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Haier posted:Still easier than Chinese, and less to remember. It's different than Chinese, not easier. Learning characters really isn't that bad and once you know them you know them. It reads left to right and is similar to English grammar and where it differs it often does so logically. English is weird because we restructure sentences when we make them into questions, but Chinese just subs question words and answers. I digress. Once you know the characters, you're pretty much set and you can start reading pretty much right away. You won't understand everything, but you'll be able to figure out what a shop sells or what signs are advertising or what's on a menu. But maybe I'm the weirdo. I had a hard time overcoming the initial barrier of studying Chinese so I just grabbed Heisig's book, spent a few months plowing through the characters, and suddenly the world around me was accessible. After that, speaking and listening came pretty quick. Thai has a whole bunch of consonant letters and a whole bunch of vowel letters. And yes you can memorize them in less time than it takes you to memorize Chinese, but the difficulty isn't in memorizing the units. It's in figuring out what the gently caress the combinations are. It's not that there are five tone markers, no that would be too easy. It's that there are consonant classes and those interact with tone markers and vowels to determine the tone. You read and write consonants left to right, but each vowel is always written on the same side (right, left, top, or bottom!) of a consonant regardless of where the vowel is pronounced in the syllable. You just gotta remember that. For every word in the language. I'm sure there are probably initial and final rules like in Chinese so certain vowels can never start a syllable or never finish one, but there's still going to be a lot of ambiguity. And that's assuming the vowel is even written and isn't one of those invisible vowels you have to be on the lookout for. And punctuation? What punctuation? No loving thank you.
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Jan 12, 2017 16:33
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Glenn Quebec posted:Haier you trimmed a woman's hairy nipple so that you could suck on it some more. The man commits and I, for one, respect him for it.
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Jan 12, 2017 16:33
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Glenn Quebec posted:Haier you trimmed a woman's hairy nipple so that you could suck on it some more. You did read the "Peanut Brittle" story, right?
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Jan 12, 2017 18:24
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Blistex posted:You did read the "Peanut Brittle" story, right? ah poo poo I had just managed to get that one out of my brain
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Jan 12, 2017 18:26
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Phlegmish posted:I wonder what the point even is, most people who work hours like that for an extended period of time either burn out or otherwise become non-productive. There's a reason Western business owners accepted reduced working hours in the past, they realized the average person won't get in more than 7-8 productive hours a day anyway. Squeezing your employees too much usually hurts your bottom line in the long run. Being at work and working are two different things. Especially at office jobs people just sleep all day and then at 6pm they maybe update one Excel cell and then go browse Taobao until 11pm. Such hard day at work, very tired. Manual labor is different though. There you show up in the morning, smoke a few packs of
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Jan 12, 2017 18:41
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Darkest Auer posted:Being at work and working are two different things. Especially at office jobs people just sleep all day and then at 6pm they maybe update one Excel cell and then go browse Taobao until 11pm. Such hard day at work, very tired. Korean/Chinese office work is the perfect example of quantity over quality being paramount in Asia. Office jobs the world over are really bad for people slacking off (readily available access to the internet), but American office productivity is something like 8 times that of Chinese and 4 times that of Korean office workers, despite working much shorter days. It doesn't matter in Asia if your workers have been asleep at their desks for 80% of the day, the fact that they showed up at 6:45am and will not leave until 10:27pm is proof that they are working so hard. Actually looking into their productivity in a meaningful way would cause a great deal of face loss for both parties (the slacker is embarrassed for not doing work, the supervisor is embarrassed for allowing it). So the best thing to do is just ignore it. Another issue with productivity in China/Korea is that a lot of workers try and re-invent the wheel or make things overly complicated because it seems more impressive to their bosses. When I was teaching at that first high school in Korea my boss was pissed because I had finished preparing literally everything for the entire semester at the end of the second month there. I used lesson plan templates (rather than making a new one from scratch every day), re-purposed previous lessons to work on different skills, had all of my handouts, assignments, and tests/exams in a very similar