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Magna Kaser posted:I just watched Taiwanese talk shows every day Atlas Hugged posted:I'm also an incredibly weird person and this method might not work for anyone else in the world.
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Dec 19, 2013 12:35
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I study at TMI, across from TLI on Roosevelt, and if you have the time in your schedule, I recommend it. It's 8 hours a week, 2hrs/4days. Not terribly expensive, I paid 18000 for 3 months. Been through 4 teachers there, and some were definitely more hardcore than others, but the use Practical AV Chinese which is an okay text and the hours are rigorous enough to not feel like you're just fluffing along. It definitely feels like the "buxiban-and-short-term-exchange-student" Chinese school, but I feel like I've learned a lot in the time I've been there.
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Dec 19, 2013 14:09
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Magna Kaser posted:I also learned several methods to make my cleavage look better. Really???? No one is gonna ask??? :/
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Dec 19, 2013 15:35
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Man I would not just learn Chinese characters in isolation, that is like learning English by starting with Greek and Latin roots. Just take a class, at the beginning level they all use the same horrible 實用華語 or whatever it's called, but I never met anybody who learned poo poo without taking a class at some point so yeah now would be a good time for these videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6M_Z9VYAfg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFEEV4Dzqf0
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Dec 19, 2013 16:58
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hitension posted:Man I would not just learn Chinese characters in isolation, that is like learning English by starting with Greek and Latin roots. Just take a class, at the beginning level they all use the same horrible 實用華語 or whatever it's called, but I never met anybody who learned poo poo without taking a class at some point so yeah Totally disagree with this. I've had nothing but a book and a tutor and I get by just fine. I'm not fluent by any stretch, but I'm perfectly functional in every day situations. Also, learning Chinese characters in isolation is, shocking, exactly how Chinese speakers learn them. That's the cool thing about Chinese characters. There's nothing inherently 中文 about them. They're just pictographs. You can use them to represent English pretty well. Learning them in isolation means that when you look at a flashcard with a character on it, your brain already knows the meaning and you can then just associate the Chinese sound with it. It's quite efficient actually.
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Dec 19, 2013 17:26
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hitension posted:
This guy's Chinese accent is atrocious. He does make a fair point about the awkwardness and ham-handedness of textbooks, though. 2/5 星星. I would nevertheless recommend classes for newbies. You need the structure, and hearing a bunch of other people butcher the language should make you feel more comfortable with your own butchering of it. Just beware of staying in those classes for too long: you will develop a ridiculous accent, much like the Youtube guy. I find the perpetual Chinese class-takers are easily identifiable. Their Chinese is understandable, but sounds ridiculous because they exist in an environment that is more or less a feedback loop of listening to other foreigners pronounce Chinese and internalizing and reduplicating the awkward, stilted pronunciations. Edit: comfortable, not uncomfortable. Pandemonium fucked around with this message at 18:37 on Dec 19, 2013 |
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Dec 19, 2013 18:18
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hitension posted:Man I would not just learn Chinese characters in isolation, that is like learning English by starting with Greek and Latin roots. Just take a class, at the beginning level they all use the same horrible 實用華語 or whatever it's called, but I never met anybody who learned poo poo without taking a class at some point so yeah We watched that elevator video in class today. Who wants to join me in writing some Gao Weili and Lin Jianguo fan fiction? I've been happy with books 2 and 3 so far. It covers a lot of grammar rules and vocab, not sure what else you expect to get from a textbook.
