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meichenxi · 10 months

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What are those apps you usually post in your productivity updates?

hi! here's a breakdown of apps i use, as well as websites and other resources i've used/use for my learning (mainly chinese, though some of these resources can be used for other languages as well).

apps i use every day:

dot languages: this is a chinese-specific app where you select your hsk level, and then read articles at that level. there's a pop-up dictionary, an option to show pinyin, post-article vocab practice (audio, matching, translation, and writing), and the option to have your articles either in simplified or traditional.

TOFU learn: a blend between flashcards and writing, you can find decks for various things, including hsk level-specific decks, and you learn new vocab with the stroke order and then write each new term three times—once with an overlay (so the term is visible), and then two times from memory. there's also a review function, which helps you practice terms you've already learnt, and each term has audio that goes with it. i use it for chinese, but there's decks for esperanto, french, german, italian, japanese, korean, norweigian, portuguese, russian, spanish, swedish, and turkish.

the pleco dictionary app: my favourite chinese dictionary app; allows you to translate from english to chinese or chinese to english, has options for writing, radical, vocal, and keyboard entry, and has both traditional and simplified characters.

ankiapp: this one's not particularly complicated; it's a flashcard app, where you can make your own decks or download decks other people have made. it uses a spaced repetition system to help you remember terms—you rate yourself from worst to best on how well you remembered the term, and that determines how many times it'll pop up afterwards. it also gives you an overall grade for each deck, which is a nice way to measure your progress.

duolingo: probably my least favourite of all of the apps i use; the chinese course isn't the best, and now that they've removed the notes/grammar information option, there's no way for people who aren't already fairly familiar with the language and its inner workings to learn them if they exclusively use duolingo. it's okay for maintenance practice, though, but i'm already almost finished with the entire course and i would say it barely reaches to lower hsk 4, so i wouldn't say it's a good tool if you're more advanced.

apps i have but use less often:

readibu: this is sort of like dot in that it's an app for reading in chinese with a pop-up dictionary. however, that's where the similarities end; readibu has novels, short stories, and articles aimed at children, and each of those are further split into genres. readibu also lets you add your own web-pages and read them on the app, so you can use its pop-up dictionary with them. it's aimed more to intermediate and upper intermediate learners, with hsk levels ranging from hsk 4 to hsk 6. the only reason i rate dot above readibu is because dot has a larger range of levels (hsk 1 through hsk 6 i believe? but it may go higher) and exercises built in to help you learn the vocab.

the chairman's bao: also a chinese reading app, though if you use the free version, you only get one sample article per hsk level (hsk 1 - hsk 6). i believe that every so often you get a new sample article for each level, but i'm not sure what the interval on that is. it also has a pop-up dictionary and a flashcard option for saved vocab.

du chinese: another chinese reading app; it has articles divided into newbie through master (six levels in total, though they don't line up perfectly with the hsk in my experience), and new articles are free for a certain period of time before becoming locked behind a paywall. there's a pop-up dictionary and a vocab review/test option for vocab you save.

memrise: flashcards with audio, depending on whether you're using an official course or a user-generated deck. decent, but it can get repetitive.

hellotalk: not exclusively chinese, but i believe it started off mainly aimed that way. you set your language, and then your target language, and then you can talk to native speakers who have your language as their target language. potentially incredibly useful, but if you're like me and extremely introverted you may have a hard time using this app, since it requires a lot of one-on-one interaction.

slowly: i haven't actually gotten around to using this, but it's sort of like a digital penpal app, as i understand it. you can learn more about it here.

websites and other miscellanea:

this massive mega drive by @salvadorbonaparte (languages, linguistics, translation studies, and more).

this masterpost by @loveletter2you (linguistics, languages, and language learning books/textbooks).

this masterpost on chinese minority literature by @zaobitouguang

the integrated chinese textbooks by cheng and tsui, which are the textbooks i use for self-study—there's textbooks and workbooks, as well as character workbooks (though these can easily be cut out without suffering from the loss).

mandarinbean: graded readers, hsk 1 - hsk 6, with a pop-up dictionary and the option to read in traditional or simplified

chinese reading practice: reading, beginner through advanced (three levels), with a pop-up dictionary and some additional notes included on vocab and language-specific things non-native speakers might struggle with or not know.

