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Any updates? Here goes. Sorry for taking so long! 😅 I spent four weeks in Taipei in March to brush up my Chinese. I had studied for about four years when I went there and had weekly free talk lessons with online teachers for at least two years, but the problems that I set out to fix with this trip were my tendency to switch over to English when I hit a wall and can’t think of a way to explain around the world I don’t know and to get more used to speaking Mandarin and improve my fluency. School and Teachers The school was in really good place near Taipei 101 building and pretty much in the middle of everything. There were convenience stores and lots of different kinds of restaurants nearby including a really local small shop, a hakka restaurant, Japanese kaiten sushi, etc. The school itself was compact, but it had several classrooms that could fit between 2 to 10 people. There was also a common area where you could get coffee and use the fridge etc. and they used it to also arrange stuff like making dumplings together playing mahjong in that common area. As far as I can tell there are basically two types of staff at the school. The administrative staff has a few local people who keep the daily stuff running and the top management and the marketing people come and go visiting the different schools LTL has. The teachers seemed to have full-time and part-time arrangements. They were all nice people and ready to help you with any problems you had. Taiwan opened up for foreign travelers in the latter part of 2022 and apparently the school went from virtually no students to a lot of students in a very short time so the number of staff apparently grew rapidly as well. They had also another space nearby that they had rented, because the space at the school wasn’t enough, but I didn’t see it. I heard some other students talk about problems earlier with the teaching arrangements etc. that I attributed to this quick ramp-up of the business, but when I was there in March 2023, I felt that they had ironed out the problems and everything went very smoothly for me. The staff seemed a bit busy, but they always had time for me when I needed them. I didn’t get to know there curriculum very well. From the start they recommended 1-on-1 classes for me as my Chinese was quite advanced already and some time before flying to Taipei, I had a meeting with the school to talk about my goals and what kinds of classes I preferred and they had picked a business Chinese book for me when I got there, but in the end we ended up not using it. The teachers and the school were very attentive to what I wanted from the experience, which basically was to practice communicating in Chinese as much as possible. I told them that I didn’t want to spend the precious time there doing textbook exercises or homework assignments. The classes ended up being discussions entirely in Chinese with my two teachers about pretty much anything for 6 hours every weekday. The teachers’ personalities were in many ways polar opposites of each other, but both were both awesome and went out of their way to find interesting material for me to study. One was very interested in history, literature, etc., she taught me a lot about Chinese and Taiwanese history, Japanese occupation, the aftermath, how Taiwanese people think about current political issues, the development of freedom of speech, etc. and also about classical Chinese poetry and literary Chinese used in the news. The second teacher took me out around town to see different places. One day I told her that I wanted to buy a translator pen and we first spent an hour on Chinese shopping sites looking for options and then we headed out to the local “Akihabara” and spent hours asking shopkeepers to introduce the pens they had and comparing them. She was also phenomenal striking up conversations with random people and then making me chat with them. Other students and activities A lot of the other students were a lot younger than me, for example spending a gap year, but there was also for example an American doctor who had just graduated and come to reconnect with his Taiwanese roots, a couple that was travelling and spending two weeks at a time in different locations in Asia, and grandfather who had started studying Chinese after retiring. I myself didn’t socialize a lot with the other students, though I did join making dumplings at the school once and I went to see Jiufen one weekend with the group. Other than that, I didn’t see other students much as my lunch hour was at a different time than the other students. I’m guessing that was intentional by the school, since before going I had told them that I didn’t want to break out of a Chinese immersion environment and didn’t want to socialize with the other students too much. The host family There were some problems finding a host family for me, which I guess were also partly due to the fast growth and demand. I was expecting a traditional family of two adults and a kid or two, but I ended up living with an older single guy, who was actually a former teacher at LTL too. Maybe I am a bit disappointed at myself since after a couple of first days, I ended up talking to him in English and he switched to English too, but he was an awesome guy, we had long talks about work and life, and I learned a lot about the people and their lives from him. He was a really good cook too and very strict about making breakfast and dinner for me, so I had to get back home by 7:30pm every day. It gave me good structure. 😅 I heard a story of how a host family hadn’t worked out for someone, but the school was quick to react to that too and they found a new family pretty quickly. The City I spent a lot of time roaming the city every day either by myself, with the teacher or the host dad. I really liked Taipei and it really easy to get around in there. The metro system is very effective, clean, safe, and inexpensive, though it does get packed during the rush hours. I missed the train one morning and decided to take a taxi instead, expecting it to be faster, only to find out that actually the metro was the best bet to be in time during the rush hour. The U-Bikes complement the public transport system very nicely, they available at all metro stations and they have lots of stations around town where you can leave them. The weather was really nice the whole time in March, but the locals kept telling me how hot it would get during the summer. Someone calling Japan a “cool country” really drove that message home for me… Reflection I really could feel improvement after two weeks in Taipei spending 6 hours every day discussing with the teachers and then spending a couple hours every day roaming the city and interacting with people around the town. The one setback was that I ended up using English with the host dad after a few days and I couldn’t fix it anymore later just because of my own laziness, but he was pretty much the only person I used English with during the whole trip and other than that I was very strict to only use Chinese with the locals. I was able to do any changes and other business with the local school staff in Chinese too. It was also flattering when a few times store owners etc. asked me how long I had lived in Taipei, expecting me to have lived there for years already. After I got back from Taipei, I had online lessons with my long-time teachers, and they told me they could see noticeable improvement. One told me that I didn’t try to change to English anymore, and she could feel my speaking had become a lot more fluent and natural with less trying to find words. Overall, the experience was exactly what I hoped it to be and in addition to reaching the goals I set for myself, it was an awesome experience! I also made it to their Youtube channel talking about my experiences. 😄 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Phv8WEmtYtc

I mean, why does anybody bother to learn arithmetic when you can have a calculator do it for you? (and do it absolutely flawlessly, I might add, which is unlikely to ever be the case with translation AIs) I don't think practical usage is the real driver of most language learning anyway, any more than people take up violin or piano because they want to become professional musicians; people do it because it's satisfying and good for their brains. You don't really *need* to learn much Chinese to travel in China, or even to live/work there. That being said, one thing AI fundamentally can't do for you is be you; any conversation mediated through an AI is necessarily going to mean either a synthetic voice or you pronouncing some text on a screen, so even if the grammar is perfect, the other person is going to be well aware they're talking to a robot. So if you want to develop Chinese-language personal relationships, an AI is never going to replace the human element in those.

