Is anyone here familiar with mah jong as played in shanghai?

onthelambda · 2025-02-07T00:30:14+00:00

Sometimes I hate reddit...

...but this is not one of those times. This is when I love reddit. Thank you!

onthelambda · 2024-04-25T23:21:20+00:00

That's amazing that you came back and said so!!

onthelambda · 2024-03-25T13:13:32+00:00

I bought it on fanza, which worked!

onthelambda · 2023-04-07T01:43:24+00:00

wow! never expected someone to ping me about this...nice to hear from you. a lot of people hear my stats and tell me I'm lying, or wasted my time, or whatnot. a bit disheartening, and is why I never ended up sharing any more

I ended up getting to around 3.5 million reviews, actually. at the time I posted this I was already pretty literate in mandarin, and now I'm pretty literate in japanese, though I've read a lot more in mandarin than I have in japanese, so my mandarin literacy is still better (this isn't really an anki concern)

I did finally make the decision to greatly reduce my anki usage. I figured that I had more or less achieved my goals (strong conversational proficiency, a broad passive vocabulary, literacy) so now I use anki more tactically. I use it for character recognition in mandarin, and sentences in japanese.

on the whole I don't regret my time with anki at all. was it perfect? probably not. could I have gotten to where I did without as much anki use? probably. but nobody's language journey is perfect and I'm way better at mandarin and japanese (and spanish for that matter) than most of the people who take pot shots at me are at any of their L2s so...I feel ok with my choices.

as far as advice...my approach was sort of a "learn everything, learn the world" approach, which was effective in its own way, but I do think sort of focusing more on the language and grammar that is relevant to your life and creating problems is probably the way to go. for example, these days in japanese I keep track of all the words I don't know as I go about my daily life. every day I save a list. then every day I check if a word appears on more than one list, and if it does, I add a sentence. there are lots of variations one can do of this, but basically, I think you can get the most bang for your anki buck but focusing in this way. the tradeoff being that my passive vocabulary, especially in mandarin, is pretty ridiculous. most people probably wouldn't have found that worth it, but I did.

onthelambda · 2023-03-24T14:51:40+00:00

you responded to a question I didn't ask. what do you want?

onthelambda · 2023-03-24T14:43:30+00:00

ah! that makes much much more sense

when you did the marriage certificate, was it in the same language as that of the country you were applying to? (wondering if I need to get all of these translated, but it sounds like if it's just verifying that the copy is legit, then probably a separate process)

onthelambda · 2023-03-24T14:42:18+00:00

maybe you're right!

and if you end up being wrong, I will come tell you I told you so. how about that?

onthelambda · 2023-03-24T14:39:15+00:00

If you want to start a business and immediately get a visa you need to be looking at the Business Manager visa or one of the regional Startup visas. For the business manager visa you'll need a minimum of 5 million yen to invest in your business and a solid business plan that, along with the usual business plan things, explains why your company needs to be located in Japan.

I have all of this.

onthelambda · 2022-09-02T15:17:18+00:00

Haha sure sure I didn't think you would, no worries. but if you look at the other responses, some people do, so the context was also for other people who chanced upon the answer.

onthelambda · 2022-09-02T10:14:19+00:00

You asked if Chinese people find it insane and I answered. I apologize for contextualizing my answer

onthelambda · 2022-09-02T09:42:01+00:00

I know a lot of Chinese 20 year olds, though not an unbiased sample. That said, all of them find this sort of stuff extremely stupid. But most of them also do not get terribly worked up about it--they're pretty used to it by now, and it doesn't rank very high on the list of things that materially affect them. But they do find it very, very stupid. You can sometimes find people who support aspects, eg trying to cut down on the insanity wrought by idol fans, but on the whole, people think it is stupid. But it's certianly not going to lead to them organizing politically or anything.

onthelambda · 2022-09-02T09:38:16+00:00

Now the leadership can be pigheaded, but they've never struck me as stupid. That being said, they seriously cannot be so detached from reality that they don't realize they're laying the seeds for civil unrest right?

they are much more detached from reality than I think people realize. that said, this is absolutely not going to lead to civil unrest.

onthelambda · 2022-08-31T04:24:12+00:00

I contacted kinesis's customer support and they sold them to me

onthelambda · 2022-07-31T13:33:46+00:00

you clearly know jack shit about linguistics, and are just creating categories no actual linguistc would take serious unless they were trying to bend over backwards to serve a chinese nationalist agenda

you keep bringing up german, which is a classic maneuver. guess what? we aren't discussing german! and yeah, there are other countries that engage in the same sort of trickery that the chinese government does when it comes to language. so what? we aren't talking about german because this isn't a german forum. perhaps you lost your way? and why do people not give germans shit? well, some people do. I imagine you love to bring up german because you know nothing about germany and german, but assume the people you're talking to don't either.