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Dec 19, 2013 18:28
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Atlas Hugged posted:Totally disagree with this. I've had nothing but a book and a tutor and I get by just fine. I'm not fluent by any stretch, but I'm perfectly functional in every day situations. Well, Chinese speakers learn to speak Chinese first and then learn the characters. Just like we learn to speak English first and then learn the characters. (Obviously for more obscure words the word and character would both be learned at the same time). Why do you think there are children's books with Chinese characters with pinyin(in China) or zhuyin(in Taiwan) to the side of the characters? It's because children know how to say those words, but can't read the characters yet. What is "perfectly functional in every day situations"? Can you understand TV news, university level lectures on topics related to your field of study, participate in a debate, etc? because that's the level I'm at now and I would not have reached that level without intensive coursework. The handful of other non-native speakers I've met who are at this level are all the same way. By no means did we just start learning characters in isolation. So many characters have multiple meanings (how do you plan to memorize 重 in isolation? 治? 似?just random examples...) I have no idea how to ask this question without sounding equally condescending and smarmy as the poster quoted above, but how exactly does one live for 2 years in Taiwan without speaking Chinese anyway? Post office/bank, getting computer/scooter/cell phone and getting them repaired, the vast majority of fun things to do around town, etc... I've been to a ton of fun exhibitions lately at 花博公園,華山文創區, 松菸文創區, etc lately and there was basically no English at any of them. I went to this wicked awesome cat cafe in East District and there were 17 cats, they have no English website or menu nor can the owner speak English, how could you go to a place like that? There's so much you miss out on?  Plus, Taiwanese people are really cool. Taiwan is like a hipster zone of the Sinosphere, I keep meeting really cool people here that I never met during all my travels in China. I learn new words here like 父權制度(PATRIARCHY) and it's not just the Taiwanese people either, I met this girl from Hong Kong who lived at Occupy Central for 10 months, whaat? It's a shame if you only get to meet the small segment of the population that are completely fluent in English. But even fun things aside, from a practical standpoint it seems like you would either constantly spend time waiting for the staff to find someone who speaks English (or stumble through broken English with you) or require a bilingual friend to accompany you all the time. Wouldn't you want to be more independent? I'm going out with classmates tomorrow and I'm reserving a hot pot restaurant and karaoke box. There is no way the people working at those establishments speak English. What do you do if you want to make restaurant or KTV reservations? hitension fucked around with this message at 00:28 on Dec 20, 2013 |
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Dec 20, 2013 00:18
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When I visit Taiwan, I stay with an old family friend who's lived there for seven years and doesn't know more than "dou shao chen", the numbers and some pleasantries. He loves it. He married a Taiwanese woman and has two lovely children who usually converse in a language he doesn't speak. It's weird to me. At first I felt bad, like I kind of pitied him for missing out on that channel of communication with his kids. But the reality is that it doesn't bother him one bit and he's happy as a clam with his life. He loves Taiwan more than anyplace and doesn't have the slightest bit of trouble getting around. I ended up being really impressed with how easily he accomplished daily tasks that I assumed would require language skills, such as the ones hitension mentioned, but they really don't. Gesturing, numbers and guesswork gets everything done. The point of this anecdote is that you shouldn't condescend to people without language skills. They know what they're doing and they can live a life just as rich and full as yours. By the way I speak like a billion languages and am awesome and my biggest problem I face every day is people gawking at me and assuming I must be a native speaker of whatever notoriously difficult foreign language in which I am demonstrating PhD-level badassery, so don't assume I'm apologizing for any lack of language skills on my part.
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Dec 20, 2013 00:30
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I dunno I feel like you're being more than a little condescending here. I think our current Chinese levels are pretty comparable, but I can tell you when I was an ESL teacher in Hangzhou four years ago and my Chinese level was pretty much poo poo my life in China wasn't really any worse off because of it. The only way my quality of life really improved over here because my Chinese improved is that I found a better job. I know people with little to no language skills who get around fine in 2nd tier cities in the mainland like Chengdu and Kunming that are probably a lot less foreigner/English-friendly than Taipei and it's suburbs on average. Yeah they aren't reserving restaurants or KTV rooms or discussing Marx with their cab drivers, but let's be honest, not going to KTV probably makes their quality of life better. These people can get by fine. There are plenty of people in the US who don't speak English and get along alright as well, if you think about it. fake edit: That said, everyone should learn Chinese so you can be super cool like Bloodnose. And NOT forget all your traditional characters so you can be cooler than me. I'm not exactly understanding what this "learning in isolation" means. I took intensive classes for like years and that worked for me, but the guy with the best Chinese I know learned it more from friends and self-study. He's definitely the exception and not the rule, but my university had a large enough Chinese population that it allowed him to pretty much immerse himself in the language in the US. He had all Chinese friends, and Chinese roommate, and only spoke English when he had to. Guy has pretty much the most authentic Chinese accent I've ever heard from a white person and the classes he took were pretty minimal. I really don't think you need classes to learn Chinese, but I also don't think you can sit in your room listening to Rosetta Stone and looking at Anki decks by yourself and get too far either. Ailumao fucked around with this message at 00:57 on Dec 20, 2013 |
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Dec 20, 2013 00:55
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Oh, I agree that they can live a full life but definitely not "as full a life as [we multilingual folk] do". By definition we can do every activity any other native English speaker can, in addition to the ones Chinese speakers can. They can only do activities from the former category.