format to save time and let the students know what to expect, and I did backwards planning by taking all of the provincial expectations, creating an exam around them, then working backwards to create lessons and activities that taught those skills (checking them off as I went). Meanwhile one of my co-teachers would create a new lesson plan from scratch every evening, take the next 20 words from some vocab book, and have his students "brute force" them for an hour and 15 minutes. He could have literally used the exact same lesson plan for the entire year, just swapping out the vocab words every day, but nope. He fiddled around with cells an columns and re-typed everything every evening so his boss could see him do it. I was chastised for being lazy (going home the minute the bell rang) despite having everything finished and of a much higher quality than that co-worker, who would spend 3 hours doing a 3/4 page lesson plan every night that literally could have been done in 30 seconds if he knew the copy/paste short-cuts. When you look at innovators* in Korean and Chinese engineering, business, entertainment (writing/directing), or technology, almost all of them have either deviated away from mainstream learning/culture at an early age, moved to another country at an early age, or had what most would consider "crazy parents" who fostered their imagination and critical thinking skills, or taught them the value of actual work rather than face-saving pretend work. *talking about people who came up with something new/revolutionary/creative, not well-connected people who just became rich through nepotism. Blistex fucked around with this message at 19:59 on Jan 12, 2017 |
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Jan 12, 2017 19:49
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so I was in Shenyang the last few days for work and meetings and it went something like this Two days ago we left the hotel at 7:30 and got to our new university at 8:30. We had meetings at 9-10, 11:30-12:30 and then 3-4. It was with the same people more or less, and I asked why don't we just do it all before lunch and a girl told me "it would finish too early" and I said "yeah so we can go back to the hotel and rest" and she said "then we dont have a full day of work" so after lunch we had a 2.5 hour break where I was told to "just sleep a little" while a bunch of grown adults played mobile phone games for two hours in suits. We finally finished our meetings around 4:10 but couldn't go to dinner until 6 so we all just stayed around and I read a bit. Then we had dinner and left at 6 but it was 35 minutes in the opposite direction of our hotel. I'm jet lagged and exhausted. We get here and it's 9 Chinese people and me, a lot of baijiu and lukewarm beer. I pass on the baijiu and have a beer that tastes like soap, and it can't be cold, because that's unhealthy. So much food is ordered it makes me feel embarrassed to be a part of the experience. Six guys go through about 50 cigs the first two hours of our meal in our tiny little room. My eyes start watering by hour three. One lady is taking selfies, one guy is blasting some techno from his phone, one guy is throwing up in our private bathroom, and two others are discussing the fact that a guy's neighbors daughter had a black roommate at Boston University. They ask me how to handle the situation. I'm barely awake and ask if we can open a window because I a, having trouble keeping my eyes open as is and the smoke in the room is unbearable. I'm told opening the window is unhealthy because it's so cold outside. It's now 9:45 and people are talking about more baijiu and going to KTV. One of the younger dudes with me, who went to Northwestern, and also who has an EQ over .5, sees I am struggling and is like "they are tying to be hospitable and polite to show you they are happy with our work" and I'm like "yeah that's great but I'm on 2 hours of sleep and can barely focus on standing up with terrible beer, turtle soup and cow hooves, while these guys get blasted out of their minds smoking 6 cigs an hour in this enclosed area." One guy gets up and toasts our team. He says I am now his brother. It's past 10 and I am an hour and 35 minutes away from our hotel. I will do this like 4 more times in the next 48 hours. This was my last few days
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Jan 12, 2017 20:59
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Sounds like you need to man up and learn how to party. It's obvious that this "work" was just a vacation for you and your coworkers to go on a bender.
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Jan 12, 2017 21:15
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Mr. Nice! posted:Sounds like you need to man up and learn how to party. It's obvious that this "work" was just a vacation for you and your coworkers to go on a bender. its not a party unless someone breaks out the special K
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Jan 12, 2017 21:38
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Mr. Nice! posted:Sounds like you need to man up and learn how to party. It's obvious that this "work" was just a vacation for you and your coworkers to go on a bender. I would have loved it like a decade ago but I'm too tired for this poo poo now
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Jan 12, 2017 21:42
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You sound like you should get out of there asap before you start to defenestrate people.