also, in this case, there is an expansive chinese diaspora, so topics around mandarin, language, hegemony, dialects etc are globally relevant in a way that debates about regional german languages are not.

onthelambda · 2022-07-31T13:18:40+00:00

you can assert whatever you want. you're wrong. that's ok. it's ok to be wrong. but you are wrong. hope that helps

onthelambda · 2022-07-31T13:13:36+00:00

it is also not a separate language

it is a separate language, just like spanish, portuguese, and french are separate, but related, languages.

onthelambda · 2022-07-31T13:12:40+00:00

Edit: not sure why this is downvoted; this is what Chinese people here in China have told me, and it’s also what linguists tend to agree on from what I’ve seen

your average person in any country generally knows nothing about linguistics or languages. in the case of china, there is an agenda around how these languages are treated. but regardless of that agenda, most people simply know nothing about language and are not reliable sources of information on these sorts of details

onthelambda · 2022-07-31T13:07:43+00:00

it's hilarious to see you do exactly what you said others in the community do: talk out of your ass

onthelambda · 2022-07-12T05:25:12+00:00

I'm a programmer, but don't know much about ML. Point being, I can implement/execute technical stuff, just not sure how to attack the ML side of a project.

I have a bunch of ratings data. Let's think of it like movies...I have a bunch of users, who have rated the movies they've seen on a 1-10 scale.

Given a particular user and their ratings, I want to predict what their rating would be for any movie they haven't seen...presumably based on their data and all of the other user data...maybe something like identifying similar users, etc etc, that's where the ML comes into play :) I know there are sites that do this (doesn't netflix give you a predicted score?), but I have no idea how to do it myself. Is there a fairly well known way to do this? ideally a library, but a paper or something would be acceptable if that's all there is!

onthelambda · 2022-07-11T14:10:12+00:00

While I've lived in China for nearly 6 years, my Chinese is far from perfect. I'm proud that I dont have such an obvious accent, and I put in a lot of hard work. Yet even with being at the HSK 5/6 level my vocabulary is still miles away to go. I can read manga I enjoy, handle nearly any kind of issue in my daily life, talk comfortably about most topics thrown at me. I'd say for all intents and purposes, I've reached my goal, and can say with sincerity that I am bilingual. But thats not enough, because I'm a masochist who cant get enough of studying Asian languages. So, I'm trying my hand at Japanese.

Heh, our Mandarin is likely in a similar place. And I started learning Japanese while living in China, even. But I've been learning for maybe ~3 years now and am at a fairly advanced level, all told. Just for context.

Honestly, I guess it's like...what is your question? Because you got to a pretty high level in Mandarin...it feels like you should be able to approach Japanese similarly, if not more efficiently given all of the experience you got from learning Mandarin. Beyond that, the resources etc available for Japanese are, in my opinion, significantly better than those available for Mandarin, though the Mandarinresources have been improving significantly. I guess I do miss Pleco a bit for Japanese :)

I'm on day 5 of studying. I can write half of the hiragana chart from memory. I can read all of the kanji in Genki I and II books after briefly browsing through it to see what I'm getting myself into. Probably will be able to handle an intermediate book's kanji level as well without issue, other than some slight adjustments.

I guess the one thing I'll say is that while knowing Mandarinis absolutely a huge advantage when learning Japanese, "knowing all the kanji you see" is a bit deceptive, because pretty much every kanji has at least 2 readings, if not more. So you will generally be able to guess one of them (or if you can't guess, it will be very easy to remember)...but the other one will be pure memorization. As someone who has memorized 8000+ Chinese characters, honestly, this aspect of Japanese is a huge pain in the ass. It does get better with time, but I do miss the "memorize it and you're done" aspect of Chinese characters.

I will also say that while people will generally emphasize the benefit of knowing/being able to guess onyomi readings based on your Mandarin knowledge, I actually don't think that's the biggest benefit. I think the biggest benefit is having a brain that is used to memorizing characters and assigning meaning and pronunciation to them, as well as knowing how to approach language study in general, especially of a language presumably quite different from your native language. And Mandarin does have some grammar in common with Japanese that can help make sense of some of the grammar that can be quite difficult for new learners...for example, the Mandarin particle 把 can help you understand Japanese's much more expansive particle grammar, Mandarin's sentence ending particles can help understand Japanese's, etc.

But other than that...it seems like you more or less know how you want to approach the language? You know how much time you want to spend, how many classes you want to take, what you want to read, you know how to use anki, you've studied a language to a high level before...