My face-to-face Chinese teachers, when I was living in China, often gave me recommendations on good restaurants, told me what local fruit was in season, what movie was worth seeing, the best bus to take to get to the museum from here, and what herbs their mother recommended to cure a sore throat. One teacher invited me home for a meal during wild mushroom season. Another took me back to her village for a holiday. I stayed in her family home, met her mom and dad, met her grandmother. One teacher accompanied me to the hospital when I was sick and new in town, before I had learned the intricacies of the Chinese system. Another teacher took me to get my mobile phone service revised at China Mobile's big, bewildering service center. Another teacher took me to open my first Chinese bank account. One teacher and her husband took me in tow to try and buy shoes for my big foreigner feet Another teacher helped me find an apartment to rent. One showed me how to get a discounted bus pass (爱人卡). One showed me how to use the rental bike system, including how to make sense out of the app on my phone. One teacher and a couple of her friends took me to a neighboring town to see yellow spring flowers in bloom. We rode the train to and from, stayed overnight. Life would have been harder and less fun without a series of wonderful teachers. Generous and kind. They hugely enriched my China years.

Sorry, that's not the issue, I'm talking about the fact that it's not actually coming out of your brain and your mouth. Having a conversation with somebody where they type something into a keyboard or say it in their native language and then it plays you a translation in their voice isn't really any different than the same thing with a computer voice; either way, you're not really talking to this person but rather are talking to some intermediary. So it's a "robot" in the sense that there's obviously a computer in the middle of this, not because it sounds robotic.

I few Taiwanese Netflix series I've watched over the past few weeks (they are all short at 10 episodes or less): 她和她的她 Shards of Her - I can't say too much without giving away any spoilers, but it's basically the story of a woman trying to put her reality back together after memory loss resulting from a trauma (think alternate universe stuff). Not bad, but I thought I was in for a 想见你 style mystery, but the plot didn't really develop in a satisfying way. It's got a good rating on 豆瓣 though (8.6), so maybe others will enjoy it more. 模仿犯 Copycat Killer - the cops try to find a sadistic serial killer. I thought it was good for the first 4/5 episodes, but then a lot of the mystery of the killer was lost and things got a bit silly. Worth a try. 人选之人：造浪者 Wave Makers - this one is about a group of spin-doctors/a PR team trying to win an election for their political party. It might be interesting to anyone with an interest ion political shows, but unfortunately that's not me and I ended up doing other stuff while it played in the background. For mainland Chinese stuff, I have been 去有风的地方 as my watch while on the treadmill at the gym series and it's been good for that purpose (no intricate plot to keep focussed on and the language is all simple, everyday stuff), so thanks for that recommendation. The main actress might have the sweetest/softest speaking voice/tone I've ever heard! It always sounds like she's speaking to children, even when she's speaking to adults. I'm going to watch the Korean drama The Glory. Not good for improving my Chinese, but I heard it's really good (it was super popular in China, apparently). An older Korean drama to check out if you missed it is My Name. I think it was overshadowed by Squid Game at the time, but it's a really great cop/gangster show. Although the actress is very petite, the action scenes were really good and they managed to show her kicking all kinds of ass without it looking too unrealistic. While I like watching mainland and Taiwanese shows, I have to say that I don't think either are quite up to the quality of Korean dramas at the moment. I don't know what it is about their culture, but they have been putting out some really good stuff these past few years!

I’m a professional translator and I fully expect the new generation of tools - NOT the current free ones you can play with - to wipe out a lot of translation work. And not even by doing the translation, exactly. It might be doing the writing directly into the necessary languages. ”Here’s a JSON file of facts about changes to our online banking system. Produce an email in each of the following languages communicating these to users.” And yes, it’ll still need monitored and checked. But I don’t think people have quite got their heads round the fact that computers can now or very soon will be able to, for most practical purposes, understand, process and produce human language, at great speed and a decent to very good degree of accuracy. It’s easy to say it can’t do a novel or translate an idiom. But the bulk of writing and translating is everything else: internal and external comms, reports, news, product descriptions, price lists. Tedious, repetitive, paying work for a bazillion people.