hsk reading: graded readers, hsk 1 - hsk 6, divided into three sections (beginner, intermediate, advanced). does not have a pop-up dictionary, but does have an option to translate the text, post-reading quizzes, and notes on important vocab with example sentences.

my chinese reading: reading from beginner to advanced (four levels); has a pop-up dictionary, the option to play an audio recording of the passage you're reading, notes on key words, things that are difficult to translate, grammar, and post-reading comprehension questions.

the heavenly path notion website, which i would say is one of the best resources i've ever found, with a massive number of guides, lists of chinese media in a variety of forms, and general resources.

chinese character stroke order dictionary: what it says on the tin; will show you the stroke order for a given character.

hanzigrids: allows you to generate your own character worksheets. i use this very frequently, and can recommend it. the only downside is if you want to create multiple pages at once, you have to pay; however this can easily be circumnavigated by creating only one sheet at a time. you can download the sheet as a pdf and print it out for personal use.

21st century chinese poety: a resource i only came across recently; has a massive collection of contemporary chinese poetry, including translations; much more approachable than classical poetry, which can often be incredibly dense and hard to parse due to the writing style.

zhongwen pop-up dictionary: if you're reading something in chinese on a website that doesn't have a pop-up dictionary, this is a must. i've never encountered any words that it doesn't have a translation for so far, including colloquialisms/slang. i use it to read webnovels, and it's been a fantastic tool. you can also save vocab by hitting the r key when you're hovering over a word/phrase, making it easy to go back and add terms to your flashcard deck(s).

chinese reading world: a website put together by the university of iowa; split into three levels (beginner, intermediate, and advanced), with thirty units per level, and ten modules per unit, as well as multiple proficiency tests per level. each module is split into three parts: a pre-reading vocab quiz, the reading with a number of comprehension questions based on it, and a post-vocab reading quiz. it also rates you in relation to someone with a native proficiency based on how quickly you read and answer the comprehension questions, and how many vocab questions you get right.

jiaoyu baike: an extensive chinese-to-chinese dictionary, put out by the taiwanese ministry of education. you can find an extensive write-up on it here, by @linghxr.

social media etc: see this post by @rongzhi.

qianpian: another chinese-to-chinese dictionary; @ruhua-langblr has a write-up on it here.

this writeup on zero to hero by @meichenxi; initially aimed at chinese learning, but now has expanded greatly.

music rec's: this masterpost by @linghxr.

tv/film: youtube is a great place to find chinese tv shows and films, and they often have english subtitles. if you can't find something on there, though, you can probably find it either on iqiyi or asianvote, which have both chinese and other asian shows and films (though you'll want an adblock if you're going to use the latter). i use these a lot to watch things, and have discovered a lot of media through these, and then novels through those when i went searching to see what they were adapted from.

polylogger: a website for logging the amount of time/type of language study you do. has a wide variety of languages, and the option to follow other people. still, it's a fairly basic site.

#woahhhhh #this is an insanely detailed write-up of all the info out there!!!!#at this stage I am exclusively using pleco for EVERYTHING #but this is a good reminder that other stuff exists lmao

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meichenxi · 10 months

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life update!!

hello my friends!

as ever, not active - life happened! I probably will continue not being active, so let's count this blog as on semi-hiatus. BUT. I have big news!

I am!!!! going to china!!!! in august!!! for ten months!!! to work as a volunteer interpreter in a martial arts academy!!!! in a buddhist temple!!!!

I get to train with the foreign students 8+ hours a day, and translate when needed!!!!

ok that's the announcement, love and peace <3

I will be getting up at stupid o'clock (5:45am), eating in silence, wearing uniform / robes at all times, teach a beginners' chinese class, and also. crucially. do really HUGE amounts of Kung Fu!!!!

on a serious note, I have been trying SO hard for SO long during and after covid to get back to china. but now I actually HAVE THE VISA, as of today, the ticket is booked, all - praise be - will be well. I am so afraid to jinx it further, and so very happy :)

I would never have thought when I started this blog back in 2020 that I'd be able to use what I've learnt, all the 'useless' martial arts knowledge from copious amounts of trash wuxia, in an actually useful context. more long term, I also get to see if interpreting is right for me, improve my chinese, and get very fit - all for free :D

hope everyone is well! - meichenxi

#meichenxi manages #life update #chinese #really genuinely I have been keeping learning I just....this blog was An Interest #and unfortunately it no longer Interests me the same amount #I'm also trying to just...speak less and do more #practice what you preach etc etc #so I've been doing a huge amount of writing and other language things. also hot girl summer!#hope everyone is well in the community and the words befriend you <3