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Jan 12, 2017 22:05
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What's that Chinese brand where they just threw a bunch of english letters together and it wound up being unpronounceable, like fgsddls or something like that?
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Jan 12, 2017 22:11
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Nanomashoes posted:What's that Chinese brand where they just threw a bunch of english letters together and it wound up being unpronounceable, like fgsddls or something like that? No, that's IKEA.
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Jan 12, 2017 22:12
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Nanomashoes posted:What's that Chinese brand where they just threw a bunch of english letters together and it wound up being unpronounceable, like fgsddls or something like that? Bumblefuck or Brrbllrfmgh. Clearly a german word.
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Jan 12, 2017 22:43
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JaucheCharly posted:You sound like you should get out of there asap before you start to defenestrate people. it's not that bad just the inefficiency of it sucks when you're on less than five hours of sleep over three days because of jetlag
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Jan 12, 2017 23:14
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Dicky mouse posted:its not a party unless someone breaks out the special K Is that the drug or the hookers name? Or the act you do with the drugs AND the hookers?
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Jan 12, 2017 23:16
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It only looks like someone being killed, watch to the end. http://i.imgur.com/37eg29z.mp4
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Jan 12, 2017 23:33
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henan, henan, it's a helluva province the thieves pick through your corpse after the traffic knocks you down
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Jan 12, 2017 23:50
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Nanomashoes posted:What's that Chinese brand where they just threw a bunch of english letters together and it wound up being unpronounceable, like fgsddls or something like that? Biem.l.flddk
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Jan 13, 2017 00:09
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LOL, Chinese grammar is not like English grammar.
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Jan 13, 2017 00:13
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I would blow Dane Cook posted:Biem.l.flddk Just rolls off the tongue.
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Jan 13, 2017 00:20
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The Great Autismo! posted:so I was in Shenyang the last few days for work and meetings and it went something like this Did you find it to be the beautiful coal-choked rust-belt city that I described?
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Jan 13, 2017 00:26
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Blistex posted:Did you find it to be the beautiful coal-choked rust-belt city that I described?
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Jan 13, 2017 00:55
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The Great Autismo! posted:so I was in Shenyang the last few days for work and meetings and it went something like this I thought it was good for healthy to open the windows when it's really cold outside. This is the first I've heard of this! I like how they think being near a black person is a "situation" that needs to be "handled." I like how some guy felt like he needed to explain to the foreigner that they are trying to do you a favor.
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Jan 13, 2017 01:37
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The Great Autismo! posted:The aqi was under 50 every day I was there, it was actually really beautiful...I don't think that is normal for this time of year though The winter I was there a new snow drift would turn grey after a day the dust was so thick and everything smelled like coal. I left in the summer and just threw out all my clothes before leaving due to the dust being embedded into the fibres.
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Jan 13, 2017 02:21
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Blistex posted:The winter I was there a new snow drift would turn grey after a day the dust was so thick and everything smelled like coal. I left in the summer and just threw out all my clothes before leaving due to the dust being embedded into the fibres. good lord I spent most of my time in China in the Fuzhou area, the air was actually pretty nice as far as I could tell, honestly not that much different from most places in America. when I went up north to check out Beijing was when I entered hell though
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Jan 13, 2017 02:29
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nickmeister posted:LOL, Chinese grammar is not like English grammar. It is superficially similar, which is why I would describe it as "like" and not "identical". They're both SVO, adjectives precede nouns, 的 gets used like an English possessive s, and so on. At the beginner level, the major differences are in time and location placement in the sentence and what Chinese lacks compared to English (verb conjugation for instance). So the point I was trying to make, without going into all the differences and exceptions, is that for someone who picked up Chinese characters as opposed to just learning a phonetic script, they would actually be able to start reading with a base level of comprehension. Going back to my personal experiences, I can read Hangul, but it's all meaningless gibberish to me. The same would be true if I managed to learn to read Thai, with the major caveat that I may not even be putting the gibberish sounds together correctly because of how complicated the written script is. So, yes, English grammar and Chinese grammar are not the same thing. Obviously. They're from completely unrelated language families. But there's enough surface level similarity that it's not a major hurdle to get over like with Korean or Japanese.