Good questions! 1. were your teachers speaking in TW or mainland accents? If they had TW accents, how did this affect your own accent? The accent is something that a couple of my mainland teachers worried a lot about. One especially has helped me a lot with my pronunciation and when I asked her why she seemed so worried about it, she told me that she thought that while I make some mistakes and some initials could be clearer, she thought my accent was pretty good and standard and she was afraid the Taiwanese accent being so different, could affect it. I wasn't worried about that because I think my accent is already quite set so a month won't change it. Apparently the mainlanders think the Taiwanese accent sounds funny. Though this teacher is too polite to say it that way directly. 😂 The teachers (and everyone else too), I interacted with, were Taiwanese, but frankly I couldn't really tell much difference between the Taiwanese and many mainlanders accents. As far as I'm concerned, they all are all over the place anyway. While everyone says that their accent is 标准... There seems to be a lot of different 标准's out there... The prominent things I noticed were the different words for things like 捷运 instead of 地铁 and 影片 instead of 视频. Sometimes I would notice tone and pronunciation differences too like 影片 for example sounded much more like yīnpiàn to me than yǐngpiàn. I used the the Taiwanese words when ever I knew them and the teachers would often tell me that some word was a mainland word and teach me the Taiwanese version too. I mostly viewed this the same way I view different English accents. UK, Australian, US accents are different and there are some different words, but it doesn't really matter and my accent will never be a native English accent and neither will my Chinese accent be. As long as it is clear enough for people to understand, I'm happy. The different words can cause confusion so it is good to know them though. In Taiwan some people asked me if I had lived in Beijing... Go figure. Most of my teachers have been southerners and I loathe the 儿化音... After I got back, my mainland teacher told me she was relieved my accent hadn't changed... 😂 2) did you bother learning traditional characters or did you ignore them all together? I didn't have much trouble with the traditional characters. I changed my Pleco in the settings to use the traditional characters some time before my trip and read some graded readers using traditional to get familiar with them. The teachers wrote everything for me in traditional characters too. I talked about the characters with some people and they were surprised to hear that there are only about 800 simplified characters, so it isn't such a big deal to learn them. I also visited the book stores a lot of times and carried home at-least a dozen books and a calligraphy training set. 3) Did you find 6 hours of conversation just right, or too long? What was the ratio of you speaking vs teacher speaking? I think six hours a day was pretty good. We started at 9am every day, there was a one hour lunch break and ended at 4PM after which I had a couple of hours before dinner at home. Some times it felt a bit exhausting, especially in the beginning with jet lag and all, but I got used to it and a routine it was pretty good too. Kind of like going to the office every morning. I didn't really think about the ratio, but sometime I would try to explain something like how elections work in Finland (the parliamentary elections were held while I was in Taipei and it was 15 minutes bike ride from the school to the Business Finland office where I could vote) and the teacher would help with the unknown words, and some times the teacher would explain something like how you use the pieces of wood in the temples to ask questions from the gods. But the rest would be discussing various things so I would say that it was close to 50/50 ratio. About the same as with my online teachers. 4) How did you keep up with new expressions or words? Were you allowed to record some sessions? Did you memorise new words ahead of the lessons (e.g. about history, politics) and, if not, how did you cope with the new vocabulary? I didn't ask if I could record them, but I guess it depends on if the teacher is comfortable with it or not. For a group lesson they probably would say no. I don't record words or phrases anymore or do any kind of rote memorization. Nowadays my approach is that what sticks sticks what doesn't doesn't. I find that especially in a complete immersion environment the important stuff comes up so often that it sticks pretty quickly, and what doesn't stick, is usually what you don't need anyway. And I think spending time, that I could be communicating and exploring the city, on reviewing vocabulary would have been counter productive. I also have enough passive understanding at this point that I could understand what people were telling me, even if I couldn't use the same vocabulary actively myself. And if I didn't, I just asked. The teachers would write vocabulary on the walls in the classroom and would use them as memory cues while we were talking (it was actually very helpful!), but I didn't take notes as I know that don't get back to them anyway and taking notes hasn't ever been something that helps my learning anyway. It rather takes my focus away from the teacher and prevents me from participating in the discussion, which was the whole point. I very much can only do one thing at a time. 5) Looking back, was the decision to stay with a host "family" right for you, or would you "next time" rather stay in a hotel or apartment all by yourself? Host family was a really good choice and I very much would like to do it again, but this time have a family that couldn't speak any English! I wouldn't have learned about how people actually live (everything that the host dad told me about his apartment's Feng Shui or what kinds of things he was dealing with at work for example) if I had been living alone. He also took me to the night market and ordered a bunch of strange things I wouldn't ordered if I was alone. And getting back for dinner and talk about how the day had been was fun and gave me a kind of structure I wouldn't have had if I had been living alone. I would have found something else if I had, but I do recommend a the local experience you get with a host family. Even if it is just one guy. It is priceless! 6) Since you went freestyle anyway and did not follow a curriculum, was it worth doing it with a professional company rather than meeting in person with freelancers in Taipei? I think it was worth it. The way I see it, I paid premium for the company taking care of all the arrangements and fixing it if something went wrong. I had never been in Taipei and didn't know anyone there, I was extremely busy at work all the way up to my trip and I didn't have time to make arrangements myself. I also had only a month and I wanted to be able to just enjoy my time there without worrying about anything. From that point of view I think I got what I wanted. But maybe the school offers even more value for students who want that international community and making friends at the school, that it also offers. If I go to Taiwan again, I'm probably going to freestyle the whole thing and I would be going with my wife this time, so we would be living in an Airbnb or I would reach out to people I know there to find a place to rent. I also think it would be very easy to find freelancers there who I could meet with at a cafe somewhere. Altogether I paid about 6000€ to the school for the four weeks which included the 6 hours with the teacher every weekday, housing, two meals a day, a "connection kit" which basically meant that they found a local friend for me to go out with a couple of times, and the pick-up from the airport. The homestay part was about 1600€. The flights were on top of that. I calculated that the cost of the lessons was about 33€/hour. The school also set up cool weekend trips that didn't cost extra, other than your bus ticket and what ever you ate while on the go. I think if I got an Airbnb and scheduled freelancers in Taipei I could get away with half or even a third of the money. Airbnb's in Taipei seem to go for between 600€ and 1600€ per month. I even saw one for 400€/month. In the hindsight I could have gone this route, but as I said, the premium I paid was from my point of view for not having to worry about anything and having the safety net of the school if something went wrong when I didn't know anything about the place and didn't have the time and energy to go looking. 7) When are you doing this again? 😉 Well.. This was also a test for me of a new lifestyle.. I work in IT, we are not planning to have kids, and am talking with the company to let me work remotely from abroad 4-6 months a year, so we are definitely going somewhere. The pandemic made me realize that my work is actually the only thing keeping us here at the moment. My wife can also work from anywhere. We are probably going somewhere in Europe or Japan in the autumn. Maybe I'll pick up German, Italian or Spanish next. 😁 But those I'm going to study while actually there. Not spending 2 hours a day at home in Finland while commuting to the office in the Finnish winter... If we go to Japan, it is easy to fly to visit Taiwan too. The only problem is our dog and the long flights with him... We aren't comfortable putting him in the cargo hold and apparently many Asian airlines don't allow dogs in the cabin. @abcdefg, our approaches seem very similar! Though I'm a little bit more forgiving about using English. But maybe that's why I tried to find people who don't speak it well. To force myself to use it naturally rather than artificially. There are no hard feelings that way either. 😅

Whenever I'm looking at a video of a person speaking a foreign language, and the video features things like English subtitles or an English overdub, I still think, "Wouldn't it be cool to understand the language without the aid of those things?" Whenever I've attempted to speak Chinese with a Chinese person without the aid of technology, there's been a really great element of personal connection ("Wow, you took the time to learn my language!"). But what would it take to discourage me from learning a foreign language? Probably if Elon Musk's Neuralink company successfully allows people to "download" languages into their brains. You could possibly argue that the experience of language learning would still be worth the effort, but that would at least give me reason to pause. At any rate, I think technology is lightyears away from that point.

thanks heaps @alantin for sharing your experience, it's one of the first really good traveling reports we get after pandemic and a major reason for me to visit this forum! wife (gf actually) and I will be going to CLI Guilin in September for 3 weeks, I can't wait. Objective is to practice real life conversation as much as we can and have an as immersive as possible experience... it's going to be a bit tricky since it's two of us to start with, I'm curious to see how that'll go.

