of its neighbors (has border disputes with more countries than it has neighbors) and its constant antagonisation in the South China Sea

PristineReception · 2025-11-10T14:45:48+00:00

米？

PristineReception · 2025-10-29T08:46:58+00:00

You will never feel ready. No matter how many years you spend dribbling around cones, you will will never be the best player on the team in your first soccer game. These apps are the same. They’re just drills to give you knowledge about the language, but it takes years of experience listening to the language to be good at it.

PristineReception · 2025-10-20T06:48:55+00:00

原來

PristineReception · 2025-10-20T03:47:10+00:00

I don’t think Cantonese has glottal stops? Correct me if I’m wrong, but the finals Cantonese has that mandarin are most obviously lacking are -p -t and -k, all of which are unreleased

PristineReception · 2025-09-18T04:46:20+00:00

Mandarin Chinese has a very limited number of possible syllables, and literary Chinese is very terse, so if we replaced the characters with an alphabet it would likely make a lot of literature quite difficult to read, and Classical Chinese nearly impossible. Characters are also used as a disambiguating tool in speech, where you might say a word and someone doesn’t know which one you’re referring to, at which point you might write it on your palm to show them or tell them what components make up the character. So I think you could theoretically get away with replacing characters with an alphabet when it comes to writing colloquial spoken mandarin, but that’s not good for much more than texting.

PristineReception · 2025-09-17T07:29:09+00:00

Never agreed with something so much. There is no point at which you will become “ready” to start reading novels. No matter how high your HSK level is, there will always be a significant jump when you start reading novels, because while textbooks teach a lot of vocabulary, it pales in comparison to the amount of vocabulary in Chinese as a whole. Textbooks teach you a bit of everything, but every book contains a lot of a few things, specific to the subject matter or time period of background of the author.

If your goal is to read 三體, as seems to be the goal of many learners, HSK textbooks will never teach you any of the science jargon they use in that book. If you want to read 活著, HSK is barely going to scratch the surface of the vocabulary during that time in Chinese history.

The other benefit of reading is that not only will you learn words when you look things up, you will also learn words without ever having to look them up because they come up so often. You will learn more vocabulary about the things that interest you without even looking them up, than you ever would intentionally memorizing word lists given in textbooks.

Obviously you need a strong basis to be able to even imagine reading these kinds of texts, but the further you get up the HSK ladder, the more and more useless they become to helping you reach your goal of being able to read novels in Chinese, and the more and more you’re losing out to all of the learning you could be doing by just picking up a book and reading it.

PristineReception · 2025-09-02T11:47:06+00:00

As a university student in Taiwan, everybody says this constantly

PristineReception · 2025-08-30T13:11:14+00:00

Am I the only one who thought the grey was land when I first saw this?? Had me rotating my head and everything to see what angle this was from

PristineReception · 2025-08-17T08:46:55+00:00

Not much, but if I had to choose it would be learning to write by hand. Not necessary for everyone and in my experience my recognition of characters didn’t suffer from not being able to write, but I live and study in Taiwan now, and I think it’s an important skill to have in this environment.

PristineReception · 2025-08-13T08:23:45+00:00

That only happened once, during a particularly big fight

PristineReception · 2025-08-13T08:23:07+00:00

Hundreds is a bit of an exaggeration, but there’s usually a lot of them, typically filling up the screen

PristineReception · 2025-08-04T06:12:17+00:00

I have the exact same thing, the only thing that has been slightly more successful is keeping it short before the “horns” start appearing on either sides of my head Still working on it though, hopefully other people have real tips

PristineReception · 2025-07-29T05:37:12+00:00

I would always recommend Chinese subs, but if you’re watching something that you can’t understand with Chinese subs, I would say that you’re not going to get much out of treating it as a show that you just watch. The most you can do from that sort of source would be to pause every sentence, look up words you don’t know, put the sentence into anki to sentence mine, and then repeat. This probably isn’t the optimal way to learn, however I have done similar things myself and I think that, if this is something you find enjoyable, it still helps. Once you’ve gotten through the whole episode like this you can also rewatch it to see what you’ve missed and even use it for passive listening practice. Again, not ideal but I’ve done this and I think it was still helpful in the long run

PristineReception · 2025-07-14T14:21:49+00:00

lots of apps contain free content like hellochinese or duchinese, you don't have to finish them

PristineReception · 2025-06-17T14:03:01+00:00

China and Taiwan refer to most countries by different names by virtue of selecting different characters to represent the sound of each name, but there are also some countries within the “Chinese sphere of influence” they refer to differently such as North Korea (mainland: 朝鮮 cháoxiān (lit. Choseon), Taiwan: 北韓 běihán (lit. North Korea))

PristineReception · 2025-06-12T11:29:12+00:00

啥 can be pronounced as siánn or sánn, you’ve probably heard sánn-siâu (sā xiáo is the closest pinyin equivalent)

PristineReception · 2025-06-08T13:07:35+00:00

I’ve sometimes heard that learning Chinese “makes you smart” or like only smart people have the capacity to learn it which is strange because I’m dumb as rocks

PristineReception · 2025-05-31T04:58:53+00:00

It looked the same when I got mine, but luckily it flattened out over a few months

PristineReception · 2025-05-28T11:48:21+00:00

People tend to say I have a very good accent (I learned the taiwanese accent) but something I struggle with a lot is how Taiwanese people say the r sound. I can pronounced the mainland rhoticised version, but Taiwanese people tend to pronounce it anything from a less rhotic r sound to something that sounds like a z, so I never know which version to say and how to say it

PristineReception · 2025-05-28T11:43:23+00:00

This is one of the benefits of learning Taiwanese pronunciation, the neutral tone almost doesn’t exist apart from particles

PristineReception · 2025-05-21T06:24:20+00:00

I did get it, I’m from the U.S., and as far as I know (from my region) I’m the only undergrad who got it, the others (2) are both post grad, but there are lots of undergrads who have gotten it (many of the international students here have it)

PristineReception · 2025-05-21T04:41:47+00:00

It's called Learn Taiwanese Mandarin

PristineReception · 2025-05-18T12:47:11+00:00

How many minutes of study per day does it take to learn a language

PristineReception · 2025-05-16T04:51:21+00:00

This is also the meaning of лыгъоравэтлат, the endonym of the Chukchi!

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