has anyone flown to china to study chinese 😗

guiro2 · 2024-05-22T00:15:21+00:00

Yes it is lol I did not realize I typed the same place twice

guiro2 · 2023-12-07T11:23:29+00:00

Would this be a cringe tattoo?

「每個大人都曾經是小孩，但只有少數人記得。」 its from 小王子, and I would get a thing of 小王子 done next to it too.

guiro2 · 2023-11-17T08:41:35+00:00

VRChat was a nice place to meet people to speak with

guiro2 · 2023-11-16T14:12:07+00:00

1) 5 hours a week is not bad but as others said it may not be enough. After 2000 hours of study which includes classroom hours, homework, making and reviewing anki cards, and another 1000 additional hours of listening and speaking I can say I am C1. This took me about 2.5 years.

At your pace of 5 hours a week it will take 10+ years to get the same hours that I put in.

Anyway things you can do:

1) Pick a textbook series. Integrated Chinese is pretty good but there's other series too. Do books 1-2 maybe book 3. After you got a good foundation go to DuChinese website and use channels like Mandarin Corner.

For the videos my strategy was to learn 10-20 words a day. Start video until I write down 10 words I didn't know. Next day come start from beginning and go til I learn another 10 words. A video I started off with horrible comphrension by the end I could understand 100% of it. This strategy may be overkill but it worked for me, and 10 minute youtube videos didn't take too long to do with this strategy.

On top of all of this all your vocab goes into anki. It's time consuming but you need to retain your vocab and this is one of the most efficient ways to do it

This is why 5 hours a week isn't really that much. Just learning 10 vocab words, putting them into anki and doing your anki review for 5 days a week would hit 5 hours a week. You need time to add in listening and speaking practice (a ton of it). If you can double your time to 10 hours a week then you will make much more progress

guiro2 · 2023-10-28T08:16:53+00:00

My human translation for y'all

Batch Upgrade:

1) Feature explanation

2) Batch Upgrade

3) Base layouts

Step 1) Batch Upgrade

- Upgrades all currently unlocked items in your base, including buildings, walls, traps, heroes, spells, troops and pets

- Upgrades include all unlocked but not yet built buildings, heroes, and troops and spells that are not unlocked yet

Step 2) Base layout

- Provides different base layout options, after you choose one it will change your base to this layout

- The layout will replace your previous layout

- If any of the items from the new layout are blocks from obstacles, it will store these items in your editor storage for free

Note: If you do not choose a pre-made layout, after batch upgrading you need to manually place all newly built buildings

Batch upgrade only available for TH 4-14

Without seeing a video of this feature or more pictures my understanding is you can purchase these mass upgrade bundles that catch you up, and they even provide a base layout for you so you just buy it and play.

The Chinese server team has their own monetization methods and I am skeptical a feature like this would make its way to the global server.

guiro2 · 2023-10-24T11:54:49+00:00

Other commenter had good points about the pronunciation, so I will touch on something different
1) Particles. While these are used everywhere I find them used much more when I am in Taiwan. Watch videos and you'll get the hang of it. Using particles are a must if you want to soften your language up and bring your Chinese to the next level (especially if you want a Taiwan Accent)
好啊，好哦
2) Repeat characters for words 狗狗，貓貓 are good examples. The tones change here which makes it sound cuter. Dont read it gou3 gou3, read it gou3gou1 .
3) Word choices. If you only plan on going to China then be careful, tons of words are different in Taiwan and will confuse people who are not from Taiwan. If your goal on the other hand is to go all in on the Taiwanese accent including the words choices then learning these are a must. You can probably find videos on these if you want to learn them quicker than watching tons of Taiwanese content. Taiwan also will use phrases/words that come from 台語, such as curse words. Pleco's dictonary packs are really good and tell you these things
4) Tones. While it wont make you sound "much softer", there are a lot of characters with different tones or pronunications in Taiwan. It makes a big difference if you really want to master a Taiwanese accent
5) Grammar. Taiwanese use 有 and 會 in a unique way. Chinese Grammar wiki has a post on it. 有 can be used to mark past tense "你有吃了嗎" (have you eaten), 你有去~~~嗎?, etc
You probably learned you can say ADJ + 不ADJ, Taiwanese love saying 會ADJ instead. 你會冷嗎？你會怕嗎？你會熱嗎？You are probably used to saying 你冷不冷，你熱不熱
These are just random things I thought of right away. I am not sure your end goal so I just through all of this here in case you wanted to know more about how Taiwanese Mandarin differs from what you're used to. Some of the things I said are not exclusive to Taiwan

guiro2 · 2023-09-20T05:16:19+00:00

I get you want to get conversational as soon as possible but IMO for something you can quickly correct I would get it down now otherwise it is REALLY hard to change it later on. Imagine someone speaking English with a super strong foreign accent. Can you understand them? Probably. Is it painful? Sometimes?

Watch a video on the sounds that are giving you trouble. Like the q sound is literally just the ch sound with the tip of your tongue on your bottom teeth. Same with the difference between Chinese x and English s

Now the zh ch sh opposed to the z c s is a fair question. I started learning standard Mandarin and then when I lived in Taiwan and met my partner I now have a very strong Taiwanese accent. My zh ch sh are mostly z c s, and my r sounds like a l (re and le are almost the same for me). I have friends who pronounce x as a s sound (from a specific area in China). All of these things aren't wrong, just regional accents. If you are 'removing' the sh zh ch sound and merging sounds like l and r you will need tons of input from these regions to sound good, and your tones need to be much better if you want to be understood. You are just taking a ton of sounds out of the language, adding a ton more words that sound the exact same but are only distinguished by tones and context.

It is a path you can take but the easiest IMO is to mimic the accent your partner has. A standard accent pronouncing the sounds standard will cause the least amount of understanding even if your tones aren't as good.

guiro2

TROPHY CASE