I think this is mainly a difference between standard and colloquial Chinese. Most teaching materials will teach predominantly the standard language so naturally this is what learners will use first. To learn the colloquialisms, you really have to pay attention to how Chinese is used in practice, and this requires a proactive effort on the part of the learner, which clearly you have been making. I didn't read through all of your examples, but I note some of them are common set phrases though, for example 合得来/合不来 is a frequently used word.

There is a lot of talk about how ChatGPT and AI is killing jobs in IT and XYZ professions. I think one profession that will be heavily affected by AI is language teaching. ChatGPT 4 is already like writing back and forth with a really good teacher. It will only be a matter of time until it can speak. Here is an amazing example of AI making David Attenborough speak German (he does not): https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/132vi0y/this_is_surreal_elevenlabs_ai_can_now_clone_the/ So, soon we will have AI talk to us in a perfect and humanlike Beijing accent. The next step is to be able to actually orally chat with AI and for AI to analyse our pronunciation and give us feedback on it. At that stage, language teachers (for adults) will have become largely unncessary.

My thoughts on this matter keep changing rapidly; there are so many aspects to consider. There are financial motivations (some people can't afford it; some people have disposable income); there's more to going to Chinese class than learning Chinese; maybe ChatGPT will lead to more people deciding to learn Chinese (sometimes considered among the hardest languages for native-English speakers); some students may simply prefer to (or not to) learn with a non-human; LLMs can be trained on vastly more material than any human could read; perhaps teachers can utilize ChatGPT in class to save time, and make it more efficient; what's the distinction between ChatGPT's neural network and my own neural network (i.e., my brain)?; are people expressing negative opinions about this technology because it's unfamiliar or destabilizing ("new, therefore bad")?; are people's negative comments based on their experience with 3-month-old ChatGPT (which indeed was awful)?; is there even room to improve ChatGPT (it's possible it's already "used up" all available training data---maybe we've already reached peak performance)?; what's the difference between "ChatGPT hype" and e.g. "blockchain hype"? I feel it's safe to say that ChatGPT (and friends) offer an as-essential-as-Google way to study a language---the toothpaste is out of the tube now. Nevertheless, I've always espoused "diversifying one's study methods", and I don't see why that would change. I guess we'll see soon enough if people can learn Chinese ultra efficiently using ChatGPT et al. Anyway, I asked ChatGPT to comment on this thread: ChatGPT:

On the other AI thread I wrote the following, which makes me want to ask whether people think the number of people studying foreign languages is set to decline dramatically.

I guess the other thing we should think about here is: Who are the people learning Chinese as a foreign language? People who learn Chinese for fun or self-improvement (or to flex). People wanting to go to, or are in, a Chinese-speaking country, perhaps for travel or work or to accompany a partner. People learning to pass some exam (HSK, TOCFL, etc.), as required by e.g. a Chinese university. People who are, or have relatives who are, ethnically Chinese or Taiwanese. Ethnic minorities in China. Singaporeans and Malaysians. Is there any reason to think these people will give up learning Chinese due to AI?

All kinds of different forms of transportation exist but people still choose to ride bicycles and walk. People still read paper books despite Kindles existing. Computers and phones didn't make pens and paper disappear. Painting and drawing still happens despite having electronic drawing tablets. Usually new technologies don't kill the original activity, it just gives people a choice. I think most people who learn languages as adults mostly do it for other reasons than absolute necessity. Edit: I just saw that this has forked into a thread of it's own. Can't delete a post though.