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Jan 13, 2017 02:49
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Nanomashoes posted:What's that Chinese brand where they just threw a bunch of english letters together and it wound up being unpronounceable, like fgsddls or something like that? There are a lot of these. My favorite convenience store chain is literally named like BGHYNCGKAJEJZNGP. Atlas Hugged posted:So, yes, English grammar and Chinese grammar are not the same thing. Obviously. They're from completely unrelated language families. But there's enough surface level similarity that it's not a major hurdle to get over like with Korean or Japanese. As someone who speaks terrible Mandarin, the superficial similarity is very useful. You can speak English grammar sentences with Chinese words and people will understand most of the time. This does not work at all in Korean.
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Jan 13, 2017 03:56
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My favorite part about learning to read thai is there's a specific character called kareen that appears above letters that are not pronounced but are still in the word because it's a foreign word and the phonetic equivalents of those letters were in it originally in whatever language it came from. I realize that as a native English speaker I have no room to complain, but I don't think an alphabet needs like 6 Ks and 5 Ts that are all pronounced that same way but written entirely differently. If the thai alphabet were steamlined a little,it would be a lot easier to read. But, yeah, tonal language, at least they kinda give you a clue as to what tone some thing should be with diacritical marks,but still
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Jan 13, 2017 05:18
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Glenn Quebec posted:Haier you trimmed a woman's hairy nipple so that you could suck on it some more. A: Say "Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwww, YUCKY!" and immediately roll over and pretend to be asleep, hoping she leaves your house or also goes to sleep. B: Pretend the hairs do not exist, put up with it and continue to suck on them, or stop sucking on them forever (and miss out on the cutie nippies). C: Follow your heart and ask her if she's ever cut those hairs, since she already shaves her other parts. When she says no, you ask if you can use your machine to cut them because you really want to continue kissing them, but the hair is distracting. Press X to turn on the $6 neon-green nose-hair trimmer you bought at Ross Dress for Less. It has an LED light built-in and so when you turn it on, it blinds the other person and you can freely wield it while she shields her eyes. There is another girl that wants to meet me that definitely has hairs on both her nipples, but her boobs are so honking that the last thing I want to do is say anything that might upset her and make her shy, so if we meet I will have to put up with. Luckily hers are nowhere near as crazy as the ones I had to trim. Atlas Hugged posted:No loving thank you. The Great Autismo! posted:so I was in Shenyang the last few days for work and meetings and it went something like this Nanomashoes posted:What's that Chinese brand where they just threw a bunch of english letters together and it wound up being unpronounceable, like fgsddls or something like that? 
Haier fucked around with this message at 05:21 on Jan 13, 2017 |
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Jan 13, 2017 05:18
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Atlas Hugged posted:So, yes, English grammar and Chinese grammar are not the same thing. Obviously. They're from completely unrelated language families. But there's enough surface level similarity that it's not a major hurdle to get over like with Korean or Japanese. In the very beginning Chinese and English have similar grammar. But when get into actually learning how to speak like someone who actually speaks Mandarin, it gets very difficult. I've studied Japanese, and while the grammar is very different from English, its rules are quite regular and steadfast. Chinese grammar is like walking into the room of a hoarder. Everything looks like a complete mess, but they've got their system. "Um, I don't know where I should put my coat?" "Oh, put it anywhere!" "Okay." *Hangs coat on a chair. "No, no, not there, that's not right!" "Uh, but you said anywhere was fine?..."  "Chinese has no grammar!" "Okay... *speaks Chinese*" "Um... 原始這樣... You're Chinese is so good! Let's go back to practicing English now, okay?"
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Jan 13, 2017 05:44
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As a woman, I actually admire Haier for being undeterred by nipple hairs, but as a human, the mental image of a woman with a bunch of hair coming out of her nipples is gross. But good on you, man. Can I ask a serious question? Do Chinese girls have enormous bushes like Japanese and Korean chicks usually have? I'm genuinely curious.