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Dec 20, 2013 00:56
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True, they'll never be able to play san guo sha in a smokey board game cafe! (does Taiwan have those?) Also you are wrong because Chengdu is indeed the No. 1 Hipster Zone of the Sinosphere. It's gay bars/events, sex shops, self-serve frozen yogurt, weird/cool bands like Chinese Rockabilly or Chinese Visual Kei, and colourful fixed gear bikes as far as the eye can see~~~ Seriously any time I'm anywhere else I miss the parades of neon pink and green fixies.
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Dec 20, 2013 01:06
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hitension posted:Oh, I agree that they can live a full life but definitely not "as full a life as [we multilingual folk] do". By definition we can do every activity any other native English speaker can, in addition to the ones Chinese speakers can. They can only do activities from the former category. Oh, I agree these people can live a full life but I spent most of a post saying "how is it possible I mean oh my god just how can you do it!?!" People who can speak two languages can experience more than people who can speak one. Is this somehow news to you, breaking or relevant in any way? And if you really think it's shocking that foreigners can survive here for a long time without picking up more than a few pleasantries then I'd say you need to spend some more time with foreigners. I've been here long enough for an APRC and still am pretty lovely about it, but I've known people who were far worse off.
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Dec 20, 2013 01:39
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url posted:Really???? He moved on to showing his thighs. Everyone in wechat loves oggling at his thighs. Moon Slayer posted:Alright, so my New Year's resolution is to finally learn some god-damned Chinese. I've been here two and a half years and can say maybe five or six words: this is unacceptable. Self-study won't work because I'm goony and lazy and will never get around to it if left to my own devices. Are there any beginning classes people would recommend, or should I look for a tutor or conversation partner or what? Well I'm glad you finally want to good good study day day up. You can try the Chinese Language thread, good luck! And don't be so 毋忘六四, can't rely on NCIKU, it shuts down on you! But really, working in a news room, you will be exposed to a bunch of higher level vocab all the time. It's a really good environment to advance your Chinese from average Chinese learner to super star reporter levels. hitension posted:What is "perfectly functional in every day situations"? Well nobody really watches TV news nowadays, it's all about APPLE ACTION NEWS  Moon Slayer works at a paper mill, so he gets his news from reporters, or controls news outright! Seriously, TV news is super sensationalized garbage like Japanese TV. Lots of stickers everywhere, scare mongering, lots of news tickers, etc... Read http://www.thenewslens.com/ or a paper instead. Bloodnose posted:By the way I speak like a billion languages and am awesome and my biggest problem I face every day is people gawking at me and assuming I must be a native speaker of whatever notoriously difficult foreign language in which I am demonstrating PhD-level badassery, so don't assume I'm apologizing for any lack of language skills on my part. So the other day Bloodnose was just hanging in my room and watching youtube videos. My mom walks in:  Oh hello guys, Hi Bloodnose! Hi mama Caberham! 又打幾？快點去拍拖 (You are playing video games AGAIN? GO OUT AND GET A GIRLFRIEND cringes uncomfortably Knowing another language means people can be brutally honest Not Bloodnose, but some other goon's friend: He's an amazing multi lingual university professor but is also an insufferable sperglord. While he may be enjoying his "amazing life", the dude makes everyone else around him miserable  POCKET CHOMP posted:Oh, I agree these people can live a full life but I spent most of a post saying "how is it possible I mean oh my god just how can you do it!?!" I agree too, I can speak Chinese/English/survival French, but I much prefer Arabic/Japanese/Afrikaans.
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Dec 20, 2013 05:33
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hitension posted:Well, Chinese speakers learn to speak Chinese first and then learn the characters. Just like we learn to speak English first and then learn the characters. quote:What is "perfectly functional in every day situations"? quote:By no means did we just start learning characters in isolation. quote:I have no idea how to ask this question without sounding equally condescending and smarmy as the poster quoted above, but how exactly does one live for 2 years in Taiwan without speaking Chinese anyway? quote:I went to this wicked awesome cat cafe in East District and there were 17 cats, they have no English website or menu nor can the owner speak English, how could you go to a place like that? There's so much you miss out on? quote:But even fun things aside, from a practical standpoint it seems like you would either constantly spend time waiting for the staff to find someone who speaks English (or stumble through broken English with you) quote:What do you do if you want to make restaurant or KTV reservations? Magna Kaser posted:True, they'll never be able to play san guo sha in a smokey board game cafe! (does Taiwan have those?)