I have observed that I personally sometimes 有意无意地 avoid using certain one-character words, and will instead opt for two-character words that have similar meaning. I have seen many other foreigners like me (who are still working on their vocabulary) do the same thing, and, from what I recall, it's known to be a common thing among non-native users of Chinese. This actually makes a lot of sense, but I won't get into why right now. But here's the thing: 華文惜字如金, and if you can afford to express just enough meaning for the current situation with just a single character, then that would be best, as it makes your language more concise and less superfluous. (Many times, those two-character words contain too much information, and bog down your sentence overall. So, in these cases, it's better to use a one-character word instead of a two-character word. You'll see what I mean below.) Here are some REALLY great examples that personally apply to me (and that I suspect apply to many other foreigners) (I've provided example sentences to show how they can be used. I've added some annotations as well.): 化 例：冰塊都化了。 I just heard this sentence today, and it's probably one of the best examples in this list. In the past, I would always say “融化” to convey the meaning of “融化”, but then I found out that, in certain contexts, I could just say “化”. Now, notice how "融" is unnecessary, and that “化” by itself completely conveys what is happening to the ice. Notice how "冰塊都化了" 比 “冰塊都融化了” 更簡練。For some reason, though, my brain had never thought to ever use “化” in place “融化”. I think it has to do with the fact that 漢語是字本位的, and that a lot of 外國人 just don't fully understand that 漢語是骨子裡的字本位語言。[另外，please note that I am not saying that “冰塊都化了” is always better than “冰塊都融化了”。At the end of the day, it's important to use context in order to determine which words should be used.] 上 例：鹿：“這裡有永動食物機，大家上啊！”（這是對某條視頻的機智評論。視頻鏈接如下：https://www.youtube.com/shorts/OM1RoTxarKo） Notice how "上" is the only word after "大家", besides the 語氣詞 "啊"。 At least in the past, I personally would have been more inclined to say something like “過來吃飯”、“過來”、or maybe even “上來” instead of just “上”。Seeing the very simple and sufficient phrase "大家上啊" was eye-opening to me. 直 例：幼年看眼，壯年看嘴，老年看腿。壯年看嘴，你會發現，有的人說話很直，也愛炫耀。這些人估計還沒有經歷社會的毒打。 This is another good one. I would have said something like 直率、直白等 instead of just 直。Alas, 只用 “直” 即可；加個 “率” would have been 冗餘的，也 would have 破壞句子的簡練。 根 例：他的母親為緬甸人，父親為緬甸後裔第一代，在美國生長。由於他跟生死於緬甸的先輩的距離很近，而且他對緬甸民俗與語言半熟，可以說，他的根在緬甸。 Again, with this one, I would have said something like 根源 or 本源。But “根” alone suffices. 盲 例：我沒有想到文盲能盲到這個程度。 其實，“盲” 一般不能單獨使用。可是在這個句子裡面，因為提到了含有盲字的兩字詞，後面單獨使用 “盲” 也不成問題。我不太確定為什麼是這樣。其原因估計跟語言學有關，可我也不是什麼內行。 悟 例：人到中年才能悟明白的真理……。 枯 例：金華市一座廣場，這一小片草已開始枯了。 Many 外國人 would say 枯萎 instead of just 枯。 合 例：這個人太嘎，跟誰也合不來。 I probably would have used something like 相處 or instead of 合. 平 例：這條水泥造的路很平。 I would have said 平板 or something like that. 平 by itself, however, seems to be the best choice. 盜 例：鎖上你車的門，要不會有人來盜你的車！ 進 例：沒登錄的網民無法直接進這個板塊。 Uses 進 instead of 進入 消 例：那大漢連續喊話喊了半個鐘頭了，怒氣卻還沒消。 消解、消散、消弭、消除等兩字詞詞都是 words that have meanings that are more or less similar to that of just 消。 從 例：你的吩咐，他不肯從。 Here are some other examples: 糟 例：這事全部搞得很糟，可惜！ 治 例：這藥能治你的病。 保 例：料敵從寬，大大增加對軍事軍備的投資，讓軍人繼續不停地演練，以保萬全。 補 例：大家好，咱們今天來補一個坑啊，就是前兩天我們在說…… 準 例：而中国人也不是人人都考虑汉字意义的，很多时候也不一定是考虑了意思，只是在不认识的基础上，从偏旁勉强推测出一些意思，不一定准，只能说不认识的字读一半，依靠偏旁猜意思这些才艺，是我们的种族技能，大部分日本人确实没有。 岸 例：苦海無邊，回頭是岸。 脹 例：我的眼角好脹。 漲 例：房價在漲。

I'm not sure if this is entirely the case. Correct me if I'm wrong but there's also the fact that rhythm/symmetry/balance play a part in choosing a word with one or two syllables. I can't remember the exact "rule" but it is sort of summarised by: Chinese likes to pair single syllable words with other single syllable words, and a two syllable words with other two syllable words, so that things sound balanced. To take your ice-cream example (while ignoring grammar and whether or not anyone would actually say this or not), because 化 is paired with 都, you will tend to keep them as both single syllables, while if you didn't have 都 then the sentence would sound unbalanced to say 冰棍化了, given that 冰棍 is two syllables, so then there would be a pull towards 冰棍融化了。 I can't remember where this was mentioned in my textbooks but I might try to find it at some point.

Here, 的 is used to emphasize that the article is interesting. "的" has a plethora of different kinds of unique uses (between approximately five and twenty, depending on how you count them), not just three. In your particular example, "的" corresponds to the following definition: "用 在 句 末 ，表示 肯定 的 语气 或 已然 的 语气". Do you understand this definition? You can think of "肯定" as just a way of "定"-ing, namely in a "肯"/confirmative way. So "肯定" means "confirm"/"confirming". "语气" is kind of like the "气"/"感觉"/"色彩" of your "语"/"语言"/"言语"/"话". So "肯定的语气" is used to highlight that something is true. "已然" is simple to understand if you know what "已" and "然" mean; but in short, "已然" basically means "already happened". "已然的语气" is used to highlight that something already happened.Anyway, this definition provides as much detail as the layperson would need to know in order to use this kind of "的" correctly. Notice how the above definition doesn't specify anything about: 1) the kind of 句子/sentence (e.g. declarative, interrogative, etc.) being dealt with, or 2) using "是". But this definition happened to come with two example sentences that show that we can use this kind of "的" in either declarative sentences (陈述句) or interrogative sentences (疑问句). We can also add "是" if we want. If we mix and match, we will have a total of four different kinds of combinations. Let's go back to your particular example: "这篇文章还蛮有意思的" is a 陈述句 with no "是" used. You could, however, add a "是" to obtain: "这篇文章还是蛮有意思的". Let's consider another example: "老王什么时候走的？" is a 疑问句 that doesn't use "是". If you add "是", you would get: "老王是什么时候走的？". All of the above four examples are equally valid and use the same kind of "的".

I was under the impression that one of the motivations for distinguishing gender in pronouns was an attempt to make Chinese more European. Certainly that's what Wang Li said anyway.

There is also 怹. I was told by a person from Hebei they use it sometimes like in the sentence 怹老人家 to show respect.

From what I've seen (from others' prompts, I haven't tried it for myself yet), ChatGPT is about as useful as Google Translate: you can use it, but only if you have the knowledge to tell if the results are correct, or perhaps to get some ideas/inspiration. Using it for language learning, without a more knowledgable person to help you tell correct from incorrect, good from bad and modern from stiff/formal, is not the best idea. That includes vocabulary lists, usage explanations, usage examples... If the sentence-generating machine is right 95% of the time, but you trust it 100% of the time, one in twenty things you learn is wrong and who knows when you'll find out. And the Summer Palace is 颐和园. Calling it 夏宫 is really weird.

Liu Bannong (劉半農) was one of the main leaders of the May 4 Movement.

Yes, that was pretty much the idea. Recognise the existence of women in society by coining a new pronoun especially for them.

