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Why Chinese?


roddy

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13 hours ago, Shelley said:

and committed suicide 2 weeks later.

I know it had nothing to do with chinese :mrgreen: unrequited love according to the note.

Unfortunately that can happen. Sociologist Francesco Alberoni describes the process of being in love like a revoluation, like a new life that opens up If that love is unrequited, this send that person into a depressive state. http://www.alberoni.it/pdf/iloveyou.pdf

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On 24/03/2018 at 5:36 AM, Shelley said:

I have only had one person, a very good friend of mine, come to me and say I want to learn Chinese, can you point me in the right direction. After suggesting textbooks and practically forcing Pleco on him, he up and went and committed suicide 2 weeks later.

I know it had nothing to do with chinese :mrgreen: unrequited love according to the note.

 

Chinese aside for a moment, I am so sorry that this happened.

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On 27/03/2018 at 12:52 PM, Lumbering Ox said:
On 27/03/2018 at 10:09 AM, ParkeNYU said:

It's really all about the characters.

I thought it was all about the base.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAJsZWhj6GI

But I could have been misinformed.

 

I thought doing the hokey cokey and turning around is what it's all about?

 

Times have changed, man.

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  • 1 year later...
  • New Members

Last year I wanted to attend calligraphy classes at Confucius institute. I filled out the form, but later they told me that institute will not be organizing calligraphy classes in the autumn/winter semester.  Not enogh people applied or something...I forgot.  Since I was there I said to myself "Well since you here, you can learn Chinese language instead of calligraphy".  That's how I started learning Chinese language and it was a great choice.

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  • 5 months later...

We learned languages in the UK as children (French / German / Latin) and I remember enough to probably greet someone, but little more. I was interested in it at the time.

 

However, after looking a little into Mandarin and watching the China season of programmes on the BBC over Christmas, I thought I would buy basic book and see how it goes.

 

In 3 months I think I've learned more than all those years at school!

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  • 1 month later...

For me, it all started way back in 2002.

 

In my (relatively small) city in Australia, my exposure to China people was limited to Jet Li and the wave of HK migrants ahead of the 1997 handover. In other words, very little.

 

True, my younger brother was studying Chinese in high school. But that didn't really play much of a role.

 

I was thinking ahead, trying to figure out what skill would be most useful ten years into the future. At the time, I really didn't know what I wanted to do, but I figured that whatever it was, it'd be international - and the more I researched, the more I figured that China would play an increasingly important role in the world economy and political system. So I enrolled in Chinese in my first year of university, something which put me on the road to where I am today.

 

18 years later - having worked and studied in China and now regularly speaking Chinese in Singapore - the reasoning for the decision was definitely correct. The only thing that changed was the romanticism - the China you imagine as a 17 year old in the early 2000s is certainly not the China in reality in 2020.

 

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2 hours ago, Nick Fisher said:

18 years later - having worked and studied in China and now regularly speaking Chinese in Singapore - the reasoning for the decision was definitely correct.

 

Have you always lived and worked in Singapore, or have you lived in the Chinese Mainland as well? What do you do there?

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8 minutes ago, abcdefg said:

Have you always lived and worked in Singapore, or have you lived in the Chinese Mainland as well? What do you do there?


I worked in Beijing from 2011 to 2015 in a property company. Singapore is much 

more recent, I only moved here a few months ago (unluckily just as the whole world went into lockdown!)

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3 hours ago, Nick Fisher said:

the China you imagine as a 17 year old in the early 2000s is certainly not the China in reality in 2020.

As someone who lived in China in the early 2000s, the reality of things back then wasn’t nearly like what people imagined either. 

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  • 1 year later...

I moved to Shanghai but got by just using English just fine, so I didn't really want to learn it. I figured I'd only live there for a year or two, not worth the effort. Then my manager forced me to learn Mandarin. I left that company but I kept up the studies, and now Shanghai has become my home for almost 4 years already.

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On 2/11/2022 at 6:08 PM, Woodford said:

Then I discovered Mandarin Companion graded readers and got hooked on them. Then I bought a ton of other graded readers.

Great story!

 

I wanted to ask you... I discovered these Mandarin companion books, I just finished my first one, and bought 3 more now to work on next. What other ones did you find?

I finished Journey to centre of earth, bought Great Expectations 1+2 and Jekyll and Hyde. I find these excellent for reading. But all the other ones I can find are the levels below, and I can just about manage these ones at the level 3. 

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On 2/11/2022 at 1:45 PM, TaxiAsh said:

What other ones did you find?


The series I used a lot were Chinese Breeze, Sinolingua's Graded Chinese Readers, and Rainbow Bridge. I ordered them all from this store (my experience as a customer was quite good, and the books shipped from Hong Kong to the US): https://www.purpleculture.net/reading-materials-c-1_101/

There might be a better place to look, or better graded reader series. But for me, that was a huge find.

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On 2/11/2022 at 7:56 PM, Woodford said:

The series I used a lot were Chinese Breeze

Wow, thanks! They are available on Amazon! That's me sorted for a year! haha

 

Do you find the level grading system similar to Mandarin companion? If so I will look at level 3 again.

 

To keep on topic, my post in here was a little further up, from March 2020 when I had my Easy Peasy chinese book, which is  just numbers and a few phrases.

 Now I love learning, and made so many friends in China along the way. It's the most interesting thing I've ever learned! I wish I had found it earlier.

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