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Dec 20, 2013 05:36
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Hitension I'm not really sure what your argument is here. The guy said he wasn't really worried about being fluent. I never claimed to be fluent. No, I certainly couldn't attend a lecture in Chinese and listening to the news is tough because of the speed that they speak in, but with the subtitles I can usually figure out what the point of a story is. What I mean is that I can do all of those amazing things you described like making friends with hispter Taiwanese folk, going to restaurants, telling taxi drivers where to go, and chat with the gangsters at the local bar. No, I don't understand or know how to say everything I want to, but I'm pretty good at communicating in broad strokes. If I wanted to get really good, I absolutely would take a more structured course, but I also don't think that's necessary to get by in the language if you put some time into it. Also, I don't spend all my time with Anki. A major part of how I learned was with a one on one tutor. After class, I'd chat with my girlfriend or go to the local pub and try speaking to random people. It worked quite well. As for the character thing, I'm so completely baffled by what you're trying to say. You do realize that being born Chinese doesn't give you any special insight into Chinese characters, right? They're literally just a pictograph. They can be used to represent any language. Kids need the Zhuyin/Pinyin because they don't know the characters as soon as they pop out of the womb. They have to learn them like anyone else. There are actually lots of scholars who never learn to speak Chinese who can read it just fine. In fact, the administrative foundation of the Chinese Empire was built on this for thousands of years. The point I was making is that vocabulary becomes almost trivial to learn and review once you have a very strong character base. Notice I didn't stay learn all 3000 characters first before doing anything else. I said learn how to read and write the 3000 most important characters and while you're doing that, start learning vocabulary and applying those characters. That way when you learn vocabulary, you won't get stuck because the characters are confusing. Yes, characters have multiple pronunciations and meanings, but that can come later. You can learn 樂 to mean music now and later learn that it means happy. It doesn't really matter all that much. Those books even talk about how they're an introduction to Chinese literacy and by no means exhaustive.
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Dec 20, 2013 05:52
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I just want to enhance my cleavage.
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Dec 20, 2013 05:56
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Atlas Hugged posted:They're literally just a pictograph.
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Dec 20, 2013 05:57
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TetsuoTW posted:Actually only a small minority are pictographic. They're mostly phono-semantic logographs. Well semantics aside, you get what I'm trying to say. Also, it should be noted that those books don't teach pronunciation at all. They teach characters in English. When you learn 百, you don't learn "bai3" you learn "100" and it uses mnemonic devices to teach them for ease of memorization.
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Dec 20, 2013 06:01
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url posted:I just want to enhance my cleavage. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IHSFqOAT-4 here you go. Alternatively watch any daytime TV show in Asia, they'll talk about makin boobs look bigger at some point. Kind of late on this, but a different approach than Remembering the Hanzi (I never looked at the Chinese version, but somewhere my Japanese version is collecting dust) is to look at sentences and context rather than individual characters. For some reason I could never remember those dumb stories and it just didn't work for me. Reviewing one character and it's meaning didn't really help either. I learned characters much better in context than I ever did with single character flashcards. What I mean by this, is learning a really simple sentence like (forgive my uncivilized simplified characters) "他去超市" was much more helpful for me. In this way I could learn a sentence, and learn four characters with three words. I used this method pretty much for the entirety of my Chinese learning and it retained it's effectiveness the whole way. I guess my mind just parses this kind of thing better. This is also how I ended up learning most of the chengyu I still retain, though those were whole paragraphs
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Dec 20, 2013 06:22
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url posted:I just want to enhance my cleavage. Also, if you want brain damage, don't watch the daytime TV shows here - watch the evening soap operas.
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Dec 20, 2013 06:30
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If anybody wants to try
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Dec 20, 2013 07:45
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TetsuoTW posted:Actually only a small minority are pictographic. They're mostly phono-semantic logographs. This is my favorite post on The Something Awful Forums. Do you drink beer? I'll buy you a beer. Actually I'll take you out to the darkest wilds of Daxi and let you run wild in the brewery. Magna Kaser posted:(forgive my uncivilized simplified characters) "他去超市" Those aren't even simplified, they're the same in traditional  In other news, I got stuck at the supermarket for like two hours today because hordes of Chinese people wouldn't let me leave until they had finished complimenting my language skills. Anybody else have this kind of problem? What do you do about it?