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meichenxi · 10 months

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部首 bu4 shou3 radicals

i received a request to do a post about 部首 radicals a while back and i figured i would just do it now. they wanted to know if they should study radicals or not. this probably isn’t going to be the post they were hoping for, but i think what i’ll discuss is still important

first of all: you do not need to memorize all of the radicals, especially if you are a beginner. there’s over 200 of them and a fair number of these radicals are never or rarely used as individual characters. i’d honestly start by just learning words and familiarizing yourself with radicals as you go along. if you really want to learn them, here’s a link to a list of the 100 most common radicals (just scroll down to the end of the article for the link)

that’s honestly my whole answer to the original question asked, so let’s move on to what i really wanted to discuss: radicals vs. character components

i’ve seen a lot of people (including myself) say that every component that constitutes a character is a radical or that radicals are the building blocks of characters. this is not true. characters only have one radical. everything else is a 部件 character component that can be used to expressed sound or meaning. just because a character component can be considered a radical does not mean it is a radical in every character in which it appears. or, to quote john renfroe from outlier-linguistics:

“The word ‘radical’ is best understood as ‘a character component that sometimes plays the role of radical,’ NOT ‘a character component that has the nature of being a radical’” (x)

the radical is simply the component under which a character is listed in a chinese dictionary. it is important to point out that 部首 simply means “section header”

so let’s take a quick look at the character 验: in this character, 马 is the radical, but just because it is the radical in this character does not mean it will be the radical in every character in which it appears. to prove this point, let’s look at 妈. it contains 马, but the radical under which it is sorted is 女. as renfroe points out in his blog post, radicals are not an innate part of a character; they’re just something chosen by people so they can be sorted in a dictionary.

in fact, the first instance of 部首 being used to sort characters in a dictionary was in the 2nd century CE in the 说文解字. the dictionary analyzes 小篆 small seal script characters. the first traces of chinese characters appeared over 1,000 years before this dictionary was made

so how do you figure out which component is the radical? it honestly takes a bit of practice using dictionaries. the more familiar you become with characters the easier it will be to locate the radical. the best practice is to expose yourself to as many different characters as possible so that you can see where different radicals are placed in different characters

so, to sum it all up: radicals simply pertain to the component used to look up a character in a dictionary. if you want to talk about etymology or how characters work, that’s gonna be a conversation about sound and meaning components (or if we’re being ~fancy~ semantic indicators and phonetic components)

are radicals the building blocks of characters? no, sound and meaning components are. it’s honestly just a difference in terminology, but i think it’s a pretty important distinction to make

so let’s look at three different dictionaries (two physical, one digital) to see how this works just for fun (under a read more bc it has pictures and is a little long)

Keep reading

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meichenxi · 1 year

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hello hello hello I have done my regular thing where I disappear (I am staying in my parents’ house and they have no wifi or signal). all is well, I am just not tumblring

#so....if you know me in real life....phone I guess? lol

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meichenxi · 1 year

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En Anglais, on ne dit pas “quatre vingt dix neuf”, on dit “ninety nine” qu'on pourrait traduire comme “Hurr durr, regardez mois, j'ai un système de numérotation fonctionnel” et je crois que c'est magnifique.

#lmaaaaao

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meichenxi · 1 year

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Character learning update! Method: found! Brain: ehh

For those of you that have been around since 2020, you will know that characters are my nemesis. I had a huge discrepancy between reading and listening ability, where I couldn’t read at all, and though that is now resolved, I still have those echoes of mental blocks around reading.

Most of my reading is also via The Vibe. I have no concept of differentiating between common characters; I just Vibe. Which is great etc etc because it means learning new characters doesn’t take long but it also makes it highly susceptible to failing outside of the particular context I’m used to seeing the character in. I do terribly with any one-character things on their own.

And I just...never learnt how to write? I learnt the first 100 or so characters about three different times, and never got beyond them. I also didn’t remember them, so every time would have to start learning basically afresh. The first time I ever learnt how to write I spent a long time getting to know various components, and it was only with that understanding of phonetic and semantic components that I could eventually make progress in reading.