I agree with Jim, except that I think the 也 there is implying the women think the bride should be 焦急/are kind of indirectly asking her why she isn’t. Edit to clarify: I think the 也 there is playing the same role as the 也 in a sentence like 我们要迟到了，你也不快点收拾东西

Finished 漫长的季节, which seems to be very "hot" right now. Same director as 隐秘的角落, so if you've seen that one then you sorta know what you are getting. It's a suspense crime drama: you follow a couple of characters as they investigate the case, both in the past when it happened and in the present after a 20 year time-skip. The crime part is pretty standard (although well done), but what elevates it is: * Interesting setting, in a fictive Dongbei industrial town, giving of the kind of declining rust-belt town feeling you get from a lot of dongbei places. * Great actors all-around, and tons of local dialect! * Zero filler (my pet-peeve with Chinese shows...) * Pretty damn dark to be honest, something you dont really see much in Chinese media I feel. Fits very well with the rust-belt setting. I think this one might be one of the highest quality Chinese tv-shows I've seen. It is not my personal favourite, although I still really liked it, but I can't think of any other shows I would be able to recommend with any buts or asterisks, just a good quality TV-show. Oh and it is available on youtube as well!

What I know for sure: China doesn't allow dual citizenship, so anyone who gets citizenship of a new country is automatically no longer a Chinese citizen. I'm fairly sure that the US does allow this, and as long as the other country allows it as well, someone can hold a US passport and one or more other passports. (Collect them all!) For Moshen's husband, perhaps the US official knew that the Chinese passport was now invalid and therefore helpfully destroyed it? What I know for less sure: The Chinese government doesn't automatically hear about it if a Chinese person gets a foreign citizenship, so someone who still has their Chinese passport can use it to travel to China. It looks like this is what OP has done. And now OP has a bit of a problem, because they can't get a US visa in their Chinese passport (since they are a US citizen), but they also can't travel on their US passport (since they don't have that). As to OP: I'd advise you to contact the US embassy and hope you encounter someone helpful. You can't be the first person to have done this, but it might take quite some paperwork and travelling to have it resolved. Good luck, and please come back to tell us how it went.

That was an interesting read, thank you for sharing!

I totally agree, parts are easy to understand, others seem super complex. I guess what helps me is that my reading goal has never been to understand 100% of what I read, instead I aim to: (1) finish the book a better reader than when I started it, and (2) come away with some interesting ideas (nonfiction) or effected by the story (fiction). So when I come across a complicated section I will read it a few times and if I still don't understand it I just move on. Similarly when I come across super specific names (in this book mostly meeting names, or names of specific government bodies) I'm content to just recognize them in case I see them again vs understand specifically what they mean. For the hypothetical section you quoted: My understanding is more like: By 1994, the principle estimate of the [XXX] fell short of the 1990 estimates put forth by the [XXX], leading to inflationary pressures in the bilateral-vertical interactions between the latent property crisis produced by the shortage in secondary budget appropriations that stifled investment in the agricultural land reform initiative proposed by the [XXX] that was ratified by the three-fourths committee put together in the [XXX], greatly expanding the ratio of national GDP to intake of discretionary means gain tax..... I still understand what's being described, I'm just missing some of the (in my opinion, non-critical) details. However, this style makes my reading much more enjoyable and I'm absorbing more useful information/vocabulary per hour of reading than if I tried to figure out what all of those obscure terms mean. So far, I have tons of new words I can use (just a few examples: 激励机制，飙升，and my personal favorite 文山会海) and some really cool insights about the government particularly related to how the different levels of government interact and how asymmetric information is a major factor in terms of who wields actual power/influence.

How's that going so far? I'm chipping away at that book, myself. Vocabulary hasn't been a big issue for me, but the sentence structure is a little difficult. To give an exaggerated example, it's almost as if it reads this way: By 1994, the principle estimate of the core index of the central bureau of educational development fell short of the 1990 estimates put forth by the vice chief of the federal labor allocation department, leading to inflationary pressures in the bilateral-vertical interactions between the latent property crisis produced by the shortage in secondary budget appropriations that stifled investment in the agricultural land reform initiative proposed by the third session of the twenty-fifth general people's annual congress that was ratified by the three-fourths committee put together in the budgetary ordinance initiative in 2003, greatly expanding the ratio of national GDP to intake of discretionary means gain tax..... Is it literally like that? Well, no. But it feels like that at times. It leaves my head spinning. I do think I understand the central ideas, though. --The introduction of the book talks about how different districts are drawn within China, at the levels of city, county, province, etc. While there are many exceptions, the territories are drawn such that the most people can benefit from shared public services that are funded by their taxes. When services are rendered on a big scale, they become cheaper and more efficient. It's difficult to adequately render services to small, rural towns on the outskirts of provinces. There's a discussion of the proper domain of local and central governments. In matters that don't cross borders into other jurisdictions (and remain strictly local), the central government doesn't want to get too involved. --The book speaks of the importance of "information." In order to govern effectively, a government needs to have an accurate picture of what's actually going on. --The central government set up certain deals with the provinces. Each jurisdiction had a certain quota of tax to pay to the central government, and then they could keep the extra money. The taxation system evolved over time, and the local governments found clever ways to keep more of their income to themselves. As China's economy exploded, the local governments become much richer than the central government, which left the central government powerless to govern the country, and inflation was out of control. So reforms were made, such that local governments had to pay more tax. --The local governments were now becoming poorer and needed new ways of making money, so the central government allowed them to own the land and let it out for money, so that people could occupy the land, build on it, farm on it, etc. Because construction and industry were the big money-makers and attracted the most foreign investment, the cities prioritized that kind of development instead of farming and housing. And the more productive such industry was, the more tax it could generate. So that sent land prices skyrocketing. And that's where I left off. But I think I understand that.

I agree. This reminded me of the time when I was checking into a hotel in a remote part of China. The clerk assumed I couldn't speak Chinese and typed something into her phone's translation app and showed it to me. "How long do you want to live here?" Because I knew Chinese, and I was familiar with Chinese-speaking people using the English word "live" where native English speakers would say "stay," I understood what she meant. If I didn't know any Chinese, this translation would have left me baffled. And I see issues like this in Google Translate's results all the time.