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Dec 20, 2013 09:20
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I learned Chinese by bumming around, not studying at all and making passes at girls in bars and I have a pretty functional level of Chinese for everyday situations. It also took six years.
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Dec 20, 2013 11:09
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Bloodnose posted:Those aren't even simplified, they're the same in traditional Lu Xun would cry if he knew China still used characters.
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Dec 20, 2013 12:08
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Creepy, I found the maid cafes today.
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Dec 22, 2013 13:03
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I'm in Taiwan (Taipei) for about 2 weeks and I know there will be days where I'm off to do stuff on my own as family members will be working and stuff. Is there any meet ups anytime between now and 1/4/2014 or anyone want to meet up on one of the weekdays?
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Dec 27, 2013 10:19
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<(I can tell you that it is NOT '42'.)
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 Sorry for the crappy cellphone picture of a newspaper page, but I'm pretty proud of the header I wrote for this one. Also the story is hilarious.
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Dec 27, 2013 18:37
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I guess it's soft news and all but that is just the goddamn worst lead.
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Dec 28, 2013 07:21
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So I have 5 more weeks at Hess and I'm starting to apply for jobs now. How do you guys generally apply for jobs around here? Remember, my only experience applying to ESL jobs is online through Hess. Is door-to-door really the way to go? So far I've been plinking a few places on Tealit. Also, how difficult is it (i.e. what qualifications do I need) to do adult ESL?
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Dec 28, 2013 09:48
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Atlas Hugged posted:Creepy, I found the maid cafes today. Far end of the Taipei Underground Mall? I walked past with my wife and jokingly said to go in one, and she called my bluff and dragged me towards a door. A girl dressed up hopped out with a stuffed animal, which she was using talking and acting through. A quick "Sorry, we're busy!" as I dragged her away. It was just too much.
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Dec 28, 2013 14:57
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I'm surprised Taipei doesn't have more maid cafes, when I was there it seemed Japan was a bigger influence on that island than anything else. Even in China they're not unheard of. I live by one in Shanghai and it's weird passing it every day on my way to work.
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Dec 29, 2013 09:23
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Rabelais D posted:I guess it's soft news and all but that is just the goddamn worst lead. Well then, I apologize on behalf of the entire paper that we're not up to your standards. 
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Dec 29, 2013 09:29
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They have at least 2 or 3, plus one of the gender swapped butler cafes too. I love the preponderance of cat cafes.
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Dec 29, 2013 09:50
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Ravendas posted:Far end of the Taipei Underground Mall? Yeah that's the one. It was pretty unnerving walking by them.
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Dec 29, 2013 11:48
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Moon Slayer posted:Well then, I apologize on behalf of the entire paper that we're not up to your standards. lol. Did you abbreviate Singaporeans' to S'pore's. Yeah, you did. 
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Dec 29, 2013 13:58
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Maid cafes are apparently a great place to meet people to talk business, because no-one is going to say "oh, I was in a maid cafe the other day and heard these guys taking about...."
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Dec 29, 2013 20:57
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Moon Slayer posted:Well then, I apologize on behalf of the entire paper that we're not up to your standards. Haters gonna hate, bro. I liked it.
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Dec 30, 2013 05:50
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url posted:Did you abbreviate Singaporeans' to S'pore's. The piece was bylined by a writer for a Malaysian paper, and there's a good shot that headline was the writer's work. Also no, whoever it was didn't abbreviate "Singaporeans'" to "S'pore's", they abbreviated "Singapore's" to "S'pore's". And on top of that, "S'pore" is common abbreviation for "Singapore" in headlines, including ones in Singaporean media. Don't get me wrong, there is a lot to bitch out China Post for - after all, they are the paper that claimed that Chiang Kai-Shek was the commander of the Allied forces in the Pacific Theater - but that's a pretty poo poo one. sub supau fucked around with this message at 09:20 on Dec 30, 2013 |
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Dec 30, 2013 09:17
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TetsuoTW posted:the paper that claimed that Chiang Kai-Shek was the commander of the Allied forces in the Pacific Theater
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Dec 30, 2013 09:35
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