For Life Reasons, I decided about a week ago that - this is stupid. Come on. If I ever want to study at university level (which I...might), I need to be able to handwrite. And I need to start NOW, because I have a good 2500-3000 characters to catch up on before next year. It’s not like I can do it in a few months, right?

...right?

Turns out - because I am and will ever remain a teenager doing the cinnamon challenge - what I needed was that dare. The thought of...ok, but how fast could I do it? I memorised pi to 500 places aged 12 because I couldn’t bear to let Courtney take the trophy when she had already beaten me at times tables. I am an unhealthily competitive person!! And it’s only done terrible things for me in the long term!!

So what were we waiting for??

(In my defence, part of it was pure linguistic interest; I am at a weird place in learning where I can read fairly well but write not at all, and so I wanted to see if I could utilise that reading ability to improve my writing in a way that isn’t generally taught, and makes use of my wider vocabulary than most students have when starting to learn.)

If it is successful - and I am tentatively hopeful - I will do a full update on the method in a post and go into actual detail, but basically: I am using sound series and semantic series to speed-run all the characters I recognise in no particular order of frequency. That’s because I don’t actually want to write HSK1-level dialogues - I just need to have a good 2500/3000 characters by next September. I can afford to learn in a weird order.

So I learn 感喊憾減 - 殘錢淺 - 國或域....and so on. All things with the same phonetic or semantic components, in a big spider diagram in my head.

It’s been....honestly shockingly successful? I also have about 100 common characters that I have learnt at some point before in my mind - but bearing in mind I am learning traditional this time around, so some of them need to be learnt from scratch. But let’s just count the sound / semantic series ones for now - that’s 377 new characters, all that I have never learnt to write before, in a week and with an average recall of 98%.

I’m curious to see what that recall rate is like in a few weeks. I’m tentatively hopeful though - about 90% I’d say I can recall easily to very easily.

Before people shout at me, obviously you are struggling, it can’t be done, it’s not sustainable etc etc - I’m pretty sure you are right! It’s a stupid amount. That’s like....1200, 1500 characters in a month potentially. But the reason I want to try is the same reason I originally started learning Chinese - because I’m curious what I can do.

And plus the issue isn’t actually memorisation. I have a terrible ADHD memory for useful things, but used to do memory things for fun - poems, long strings of digits, etc etc. I know a few techniques and would love to learn others. And at every point I have felt myself get overwhelmed and like I can’t recall them easily, I have stopped, taken a nap, gone for a walk, done the rest of my life, and come back to it the next day refreshed.

The issue is not even time. I have time. In order to average above 50 a day, you need at least an hour, and some character sets are far more difficult than others. But I have an hour. That’s not the problem.

The issue is quality time and quality attention. Attention!! Is! Tiring! But! So! Necessary! For! Learning!!!!!

Something that I have found out very quickly through this little experiment of mine, trying new things out most days, is that the amount of attention paid to the character when you are learning is is the most accurate predictor for how easily you will be able to recall it later. In the first few days, I didn’t spend much time at all on characters like 憶, because...look it’s a heart, it’s to do with thinking/the mind, and its phonetic component is 意. Easy. Bish, bash, and as my father says, quite literally bosh. I would spend far more time on characters that made less immediate sense to me and come up with fantastic mnemonics - but those would be the ones I could recall later. And I wouldn’t know which yi sound component 憶 used.

Because ‘sounds like yi and therefore uses 意’ is great when you’ve only learnt one sound series with components that sound like yi. But when I went up against more (and this was a particular fucking problem with the various qing and jing series - there are just SO many of them) I quickly realised I needed to do a lot better than that. Otherwise how could I remember which qing or jing it was???

Basically: if I used my full attention, came up with an excellent mnemonic, and fully understood which parts of the character were functional, what components they were, which were not functional and so on - sometimes I would only need to write it out once and boom. In my mind forever. (Or at least, for the past week. We’ll see in the future.)

The coolest thing about this method is like....most of my memory practice is not with pen and paper? I still need to write characters out to get proportions right in the future, but that’s not what I’m doing now. So much of the practice is done whilst walking or in class or tidying up or various other things. If you know it’s 心 + 意 = 憶, you don’t need to have access to anything to write that down, and you don’t need to mindlessly copy strokes for 200000000 pages until you have brute forced the stroke order into your mind. You just need to know it’s 心 + 意.