I second what Lu said. There were the same claims made when Google Translate and others came about, essentially saying it would be such a game changer and the skill of language learning/translating would become more or less obsolete because we'd all go running around with our phones using speech-to-text and then have it all automatically translated. Just doesn't work. So far, whenever a Chinese speaker wanted to get something across they thought I didn't fully understand, they first had to manually correct whatever characters their voice input had come up with (ok fair, they didn't speak super standard Mandarin), but the English translation usually made little sense and it was easier for me to look at the written characters and figure it out that way. And it gets even worse if you want to translate into other languages than English... so I'm skeptical at best.

I was having this conversation with my girlfriend and she said, the recent Covid and lockdown proved that we can effectively work from home using emails and team calls, and it looked like that was the new way of working. Then we realized that we didn't like it one bit and we were all missing human interaction, and (largely) went back to the way it was before because we are social animals and we crave interactions with other humans. I think this point is really valid, in our technologically driven society we routinely miss these "soft" but extremely important considerations when weighing a problem.

I don’t see much value in looking at ChatGPT today and saying any Zoom-doable career is safe, if not from elimination then major disruption. The rate of change across generations is stunning and the models you’re interacting with haven’t been specifically trained to be good at any specific thing. Once we get GPT-X and it’s been tweaked to be a good language teacher… it’ll be a good language teacher. The outcomes are hard to predict. Maybe we end up with teachers able to handle three times as many students with AI assistants. But maybe the associated reduction in costs means four times as many people start learning languages and overall there are more “teaching” jobs. Maybe live translation tech become so good demand for language learning plummets. Etc.

It has some concrete advantages over a flesh-and-blood teacher too: It doesn't sleep, nor get impatient or argue. Your next class is whenever you want, and you don't have to get dressed up and take the subway to get there. It's never rude---there's no risk that the teacher will ridicule you or play favorites. It doesn't force the student to use methods they don't want to use---it can suggest many alternatives. It understands English, Chinese, and linguistics to a high level. It uses words very precisely. It's crazy functional: "Can you write a paragraph using [these Chinese words]?" "Can you make me an Anki deck with 100 insect names in Chinese?" "Can you write a version of Clozemaster in C++ for me to practice Chinese?" "Pretend you're a medical researcher, and I'll interview you in Chinese." "Write a play in Chinese for me to act out." It is able to teach Chinese in every domain, e.g. "Can you teach me chemistry in Chinese?" Some versions are free. So are Chinese teachers going to become extinct? It's hard to say, but I don't think it'll be that simple. For a long time, people have been willing to pay money to learn things from a human, despite having free alternatives. But maybe ChatGPT will change that.

Jump quickly.

I just finished reading 活着. @Woodford I wept when the main character called out the names of the imaginary cows at the end. I am still crying. Fuck.

I agree that the ability of AI to translate will continue to improve, but the idea that a real babelfish will be created that would completely replace the need to speak another language is a pipe dream. We're talking about simultaneous translation that wouldn't be hampered by wait times. I just don't buy it.

If.

I don't believe such a technology would have a big impact on someone's motivation if they are really into the language and culture and want to establish a deeper connection etc. If we want to make a comparison: I like drawing and painting and I'm not going to stop just because now I can use Midjourney to create a better watercolor than I will ever be able to in no time (by the way, is it ethical to trawl the internet for art so we can replace humans? I don't think so). Convenience is not always the point - although it seems like we are being pressured really hard to believe it is. However, I do think it will be a further hurdle to overcome for intermediate students; I can imagine many situations in which an impatient listener will just prefer shoving a phone with its simul-translation app in your face rather than having to deal with your less-than-perfect Mandarin/English/whatever.

路遥: “路遥知马力，日久见人心”, this ancient poem contains it. I think 路遥 is ok, but it probably looks more like a boy's name. 恩霖: Looks like the name that the Taiwanese would take, it has a good symbolism, the sweet rain of heaven's grace. 霏霏: This word is from the 《诗经》 and describes the rain and snow, the only drawback of this name may be too common, quite a lot of people with this name. 艾雯 or 莉雯：It is better not to use these two names, like a direct phonetic translation from the English name. 露涵：Not good and not bad, I cannot see its specific meaning. As a native Chinese speaker, I suggest you also go to Zhihu to see if there are any suitable ones. some related link： 有哪些适合取名的诗词或名句？ - 知乎 (zhihu.com) 50个藏在诗词中的好听名字 - 知乎 (zhihu.com) PS： I've seen a great name 乐兮, very simple and beautiful, the symbolism is happiness, but I do not know if its corresponding English name lexi is good.

I don't know if you're studying the language, but I made a few friends doing language exchanges. Obviously it can be a bit hit or miss, but if you can meet ordinary people rather than students (nothing against students, but in my experience they tended to not have much of a life outside studies) then you might meet someone you get along with.

I joined here nearly 20 years ago. There have been numerous tech advances in that time. Character recognition on phones, text to speech, etc. Of the advances I have barely used them at all other than to play with. The main issues with tech are how they can influence how and what you think. Some warn against auto suggest for pinyin, as with people being lazy, they'll just go with whatever is suggested as it's faster. Control auto suggest and control how a billion people think/write (or at least influence the next word in the sentance). It's Skynet all over again, once a computer is self aware, does it choose to go with what the goverment says, or an alternative? Which one is most likely going to result in it being turned off? What sort of history will it decide to teach you? If AI comes up with a syllabus, is it a good syllabus? If there's live translate, will it translate "dodgy" material, or will it obey the government... For me AI is going to be useful when you can tell your foreign phone to get you a local phone number, working wechat account, and a VPN as soon as you touch down in China, and it does it all by itself. AI should deal with boring mundane stuff, not the fun learning bit. The real test is will AI do a scan of all the exisitng teaching resources and decide if mamahuhu is a phrase a beginner needs to know or not?

I meant to comment on this earlier. What everyone's looking at these days are "large language models", not mathematics models (we've got those already, they work quite well in calculators and suchlike). If you think of ChatGPT or similar as a recent college grad who has somehow managed to avoid any degree of numeracy, but has picked up some concepts from wide reading, you might get close to it. I had a beautiful one a while back when it got a mega>giga conversion turned around and gave me an answer out by a factor of a million. I might have a screen shot somewhere (attached now).* But I suspect it's being allowed to make those mistakes at the moment as the researchers are fascinated by what it can figure out without being taught, and what kind of errors it makes. It won't take long to give ChatGPT a calculator and tell it to check any numbers in its output. * As an aside - that bit where it apologised and corrected itself felt like some proper uncanny valley stuff on my side.