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Jan 13, 2017 05:54
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nickmeister posted:I've studied Japanese, and while the grammar is very different from English, its rules are quite regular and steadfast. Sounds like you could use some more studying.
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Jan 13, 2017 06:01
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Stringent posted:Sounds like you could use some more studying. Yeah I'm not exactly a high level speaker of Mandarin but I can hold my own and he seems to both be intentionally ignoring the point I was making while also exaggerating just how tough Mandarin is. If you get deep enough into any language, the exceptions and idiomatic expressions are going to make it seem like it has no hard grammar rules. Still, the only people I ever met who said Chinese had no grammar were people who had been in Taiwan for years without ever learning to speak Chinese.
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Jan 13, 2017 06:15
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Stringent posted:Sounds like you could use some more studying. How's that? Atlas Hugged posted:Yeah I'm not exactly a high level speaker of Mandarin but I can hold my own and he seems to both be intentionally ignoring the point I was making while also exaggerating just how tough Mandarin is. If you get deep enough into any language, the exceptions and idiomatic expressions are going to make it seem like it has no hard grammar rules. Still, the only people I ever met who said Chinese had no grammar were people who had been in Taiwan for years without ever learning to speak Chinese. I haven't ignored your point. I agree that on a basic level, English and Chinese grammar seem similar. As for "Chinese having no grammar," I have been told this by many Chinese people. But they were all mainland Chinese and I've only heard that once so far in Taiwan, so maybe it's just not a view that Taiwanese tend to have?
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Jan 13, 2017 06:34
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Fleta Mcgurn posted:As a woman, I actually admire Haier for being undeterred by nipple hairs, but as a human, the mental image of a woman with a bunch of hair coming out of her nipples is gross. But good on you, man. 
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Jan 13, 2017 06:54
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Fleta Mcgurn posted:As a woman, I actually admire Haier for being undeterred by nipple hairs, but as a human, the mental image of a woman with a bunch of hair coming out of her nipples is gross. But good on you, man. 
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Jan 13, 2017 07:02
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nickmeister posted:In the very beginning Chinese and English have similar grammar. But when get into actually learning how to speak like someone who actually speaks Mandarin, it gets very difficult. I've studied Japanese, and while the grammar is very different from English, its rules are quite regular and steadfast. Chinese grammar is like walking into the room of a hoarder. Everything looks like a complete mess, but they've got their system. "Um, I don't know where I should put my coat?" "Oh, put it anywhere!" "Okay." *Hangs coat on a chair. "No, no, not there, that's not right!" "Uh, but you said anywhere was fine?..." nah this is right. Chinese grammar in book 1,2,3 is like 'woah I can get this' and then you go out into the real world and you will not be prepared
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Jan 13, 2017 07:18
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Fleta Mcgurn posted:As a woman, I actually admire Haier for being undeterred by nipple hairs, but as a human, the mental image of a woman with a bunch of hair coming out of her nipples is gross. But good on you, man. In my experience in China, the bush is more like a forest, and many women tell me that they think it's gross and weird to trim or shave it (and I've had a few tell me that their previous BFs agree). As someone who thinks going down is part of the evening, getting tickled and/or pulling out a stray hairs sucks. I don't care about shaving, but I have had some previous lovers allow me to use my hair buzzer on a medium setting and hack away at the overgrowth. My previous FWB was from Mongolia and her forest was ridiculously long and somehow my floor would be littered with the hairs every time she stayed over. I would sweep and there would be a pile of pubes, as if I had a pet that shed a lot. She eventually let me use the buzzer and I regularly did touch ups because it grew at a rate that shocked me.
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Jan 13, 2017 07:20
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nickmeister posted:How's that? I already had it out with another Japan goon who just kept repeating Japanese grammar is very regular and consistent except for the parts that aren't and I don't have the energy to go through it again. Out of curiosity though, how would you describe your level of proficiency with Japanese?
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Jan 13, 2017 07:36
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