I got SO excited about this. I was on FIRE. I was CRACKLING. And then last night I went to bed and couldn’t sleep for the entire night because every time I went to bed I started anxiety-attacking my self awake. And then today every single tiny tiny noise and bright light felt like it was stabbing my brain. Headache. Exhaustion. Drifting along dreamily but couldn’t sleep.

The thing is, which I also forgot because I love it so much, is that studying....requires brain? And brain is....an organ? Which requires energy? And I also have a full time job which I have started again for the first time this week which I find personally and professionally utterly exhausting?? In order to concentrate so spectacularly well on Chinese, I have to concentrate less on other things, or rest more. And I can’t rest in the rest of my life. I have a job and am moving countries. So...?

So, unfortunately and probably very predictably, I’m going to have to slow down and maybe stop before I myself outzerburnen. The funny thing is and I guess the reason I didn’t even think about this is that I had imagined that my limits would be...limits of memory? That seems logical??? I had thought I would stop when I couldn’t remember stuff?? But I’m remembering everything fine. It’s just that the sheer amount of energy and focus required to create those mnemonics and visualise them, to hold them in your brain and create such a strong image that even if you only write them once you remember them forever...it’s way more intense than I can currently do, what with The Rest Of Life still plodding on.

(An example of such a mnemonic: Mei Changsu being called to present the emperor a birthday gift in the capital (Jinling) except it’s a massive whale: 鯨. Gazinga.)

But it’s good to know that the system as it stands works!! Not only works: for me personally this is....I don’t know. The light at the end of the tunnel etc etc. I feel so excited to have found a system that works for me, and that keeps and holds my interest!!! And I like writing now!! A bit!! Writing is fun!!!

And I’m not stopping, just going to aim for maybe....30 a day? (I realise that’s still a lot.) And of those 30, I’ll do maybe 25 from sound series and 5 from frequency series. That sounds quite few, but the ones I learn without the context of all the others to help them ironically take much longer. Generally the first 30 do not take as much energy as the last 20. I also think it would probably be fine if I weren’t in a full time job that required me to mask all day and come home crying from the Scary Noise and Scarier Lights and Unexpected Colleague Encounters to lie on the floor in the dark for literally two hours pumpkin-ing before I can feel normal again. I might try with this number back at home.

So there we go. I’ll update this again at the end of the month, with how many characters I’ve managed to learn and how well the retention has gone after a longer period of time. I do NOT intend this to be a ‘learn them for the views and then forget’ challenge. I fully intend to see if I can retain these characters for a very long time, and will be curious to see if extreme speed in learning and high rates of retention can co-exist at all. I’m still tweaking and changing and experimenting with things. And if it works, I’ll do a full (and far less rambling) guide to what I did then.

See you on the other side!!

- meichenxi

#chinese #learning chinese #chinese characters #studyblr #langblr #please lads: nobody yell at me for this number #I know what I'm doing etc etc. i.e. I understand and accept it is stupidity #but I wanna know!!!!!#plus 'how I learnt [gazillion] characters in [stupidly short time]' except not click bait #would be the best title ever #is it clickbait. if it's true. *thinking emoji*#anyway it's all an experiment in learning and that's why I started chinese in the firstplace #because it looked hard and scary and then I found it was actually soft and warm and lovely #and I fell in love <3 #but yeah this is 1000000% for the record not something I would EVER recommend #I just want to see if it's Humanly Possible to learn 1000 in a month and actually remember them for the rest of ze future etc etc #if it were 50 a day. that would be 1500. but I think I'll set a goal for 1000 #I'm most curious actually about the retention rates #so I will be updating this for several months afterwards #I know it sounds like a flash-em-quick and then forget them method #but I'm curious to see if I can learn quickly and STILL recall them afterwards after 69 12 months etc #6.....9.....12 #not 69 12 #I don't have grad funding so I can only use my own brain :)

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meichenxi · 1 year

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Hello everyone!! For all those who replied to the post or contacted me asking about the UK and Ireland languages project - thank you so much for your interest! I apologise for the radio silence - my job has started up again, and I should be able to reply to you with more information later this week :)

Hope everyone is well!

- meichenxi

#meichenxi manages #thank you so much for everyone who shared it!!#I am very excited #interesting times ahead~ 0.0.

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meichenxi · 1 year

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@jabalinya replying on my langblr! I think they tend to be referred as such in the same way languages like Norwegian / Swedish / Danish are referred to as languages, even though a speaker of each can understand the others without much of a problem (however much people joke about Danish)- it's politically / socially / historically motivated. A language is a dialect with an army, etc etc!