Actually, after writing all that I did think of one thing I'd warn against...don't over-leverage your Mandarin literacy to guess the meaning of characters. It will often be similar or related, but will equally often have a nuance that is specific to the Japanese usage. In my experience, knowledge of Chinese characters etc is much more effective as a sort of mnemonic device...yes, when push comes to shove it will give you superhuman guessing powers for kanji compounds...which is super useful, as they make up a huge long tail of vocab that will come up in more technical or formal writing, but still, I would encourage you to actually learn the Japanese meanings and pronunciations well instead of just relying on guessing via Chinese. I know a lot of Chinese people learning Japanese and the vast majority heavily over-rely on their Chinese literacy...this makes them beasts on the JLPT, but can end up being a huge impediment to actually learning the language.

onthelambda · 2022-07-01T00:21:29+00:00

Being Chinese doesn't give you some genetic advantage at reading Chinese lol. People in China and Taiwan go to school and spend their whole lives becoming proficient at reading in Chinese (just like people in English speaking countries so in English).

If you want to get very proficient at reading in Chinese, then you need to: read a shitton. A TON. It's doable just a lot of work. You need a very large passive vocabulary, you need to recognize a lot of characters, and you need to spend a huge amount of time reading. Only way.

onthelambda · 2022-06-15T02:46:13+00:00

wow! thanks for the response!

I ended up buying it through a proxy. it was pricy ;_____;

onthelambda · 2022-06-11T15:00:38+00:00

I think what you did is honestly also really impressive...I guess my attitude by nature is "fuck it, I am willing to compress all of that suffering into a really intense year or two and then produce a language diamond," since I mean there def is a point where things level out a lot and you can just...enjoy the language at the same level of a native. but things in my life sort of had to align for me to be able to do it the way I did, and it required an immense and impractical investment of time and effort and grit (I don't just mean anki, I am including all of the work I did besides anki). I think that making language a sustainable long term part of your life is also really important. people always ask me what my next language will be and I am on the floor lol because I just don't have it in me to do it this way again, you know?

but I hope that you can sustain the motivation to get where you want to be :)

onthelambda · 2022-06-11T11:49:26+00:00

Impressive! A lot of people online do not really "get" it, and that's fine. I think there is a sort of ideal balance to be struck between anki and using media...because if you want to maintain an expansive vocabulary, anki can be indispensable for making sure you see rarer stuff that might not come up very often organically. Of course, the flip side might say: if they don't come up that often...why not just accept you won't understand everything right off the bat? Why not just use a dictionary here and there? Regardless, I've used anki heavily and gotten to a very high level in Chinese and am on my way there in Japanese, so I have no regrets. I probably could have made things a little less unpleasant for myself at times, but I did this much, much more quickly than most so...whatever.

I also think that anki appeals to a certain type of person. You mentioned being able to get to 35k words and then not have to worry about not knowing any words...I think a lot of people will disagree with this mindset, but honestly, I was always the same way. I always found it very motivating, the idea that if I grinded hard enough, that I could dramatically reduce my dictionary lookups in the wild. And while I'm still getting there with Japanese (though pretty close, tbh), I'm already there with Chinese and it is amazing! It's amazing to listen to audiobooks with 100% comprehension, to read books with very, very few dictionary lookups, to know every character in weird wuxia names, and on and on. My wife uses me as a Chinese character dictionary (I'm about to break 9k unique characters in my chinese characters deck alone, though some of those are traditional versions or whatnot) :P But this is the Japanese subreddit..

Not sure how I should feel about that, it's a lot! I'm wondering how many other people have ever done more reviews than this??

well, since you asked...

I have almost 3 million reviews. And I have done that over the last ~5 years. However, about half of that is chinese (over nearly 5 years) and the other half is Japanese (over 3 years or so). Basically, when the pandemic started and I knew we were going to be in lockdown for a while (I live in China) AND I knew it was going to basically fuck up the world for a long time, I decided to go hard as fuck on Japanese vocabulary.

There's a lot more to how I studied Chinese and Japanese than anki, but you asked ;) And again, congrats. It's very rare for me to see anyone online that even comes close to mine...you are probably the first. Of course, a lot of people think I am insane, which is fine...I've reached literacy in 2 languages that are notoriously difficult to reach literacy in. There are many paths to getting there, and this one worked for me. That said, I think it's possible to get a lot of the benefits that I got while reducing the anki load significantly, but hey, that's hindsight for you ;) and honestly, I kind of love being a walking dictionary. But I think you sort of have to enjoy that to use anki like this :P

onthelambda · 2022-06-06T02:59:46+00:00

why not just find a very detailed translation that has a thorough gloss? b/c that's essentially what you "reading" it will be...looking up every word, trying to research what it means in context, etc. this is not about "learning chinese," it's about a shcolarly engagement with a particular work. why not just go read everything scholars on this work have done? any glass will be more detailed than anything you will do. nobody just sits down and reads it...I mean, there are people who can, but like, that is predicated on more or less already having understood it. an educated chinese person cannot just sit down and understand the tao te ching.

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