Fojar38 posted:

It's really loving funny that China is building carriers even though it has zero strategic use for them whatsoever

ocrumsprug posted:

Think anyone will tell that guy that his son is British too and he doesn't need to overstay his visa while his wife goes walk about(lol)?

peak debt posted:

Right now, yeah, but they presumably want to start loving around in South Asia and Africa some more in the future.

ocrumsprug posted:

Think anyone will tell that guy that his son is British too and he doesn't need to overstay his visa while his wife goes walk about(lol)?

Ron Darling posted:

China's already got a huge strategic footprint in Africa, so that should be exciting times once they get colonial urgings

nickmeister posted:

But I'm pretty sure they would get the poo poo kicked out of them if they ever tried to start any real fights down there.

Why would you let your baby become a Chinese citizen rather than an affluent Western country? Why?

Baronjutter posted:

lol 2020. I chuckle every time I read or hear that year now thanks to like a decade or more of it being the prophesied date of China's inevitable rise to global superpower status. Everything in china will be done or good or fixed or better by 2020, give or take. if not, just have a rest.

nickmeister posted:

Chinese movie titles for western movies suck. They are way too direct are basically spoilers.

Ceciltron posted:

I like how "Ban Coal Use" and "Increase Coal Capacity" are simultaneous propaganda goals.

Ceciltron posted:

I like how "Ban Coal Use" and "Increase Coal Capacity" are simultaneous propaganda goals.

Ron Darling posted:

Eh they won't start fights necessarily, they'll just invest huge amounts of money and then one day be "lol you our bitches now we own every single resource extraction company in your country"

Gargamel Gibson posted:

Go on.

Outrail posted:

All the star trek I ever watched involved fighting and acts of war.

Chomp8645 posted:

I take it you only watched the movies then.

angel opportunity posted:

No offense but you're insanely ignorant about Mandarin phonology and don't know what you are talking about. Pinyin is very good at certain things, namely it is extremely systematic and regular. It is good at representing all the phonemes and having a very systematic romanization that someone already literate in another language can learn in roughly a few weeks and be able to read anything without guesswork.

quote:

The choice of /x/ or /qi/ could be considered poor choices, but "why not ch?" because /ch/ is already being used for another phoneme? It can't be used for both. They probably could have found letters that were more obvious to native English speakers, but are those necessarily going to be better for native speakers of other languages? Are they going to be any better for native Chinese speakers?

zh, ch, sh, are the retroflex versions of z, c, and s. This is why they did it, any of those with an /h/ after indicates it's a retroflex, and this choice helps show that these sounds are very closely related to each other with one single difference (being retroflex).

quote:

See above, if you did /ts/ then the retroflex (ch) would have to be /tsch/, which isn't inherently bad but it's a lot of consonants clustered together. The "i" thing is just your native language biasing you; there is no "ur," /shi/ is simply the exactly same thing as /si/ but with the tongue in retroflex position. Lips and teeth and voicing etc. are all exactly the same between the two sounds. It's the exact same difference between /su/ and /shu/, you think they should use another confusing set of letters just because native English speakers think it sounds like "ur"?

Magna Kaser posted:

You're under the misconception Hanyu Pinyin was designed as both a romanization system and a pronunciation tool specifically for English speaking westerners when it is neither.

nickmeister posted:

“Oops, 'rebels' just took over your factories and killed all of your managers. What's that? All of your military personnel are only trained in the art of beating up dehydrated chain smokers?"

quote:

However when the line is fully functional, uniformed Chinese controllers will welcome passengers to the spotless platforms of newly built stations all along the route, while Chinese technicians and stationmasters will keep things running behind the scenes.

“We don’t yet have the management experience yet. We have a management contract with Chinese staff for five years, with an Ethiopian counterpart in training,” said Getachew.

China has invested heavily in infrastructure in Ethiopia, funding sub-Saharan Africa’s first modern tramway – which opened in Addis Ababa last year – as well as motorways and dams.

The new $3.4bn railway, with its red, yellow and green trains evoking the Ethiopian flag, was 70% financed by China’s Exim Bank and built by China Railway Group and China Civil Engineering Construction.