Re Hindi and Urdu - as far as I know they are definitely mutually intelligible - but whether something is a 'dialect' or a 'language' is often down to social considerations i.e. at higher levels using vocab from different sources; religious, historical, political considerations etc. And on the opposite side of the spectrum that’s why some Chinese ‘languages’ are sometimes referred to as ‘dialects’, even though many of them are totally unintelligible to speakers of other dialects - there’s an argument for calling them such (whether or not you agree is another matter, and not the point of this post!) based on mutual history, a shared writing system and so on, as well as being politically motivated (wanting to represent the unity of a country etc) and so on.

I don’t know too much about the Hindi / Urdu situation beyond a few months spent in north India (where people would refer to their language as Hindi or Urdu), but in general mutual intelligibility on its own isn’t a great way of deciding what is called a language and what is called a dialect. If you imagine that you live in one city, and a friend lives in another 500 miles away, and you speak different languages - that’s clear, because you can’t understand each other. But what about a friend that lives 250 miles away from you can understand both you and your friend. Is that a different language? What about if speakers of language A can understand language B pretty much perfectly (like Danish speakers listening to Norwegian), but speakers of B struggle to understand language A (Norwegians listening to Danish)? What about if you can understand them when they are written down, but the pronunciation has changed to make spoken language impossible? What about if you can understand them at the level of basic daily conversation, but the more formally you speak, the more the languages use formal vocabulary loaned from different languages? (Which I believe is the case with Hindi using Sanskrit vocabulary and Urdu using Farsi / Persian and some Arabic, Turkish etc).

...etc etc etc XD it just goes on!

Every time we speak is an act of identity - so there’s a huge amount of tension held by speakers over whether a language is a ‘language’ (seen as its own thing, better, independent, the ‘correct’ written version, educated etc) or a ‘dialect’ (lesser, not ‘proper’, not taught in education, maybe connotations of being less important, from a poor / countryside background etc). Because it’s such an incredibly personal question, right - if you feel like you are part of a culturally / socially / religiously etc different group, but another group calls the thing you speak a ‘dialect’ of their language...that suggestion has a LOT of social ramifications.

Which...is why linguists tend to chicken out and avoid the question altogether and call them ‘variants’ or ‘varieties’. There are languages with extremely few similarities that speakers call ‘dialects’ of other languages (that some people would maybe automatically think of as 'languages’ if they saw or heard them) and languages that are essentially exactly the same as another one that the speakers maintain are not the same - because the two groups of speakers are different enough in some way that they have a reason for wanting that distance, and for identifying socially as two separate groups.

There are so many examples of this (I’m sorry they are all so Eurocentric; apart from Chinese it’s what I’m most familiar with.) Czech and Slovak are basically intelligible, but after Czechoslovakia split the speakers want to distance themselves from each other, so they are called different languages. Gaelic and Irish have certain similarities and are quite mutually intelligible, but the different spelling systems and common basic vocabulary and grammar is different enough - plus they are spoken in different countries - that they are talked about as ‘languages’. Languages like Ukranian and Russian are more similar than languages like Mandarin or Cantonese that are sometimes called ‘dialects’ (which I personally think is stupid, but that’s a topic for another post), but nobody in the current climate would suggest they were the same language! In the UK, children were punished for speaking 'dialects’ like Scots instead of ‘proper’ English - I’m putting dialects in ‘’ because Scots speakers call it another language, though it’s intelligible with English, because of the way that English was forcibly promoted at the expense of local Scots, often with violence, and the way both groups of speakers consider themselves distinct. In the north of India I imagine that if you are in a minority of Muslim people in a majority Hindu area, you might have a similar drive and desire to call Hindi and Urdu two separate languages? (Any Hindi and Urdu speakers please chime in!) It gives you identity and ties to a group, and has much further reaching connotations than whether you can understand a person speaking the other language or not.

Because calling it a language and not a dialect (or half of one bigger language) is an act of saying - look, I’m here, I matter, my stories are just as important as yours, my words have worth and meaning and history and you can’t stamp that out. We’re two different groups; we don’t want to be perceived as the same.

Re the Hindi vs Urdu thing again - because the grammar is very similar, many linguists will refer to Hindustani in textbooks or for example sentences, but are usually careful to try and separate that from what to call the language ‘out and about’, as it were. So if the other person on the post were going ‘No, they are so different, we can’t understand each other at all!’ that...would also be wrong? Because it’s objectively not true. And I would also have been a bit confused. But if they were talking about the experiences of people and the language in a social context, then I personally feel like talking about Hindi vs Urdu is very valid and probably the ‘normal’ way to do it. Personal opinion!

Generally speaking when talking about languages vs dialects, aiming high (that is, calling things a language) and getting it wrong hurts less than the other way around. Does it hurt any English speakers to suggest that Scots is a language? Not at all; why would it? Many non-Scots speakers of English might not even know Scots exists (which is its own special brand of privilege of the majority language speakers lmao). But it will be incredibly hurtful to many speakers of Scots to suggest that it’s a dialect of English.

So...linguists just say varieties (unless talking about it in a specifically sociological context where that perceived distinction is important) because it steps neatly around the ‘language’ vs ‘dialect’ distinction. Because that is so often because of political / historical / sociological reasons and not based on any actual measurable or reliable distance or difference between the languages in question.

At this stage I think most people give this up to be a personal / sociological question, not a purely linguistic one - it isn’t a linguists’ place to answer, not really. It’s not an academic decision, because it’s not based on anything you can actually measure. Speakers of the language decide, and linguists follow - or (what most actually do) avoid the question entirely.

I hope that makes sense! All of this was written in good faith, so I’m sorry if there is stuff you already know or I misread anything!!

As ever, any corrections welcomed. Still learning etc etc.

Had to unfollow someone for suggesting Urdu and Hindi are two different languages.

#linguistics #meichenxi manages #I hope this is ok to reply like this - I started typing out a reply and then realised it would be a bit long XD #language vs dialect - the eternal question #I often get these kind of questions from curious family members who speak scots #is it 'actually' a language? is it a dialect?? tell me O University Educated Person Of Wisdom #I give a shortened version of this post with a thumbs up and tell them they can call it what they like #and then run away to hide in a corner asfhjka

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meichenxi · 1 year

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#it's me and my 235735478597 saved words on pleco against the world

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meichenxi · 1 year

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@mejomonster Thank you!! Back in December this year I studied about the most common 100 characters in traditional to hand-write (by which I mean common in total, not just the most common ones that only appear in traditional). Otherwise I hadn’t really studied it at all before.

It has definitely been a learning curve!! But honestly not as bad as I thought. In the first few days I was looking up a lot of words that I could guess by context would be something fairly simple. The most frustrating thing are the words which are totally different and which you have no way of guessing unless you know them - the words that have components that are just more complex are fine.

A type of character I should have honestly anticipated but just didn’t think about was the kind that replaces one phonetic component giving the sound with another, simpler phonetic component. So for example 種 (种）or 鐘（钟), aside from the simplification of the semantic component 金 in the latter, also replace the phonetic components 重 and 童 with the much simpler phonetic component 中, which gives the same sound. (Especially in the case of 鐘 where the phonetic component is tong2 not zhong1 - the simplification gives a much clearer clue on how 钟 should be pronounced.)

With those characters though I think it also helps that I have a decent grasp of phonetic components that appear in certain characters, and also the kinds of ways in which they can vary. So two characters with the same phonetic component being pronounced ‘jian’ and ‘lan’ is not unexpected; but if one were pronounced ‘zhong’ and the other ‘lan’, that would indicate that maybe the component is not acting phonetically in one of them. So for the above if I don’t know what 種 means, taking away context which to be honest is the most useful way of determining/guessing what a character is, I know that the simplified character likely has a 禾 and then maybe some kind of component that reads ‘zhong’ or ‘chong’ if it’s acting phonetically. Which gives 种. For the second one, context would help a lot - but ‘tong’ and ‘zhong’ are not super unexpected varieties on a sound series, so I could still guess that the simplified character would have a simplified 金 component and would sound like maybe ‘tong’ or another element that often appears in a sound series with it.

(For 童 for example the majority of words according to pleco that have it as a phonetic component are pronounced tóng, or zhong, chong, zhuang and chuang with some kind of tone, with a very few also pronounced dong.)

