r/MandarinChinese

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.

Sometimes I can say something in Chinese and it’s technically correct, but I’m not sure if it actually sounds natural.

Like, a native speaker would understand me, but maybe they wouldn’t say it that way.

Recently I’ve been doing more casual speaking practice, and the most helpful part has been when someone tells me things like, “That’s not wrong, but we’d usually say it like this.”

That kind of feedback is honestly way more useful than just being corrected for grammar mistakes.

It made me realize that a lot of my Chinese is understandable, but still sounds kind of translated.

Has anyone else dealt with this?

What helped you sound more natural when speaking Chinese?

I know 玉 is a rare surname, but I really like its annotations and I think it softens the feel of 伟志 to not sound overly masculine, but I wanna get the opinion of others and native speakers.

Total fluency to me means you can, for example, go on Chinese TV and give an unscripted interview while being at ease, comfortable, and confident. It's what Jodie Foster is capable of in French, even though she's not a native speaker. (Search YouTube for "jodie foster interview french" to see what I mean.)

I wonder, do any non-Chinese exist who have this level of competency in Chinese? I doubt it for the simple reason that all vids I see on YouTube of foreigners speaking Mandarin, are mostly dudes and gals who have achieved fluency w.r.t. practical household talk and are quite smug about that, to the point where they seem to consider themselves quite fit to comment on the language as "experts". I very much doubt though that they could match (in Chinese) what Jodie Foster does in French. In any case I haven't seen any video evidence of it.

But maybe someone here knows of foreigners who have reached this level? I'd be interested to hear about it.

I recently read a write-up on how 小姐 is nowadays not necessarily a safe way of addressing a young woman because in some circles this term has come to be regarded as derogatory or disparaging, it (apparently) being evocative of "ladies of loose morals". I think that's tragic, what with the term 小姐 literally being quite courteous, but I can't change the way things are, so that leaves me wondering: what are safe forms of address toward females—but also toward men. Is 太太 still safe, or is 女士 safer? How about young girls, either teenagers or children? How about men? Surely 先生 is still okay for grown men? How about teenage boys? And how about the elderly? I'd like to be updated on what's currently considered best because I think my textbooks may be a little outdated. Also, please do point out if there are important differences between mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and diasporas. Thanks all.

Hi! I am looking for a mandarin language partner. I would be happy to help with English. My mandarin is very limited but would love to meet once or twice a month to have a meal and practice as well as text etc.

I live in the chamblee area.

What bothers me most about the incredible number of homophones in Mandarin is not the effort of learning them from a vocabulary list and the occasional confusion that may cause, but rather how they interfere with what I consider to be the normal reflexes of a learner's mind to try to understand what one hears even when what's being said contains words one hasn't heard before. Here's an example:

Let's say I know 工 as part of 工作 and 工夫, and I'm aware of its standalone meaning "work". Let's say I also know 电, electricity, both standalone and as part of 充电 and 电影. Now let's say one day I take a walking tour with a guide somewhere, and he's showing us around an old town and explaining things in Mandarin. While we're standing in front of a some building I hear him use the word "gōngdìan" several times. I don't know this combination, but my mind enthusiastically attempts to piece something together from the spoken form of these two syllables. They sound like 工 and 电, work and electricity! I guess he's talking about a power station, or a generator, or a something like that? Surely this is a building where electricity got generated, or at least some work to do with electricity got done! Nice how in spite of my limited comprehension I can piece things together, same as in other languages I've learned!

Except, of course, I'm quite wrong. He's saying "gōngdìan" alright, but this gōng is 宫 and this diàn is 殿, and together they mean "palace". The word has absolutely nothing to do with 工 or 电, and so my assumption that I'd achieved a little understanding was actually counterproductive, not so much because I missed what the guide was actually saying, but—which is much worse—because my mind is actually forging incorrect associations. Unless I go through the trouble afterwards of actually verifying my inference somehow (in a dictionary or by asking someone), I will walk away from the guided tour thinking I'd learned a new word on the fly, while actually I didn't at all.