A high-level Chinese delegation, in Addis Ababa for the inauguration of the railway, on Tuesday signed further agreements worth $100m for the construction of roads, the state-controlled Fana Broadcasting Corporation reported.

Natural resources from Africa have helped fuel China’s economic boom, and it became the continent’s largest trade partner in 2009.

However, direct investment in Africa slumped more than 40% last year, as growth slowed in the Asian giant.

Jimmy Little Balls posted:

The old Korean lady in my class has a ziplock bag of stale cornflakes and is giving them out one at a time to people who are too awkward to say no thanks.

Volcott posted:

barbecue at the folks posted:

The Chinese way of building stuff in Africa is to bring everything from materials to engineers to work teams to even the train conductors onsite from China. The locals are well aware that while new infrastructure is real nice, in the end they're getting shafted in the deal as the new train lines and ports exist only to ship their natural wealth off to China while locals have been kept in the dark about operating the new systems. I'd give it the five to ten years it takes to train locals to use the equipment until someone feels confident to pull the rug under the feet of the Chinese: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/06/next-stop-the-red-sea-ethiopia-opens-chinese-built-railway-to-djibouti

big time bisexual posted:

it's no wonder why kan re nao is a thing

https://my.mixtape.moe/qsludn.mp4

angel opportunity posted:

I will give you the /i/ thing representing a different vowel, that is a good argument I hadn't thought of. It's likely done that way because there is sound in mandarin of the i in qi + the z in zi, so rather than using another letter entirely or some accent mark, they just left it as /i/. I can't say with any authority if this is good or bad, confusing or not. In my experience it doesn't confuse anyone.

What DOES confuse native English speakers at least about pinyin is stuff like /x/ vs /sh/, /q/ vs /ch/, etc. and I think there is inherently no way around this. You can argue one one side that the "arbitrary" letters are extremely confusing and poorly indicate the actual sound, but I would argue that native English speakers simply cannot hear the difference between these sounds anyway and typically just fuse all these sounds--and more--together. Go into a first or second semester Mandarin class and listen to people pronouncing "xue" vs. "shui," many students pronounce it exactly the same. Writing it as "Tsue" or something wouldn't actually help, the students just hear /x/ and /sh/ as the same sound because English doesn't have those sounds.

The argument for using arbitrary letters in this case is that it can help some students more easily realize that these are "foreign" sounds and actually quite different from each other. For me personally this helped a lot when I was learning. I kept hearing the sounds as the same, but the letters being so different made me really look in and set me to realize that these must actually be different sounds that I need to listen more closely to.

I personally think adding in ' or something to indicate retroflex would be bad because they already have tone marks and umlauts in there. They end up almost never using those, but they are used in textbooks. Imagine seeing "lǜc'á" for 绿茶

Devils Affricate posted:

This I didn't know. However if that's the case, what's the point of even using the Roman alphabet in the first place? As a teaching tool for native Chinese speakers, something like Pinyin is only going to confuse them later when they try to learn English, or any other language that uses the alphabet.

Gargamel Gibson posted:

Go on.

barbecue at the folks posted:

The Chinese way of building stuff in Africa is to bring everything from materials to engineers to work teams to even the train conductors onsite from China. The locals are well aware that while new infrastructure is real nice, in the end they're getting shafted in the deal as the new train lines and ports exist only to ship their natural wealth off to China while locals have been kept in the dark about operating the new systems. I'd give it the five to ten years it takes to train locals to use the equipment until someone feels confident to pull the rug under the feet of the Chinese: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/06/next-stop-the-red-sea-ethiopia-opens-chinese-built-railway-to-djibouti

etalian posted:

It makes me laugh at how China has such a incompetent poorly built empire.

The Romans were assholes but they sure built their stuff to last with things like their roads systems still being in use thousands of years later.

Magna Kaser posted:

You know all the big hits like Stealing Dream Space, Flying House Adventure Around the World, Emotion Secret Service, The Unmatched King of Destruction, or One Night, Big Belly.

Blue Star Error posted: