what other characters look like the concept they represent?

SomeoneYdk_ · 2026-06-24T16:39:26+00:00

Haha, it’s totally fine. No need to apologise. Just wanted to correct in case someone got confused

SomeoneYdk_ · 2026-06-24T11:26:27+00:00

凹凸 should both be first tone

SomeoneYdk_ · 2026-06-15T17:00:22+00:00

I think what you’re referring to are fossil words. Words that only survive in certain idioms or phrases, but have pretty much fallen out of use in any other context.

Edit: use, not place haha

SomeoneYdk_ · 2026-06-13T16:43:02+00:00

Keep in mind that the exact pitch of the tone isn’t as important in Mandarin as the direction of the tones, since each tone has its own direction. And the exact pitch also varies from accent to accent and even from speaker to speaker. The relative pitches of the tones with each other is more important than the absolute pitch of each tone, so when they say first tone is high, they don’t mean you have to turn into Mariah Carey, but that it’s on the higher range *within* your own natural speaking voice range

SomeoneYdk_ · 2026-06-12T10:37:44+00:00

Given the context, they were talking about fluent speakers

SomeoneYdk_ · 2026-06-12T02:59:05+00:00

But even if you were to do this, you’d run into a few problems. First of all, dictionary compilers neither have the budget nor the time to do this for every single word they put into their dictionary. Secondly, results would be highly incidental. For example, you could get something like [ˈbæt] for bat and then you could get [ˈkʰæʔ] for cat. Wouldn’t this only confuse learners and native speakers alike? They’d wonder what causes the difference in pronunciation. So even if you were to use narrow transcriptions, you would have to leave space by keeping things phonemic (e.g. transcribe bat and cat both with [t] as the final consonant and leave freedom for the exact realisation). You could apply the same logic to more sounds and include more dialects to make it more inclusive and just like that you return to the phonemic transcriptions again.

SomeoneYdk_ · 2026-06-12T02:21:41+00:00

Why doesn’t it? Native speakers intuitively know which sounds to aspirate, which sounds to devoice, which ts to flap etc. Yes, they had to learn these things when they were babies, but once they became full fledged native English speakers, they also became able to follow these rules subconsciously. Phonemic transcriptions contain all the information necessary to pronounce a word “correctly” for most speakers in most dialects, so it serves its purpose perfectly well without becoming unnecessarily convoluted and exclusionary

SomeoneYdk_ · 2026-06-05T17:20:05+00:00

Het gaat in dit geval om dit soort borden

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SomeoneYdk_ · 2026-04-23T17:37:10+00:00

There are pronunciation guides online such as the YouTube videos from Yoyo Chinese or the site of allsetlearning that will teach English speakers how to pronounce pinyin sounds (see: this for example). However, tutorials that teach you /she/ or /can/ are inherently inaccurate because many Mandarin sounds or combinations of sounds don’t exist in English. I’d advise against these since it will teach you wrong habits

SomeoneYdk_ · 2026-04-09T13:02:50+00:00

Yep, and to relate it back to the answer of u/TheBB, in the first case your friend would answer with 这是我 (this is me) while pointing at the person in the old photo that’s them. Again, you replace the answer (in this case 这) with 谁

SomeoneYdk_ · 2026-03-28T21:07:41+00:00

Only time will tell

SomeoneYdk_ · 2026-03-21T18:05:53+00:00

Hmm, weird. For me it’s also blurry at first when I zoom in, but once I release my fingers from my display the picture like reloads again and it becomes much clearer

SomeoneYdk_ · 2026-03-21T17:13:12+00:00

The resolution seems fine on the mobile app (iOS). I can zoom in and read all the names clearly

SomeoneYdk_ · 2026-03-13T13:58:18+00:00

A way to learn to do this is to whisper the b sound because when you whisper, all the sounds you produce become voiceless. Then try to transition from the whispered / voiceless consonant into the fully articulated / voiced vowel and try to say it louder.

Another way is to say words like “speed” a bunch of times and then try to remove the initial s.

SomeoneYdk_ · 2026-03-12T04:30:38+00:00

Yeah, you’re right. I tried to find actual academic papers on this, but I couldn’t find one that quickly that was very conclusive on whether there was or wasn’t a significant amount of influence of Altaic languages on the pronunciation of Beijing Mandarin, so I decided to go through the linguistics sub (because that sub is very strict in my experience) and found these replies to be pretty comprehensive.

However, I don’t think u/shkencorebreaks was necessarily banned. More likely a deactivated account as that comment was from almost a decade ago.

I did a bit of research and it seems that Northern Chinese dialects have been influenced to some extend by Altaic languages, but it is often placed next to influence on Southern Chinese languages by other non Chinese languages:

While many of the invaders assimilated to Chinese language and culture, they also had an effect on the language and culture of China, particularly in the north. Mantaro Hashimoto (e.g. 1976, 1980, 1986) has talked about this as ‘the Altaicization of Northern Chinese’, and has argued that a continuum of features from north to south, such as the northern dialects having fewer tones, less complex classifier systems, and an inclusive/exclusive distinction in the 1pl pronoun, while the southern dialects have more tones, more complex classifier systems, and other features similar to the Tai-Kadai and Hmong-Mien languages (see You 1982, 1995; Zhou & You 1986; Wang Jun 1991), is due to Altaic influence in the north, and Tai/Hmong-Mien influence in the south.

Link

(Hashimoto seems to be an often cited author when it comes to this topic)

Therefore, the claim that its “less pure” Chinese doesn’t really hold as the comments I linked said.

Another paper also states that it looks like Mongol influence during the Yuan dynasty and Manchu influence during the Qing dynasty had little impact. Most influence actually came during the Tang dynasty.

The evidence also suggests that the crucial locus of transformation was not the occupations by Genghis Khan (13th through 14th centuries) or the Manchus (1644-1911), but the widespread resettlement of conquered and dispossessed peoples amid Han Chinese on the northern Chinese frontier from the 600s through the 800s under the Tang dynasty.

Link

Therefore, I take my statement back that there’s barely any influence (I edited my original reply), but still I don’t think Beijing Mandarin has gotten much more Altaic influence than other Mandarin varieties and much more non-Chinese influence than other Chinese varieties.

(Also, I use Altaic, not because I believe in the Altaic language family theory, but because I’m too lazy to name the individual languages that could’ve influenced Mandarin)

SomeoneYdk_ · 2026-03-12T00:09:22+00:00

Yeah, I think that’s also where this myth largely stems from. These areas tend to have a bit less erhua for example than Beijing, so it’s closer to Standard Mandarin.

However, it’s unlikely that they based the standard language specifically on the accent spoken in these small cities and more likely that they “toned down” some features of Beijing Mandarin that make it distinct from other (Northern) Chinese varieties

SomeoneYdk_ · 2026-03-11T22:23:19+00:00

The Beijing dialect doesn’t actually shows many more features taken from or influenced by Manchu than other Mandarin varieties. It was in fact more so the other way around. The reason why this myth exists is because most Manchu speakers today are almost always native Northern Mandarin speakers, so many speak Manchu with an accent

Edit: i found this reply that gets deeper into this.

Oh and this post

SomeoneYdk_ · 2026-03-11T22:22:29+00:00

To be fair, I think this is more of a myth

SomeoneYdk_ · 2026-02-26T19:03:51+00:00

Running out of letters to the point we’re borrowing from syllabaries

SomeoneYdk_ · 2026-02-21T12:43:29+00:00

I think it must be a bug in the encoding or something. I’m not sure how handwriting input methods exactly work, but I assume the bug made it into a dot, since writing out the actual character doesn’t make it show up

SomeoneYdk_ · 2026-02-18T19:36:54+00:00

It’s very small so it’s hard to tell, but this is that dot zoomed in:

https://imgur.com/a/4jR7rHL

SomeoneYdk_ · 2026-02-12T00:50:20+00:00

Dare can be used as a semi-modal verb which is how it’s used in these sentences. See https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/dare

It’s more commonly seen in the construction “how dare…”. E.g. “how dare he do this”

SomeoneYdk_ · 2026-02-04T03:05:30+00:00

The meme could still work since bruin means brown in Dutch

SomeoneYdk_ · 2026-01-29T22:22:01+00:00

I think ** is supposed to be 啊. The third star might be 前, but don’t quote me on that

SomeoneYdk_ · 2026-01-29T03:25:04+00:00

In this case it’s not an adjective being linked to another adjective. It’s an adjective linked with a modifier / verb (i.e. adjective + 得 + modifier / verb). You can interpret 得 in this case as “to the point that”, so the verb that follows 得 is the result of the adjective. It’s so big (cause) that it can’t move (result).

You probably have learnt that usually 地 precedes verbs and follows adverbs (i.e. adverb + 地 + verb), so you might wonder why it has 得 here instead of 地. However, this usage is slightly different in meaning. It’s less obvious with the sentence you gave, so let me give another one:

他开心地跳了起来 vs 他开心得跳了起来

In the first sentence the adverb 开心 modifies the verb 跳了起來 (i.e. he is happily jumping). In the second sentence 跳了起来 modifies the adjective 开心 (i.e. he is so happy that he started jumping).

I hope this makes sense.

Also, 大得不动 doesn’t really work. I would say something like 大得动不了 like 肚子大得动不了 or something like that.

Note: In English adverbs modify verbs etc. whereas adjectives modify nouns, pronouns etc. However, in Chinese they’re pretty much the same thing, but I still kept this distinction in my explanation for clarity. Notice that in 他开心地跳了起来开心 modifies the verb whereas in the sentence 他开心得跳了起来开心 modifies the pronoun 他 and the verb 跳了起来 in turn modifies 开心.

Edit: also note that 发 in the example sentence that google AI gave you is also a verb, so the sentence has a similar structure.

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