Another example: when I saw 頭髮（头发）- which is made up of two fairly simple/common characters; I just really have never read traditional before - I had no idea what the first one was. 豆 is dòu which, on its own, would be great and seemingly very helpful - but it’s not a very ‘reliable’ element? Like lots of characters that have 豆 don’t sound anything like that. If they have 豆 in them they tend to be part of a larger component which gives the sound - like 證 zheng4 or 燈 deng1 which both have the active phonetic component 登 deng1 in them. And then 頁 doesn’t usually give the sound (think 頗，項，領 etc where the other element is a very helpful and clear phonetic component). So I had no idea for that one.

But for 髮 on the other hand - the top bit I knew was some kind of ‘hairy’ semantic component and the part underneath I knew to be 发 fa1. And I knew that traditional often makes differentiations between characters that are written in the same way in simplified Chinese - and the meaning of ‘hair’ is very far from the normal meaning of 发? So I thought maybe this was the case with this one - that, hmmmm, it was a character being ‘overused’ in simplified Chinese. And then we have a sentence like ‘San Lang’s long black 頭髮’, so San Lang’s long black something-fa. Ahh! 头发!! Huzzah!!!

So that’s basically how I’ve been going through. I haven’t been looking up every word by far, but if there’s a word that gives me kind of ‘basic’ vibes (i.e. in context or where it’s used or if it’s paired with another common character / phrase, like 儘管如此 / 尽管如此) and I see it more than twice I might look it up. Before looking it up, I have been going through a similar kind of process - sometimes very fast and subconsciously, and sometimes very deliberately and slowly - to see if I can figure it out before turning to pleco.

Otherwise though it’s been ok? My speed is getting slowly better, but it was fairly slow at first. The main thing seems to be tiredness that affects it. If I can get into the ‘flow’ state of whatever, I don’t have to subvocalise and I can skim whole chunks of 5 or 6 characters. If I’m tired, I have to literally read every single one. Which is terrible and I hate it and so I’m hoping it gets better quickly Xd

Honestly I had built up traditional to be this huge scary thing in my mind, almost a mental barrier about Taiwan and Classical Chinese etc, and I wish I had realised earlier that it isn’t. I think grabbing something and forcing myself to read it has been incredibly effective and I really, really wish I had started earlier now. Because I am reading this - not easily lmao, a LONG way to go before that, but easily enough to make it pleasant enough that if I’m not tired I can sometimes read up to 20 pages in a sitting. I should have listened to other people and started earlier XD because it’s literally fine, and if anything is giving me a much more in depth understanding of characters and forcing me to really think about how they are made up much more.

I have!!!!! finished the first 200 pages of tgcf. this is more exciting than just me being literate I promise. it is the first time I have ever:

- read in traditional Ever

- read vertically

- read An Actual Real Proper Book In Chinese that’s not on my kindle to more than 50 pages. and only the second time I have ever actually held a physical book in chinese and even attempted, and the first time was only about two months ago and was simplified and horizontal

it took about 2 weeks?? and I got the flu halfway through, so minus about 5 days of no reading at all. some takeaways:

- I’m honestly not sure whether I dislike the vertical text anymore? I AM slow, but on the other hand I’m not sure that’s a field of vision thing as much as I am baby at reading chinese thing. though it’s definitely something to do with a combination of the font (songti die in hell!!!!!!), the closeness togetherness of the lines (18 per page, compared to 16 for mdzs), the traditional-ness and the vertical-ness. I can skim noticeably better in horizontal simplified.

- the speed of everything is improving. I’m not sure how much I’ve leeeearnt however? which proves that reading for reading / solidifying grammar structures etc and reading for vocabulary are two different things. have started, as of three days ago, also putting some vocab into pleco. though my recognition of traditional characters is def getting better

- my ‘ohhhh shitttttt this takes brain effort’ instinctive balking and cowering and cringing etc at lines of chinese text is also…less? I think that’s the biggest takeaway. both today and yesterday I read 20 pages; at the beginning I was struggling to read 5 without feeling exhausted. it’s becoming more chill!

- xie lian is such a fucking loser and this book is so so immensely funny. and this is not a ‘oh my godddd you simply haaaave to read it in the original hurhurhur’ it’s just me being pleased that I can Get Jokes And Humour in another language. the third time I’m reading it and I’m sitting here chortling in public places. he’s so lame (affectionate). I look forward deeply deeply to reading mdzs and laughing even more!

200 pages!! I’m officially over 1/12 of the way through this singular book!!!

that is….less impressive, written like that.

#meichenxi manages #mejomonster

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