IOW, this way of trying to improve listening comprehension is actually quite reliable in all languages except Chinese, where this absolutely does not work. You'll get it wrong far more often than you'll get it right, so when learning Chinese it's best to not even try to best-guess the meaning of unknown words even if you hear them correctly and can associate them with some meaning. So then how do you try? Frankly I don't know. Where listening comprehension is concerned, I find that my usual way of improving it (in other languages) doesn't apply. In the case of Chinese, you pretty much have to find out what the written form is before you tell yourself you've learned some new vocab. And that's quite a nuisance. It also makes it quite clear, imo, that learning "spoken Chinese" only, using nothing but Pinyin to note words down, is hopeless. It is an intrinsic property of Chinese that you need to know the characters if you want to move beyond the basics—so that's what I'm doing, but that doesn't fix the problem I just described of being unable to infer the meaning of new words from their sound and context.

What y'all say?

I am a special education teacher at a high school. It seems like in my area when students from other cultures have names that are difficult to pronounce or read correctly, they end up adopting some common English name to use at school. I had one girl on my roster whose name started with a Q and I asked her how to pronounce it she said that she just went by “Abby.” I don’t know when or how this practice started, but I’ve my best to work around it and learn the name they were given from their parents. So now I am working with “Kiley” a teen girl with special needs whose verbal skills are VERY limited. One day I noticed a tag on her bag read “Ngaontshia“ and realized she was another one of those cases with a different name. I think as a teacher, particularly working in a special education setting with her, it would really benefit me to learn how her name is actually said. The Internet has been kind of vague with letters and syllables. Any help appreciated.

Consider the question "Can I charge my phone here please?" Google translates this as "请问我可以在这里给手机充电吗?"

Two things surprise me here. First, why not simply "请问(我)可以(在这里)充电我的手机吗?" What I mean is, GT's translation moves the direct object (手几) before the verb, but why do that?

Second, even if moving 手几 in front of the verb is better (more idiomatic?) here, why does GT use 给? I would expect 把 instead.

I notice that whenever I see a Chinese character I don't know, and I want to look it up in Pleco by handwriting it, I find it difficult to remember the character even though I was only looking at it a few seconds ago. Typically I have to look at it again, then very consciously tell myself something like "okay, such-and-such radical on the left, then the one that looks like such-and-such at the top right, then below that the rectangle part of such-and-such, etc." And then I still forget within a few seconds and have to look at it a third time, and maybe a fourth time.

It puzzles me because generally speaking I don't think I have a diminished capacity for Chinese writing. When I actively study characters, learning them one by one, I believe I do quite well, in the sense that I remember most after a few rehearsals. And the characters I've rehearsed I recognize even if I forget the meaning, and therefore I can reproduce them in my dictionary app. But it's not so for characters I've never seen before. It seems my visual short-term memory is quite weak unless I can link the visual impression to some previously known meaning, thus (presumably) moving the impression from the strictly visual domain to something that's at least partly verbal or aural.

Do others have this same experience?

PS. Bonus question: does anyone besides me see Chinese characters everywhere after he/she's been studying them quite intensively? E.g. in tree branches, lines in artwork, shapes of random objects?

Pretty sure I have neither the time nor the mental capacity to learn written Chinese at this time. What are good resources to learn spoken mandarin only, with pinyin as the basis?

I find it curious that in Mandarin some syllables are overloaded in the extreme with possible meanings (example: yù), while there also exist syllables that have only a single possible meaning and no homophones at all (e.g. nàng 齉). And then there are some that you'd think would be in use but aren't, so zero meanings, e.g. mei1. The latter is especially puzzling because clearly méi, mèi, and měi are in use, so it can't be argued that "mei" doesn't "sound right" to Chinese ears.

Anyway, today I'm mostly interested in the second category, so syllables like "nàng" that have only one meaning. Anyone know any others?

What would be the fastest way to learn mandarin? Using any ai tools, tricks tricks or any online classes?

This is for my kid. We are sending him to China to learn the language. He has taken a year of Japanese. But wants to learn Chinese. Both my husband and I don't speak Chinese at all.

It's one of the hardest languages as it is rote memory.

Thanks!

Pleco offers the following example of the use of 可：

你可别小看了这件事

Nǐ kě bié xiǎokàn le zhè jiàn shì.

I would expect simply 你别小看这件事. I don't understand the use of either 可 nor 了 here. Anyone care to explain?

I'm self learning Mandarin because I love Chinese literature and culture.