I am still continuing with my stated 2023 goals of (1) creating a Chinese-language travel blog (already filmed, now I just need to edit it and record a voice-over) and (2) translating a novel into Chinese, though I switched from Sphere by Michael Crichton to The Beach by Alex Garland to avoid all of the sci-fi language - I am still on p1, but hey, at least I started! Anyway, I have also continued with my previous reading/listening in parallel, and in the process I discovered a couple of new materials that I thought others might enjoy! (1) [TV] God Troubles Me on Netflix is actually pretty good! The episodes are short and I find them really easy to understand. I would definitely recommend this show to anyone looking for easier, yet still engaging native listening materials. I started watching it on a whim, and now I'm addicted (note: it's an anime-style cartoon, so you kind of have to be into that). (2) [Nonfiction] 置身事内 this is a nonfiction book that describes how the government manages economic expansion. I am only 30p into it so far, but I have found it absolutely fascinating. This is the first nonfiction book I have attempted and I am absorbing a bunch of new, super-useful business, government and economic terms. At the end of my last fiction book I was probably encountering 1-2 new words per page. Now I'm back up to 8-10, but oddly enough I almost missed the rush of new vocabulary. This one was easy to purchase in hard copy on Amazon.

TLDR: Read 活着 in Anki (or on paper) while learning the vocabulary that goes with each chapter, roughly according to your level. If you're interested, you should read at least the "How it works" section below. Download link for all decks here Background How it works Example (with images) Here I've chosen the HSK 5-7 (7 = HSK advanced) vocabulary deck, and for reading along I've also chosen HSK 5-7 but this time including non-HSK vocab. This means that when I'm reading I will see word defintions for HSK 5-7 words, but also for words that aren't in any HSK list. Vocabulary Cards: Top left: Progress through vocabulary in the current chapter (here it's chapter 1), and below: progress through vocabulary of the entire book Top right: Word info, including HSK Level, FIRST chapter in which that word occurs, and how many times it occurs in the entire book. Bottom: A list of all the chapters in which this word appears Many cards have audio. If they do, pinyin is hidden to reduce reliance on pinyin, and learn to trust your ears more. It can be shown by clicking the "pinyin" button. Each word has a meaning card and a pronunciation card so that they can be studied separately. If you want just one card per word, go into the card types manager, edit the card template and use the drop down menu at the top to select and remove the second pronunciation card Book Cards: Top left: Current chapter (to know which vocabulary to study) Top right: progress through entire book Main card content: Previous line: slightly grey, you can see the previous line you just read to make moving between cards less jarring Current line: glossed words are highlighted with their meanings shown below. HSK levels are also shown above words Next line: also to make it less jarring when you move to the next card Bottom: Glossed words. The words that are glossed will be determined by which deck you download Each card has only one side, so pressing "good" just goes straight to the next card, not to the back side. Vocabulary Stats for 《活着》 Notes & Bugs Support & Donations

I used to read a lot when I was younger, but since leaving school I haven't as much. So it hasn't been harrd for my Chinese reading to outpace my English reading... but it has really outpaced it I've just started reading 天机 by 蔡骏 which is about a Chinese tour group in northern Thailand and a bunch of unfortunate events... There's an old lady who curses a bus of French tourists and that bus goes off a cliff and explodes and the Chinese tour group pick up an unconcious Frenchman and nurse him back to health on their own bus before being attacked by a monkey (of some type I didn't hit the dictionary to find out the exact kind). The monkey was pissed because they'd been tricked into eating the brains of the monkey's baby... and then they find a recently deserted city they'd never heard of and people start dying off one by one. It's not the most intellectual of books, but it's a fun little thrill-ride and I'm surprised that no one has made it into a movie cuz it reads like that's what the author was going for.

There are some expressions that do not sound very natural. But as I'm using my phone, it's kind of hard for me to give you any examples. Personally, I wouldn't use it for learning Chinese before I become an advanced learner.

@Kenny同志 Reading through the examples posted so far, are there any instances where the Chinese wasn't idiomatic? I don't think we've had a native-speaker chime in yet.

Oh, I very much enjoyed repetitive material when I was a child, though not as much when I was older. I'm sure that repetition can help anyone. Maybe if I'm getting hopelessly frustrated about my reading speed in the future, even as a very advanced learner, I might fall back on reviewing a book multiple times to "speed read" it. I think I'll actually do that when I switch to learning the traditional characters. Just to get a feel for them. I spent about one year reading graded readers, and I read each one four times. Then I spent about another year reading native-level novels, and I also read each book four times. It was rather overkill, probably. Now I read each book only once. I encounter about 0-2 unknown words on every page (so that's an average of 1, I guess). Of course, that's just an average. I might encounter a page with 10 unknown words, then a stretch of pages with zero. For me, that's still rather distracting and cumbersome. Some people can just ignore the unknown words and be happy with knowing the overall gist of the story, but it's psychologically difficult for me to do that. My arbitrary goal is to reach an average of one unknown word every 3 pages (i.e., the majority of pages have no unknown words). I'd like to reach a point where I can just put the dictionary away and read. And it is true that my ability to guess words from context is growing! That's a good observation. I loved those somewhat rare moments when I reviewed a book and understood something that I didn't understand the first time. But otherwise, I say to myself, "Yep, the hard parts are still hard to understand, and the easy parts are still easy." I definitely feel, however, that the system of review really helped me. I still encounter challenging content, but when it comes to the more plain-spoken, less literary, less complex stuff, I feel pretty confident.

Some more vocabulary lists for readers from this thread. All of the lists only contain the traditional characters and can be imported into Pleco. AReaderInPostCulturalRevolutionChineseLiterature.txt + TheIndependentReader.txt -- The two readers by Vivian Ling. TalesAndTraditionsSeries.txt -- link SupplementaryChineseReaderSeries.txt -- The complete series recommended by @OneEye here ThoughtAndSociety.txt -- The ICLP textbook AReaderInPostCulturalRevolutionChineseLiterature.txt SupplementaryChineseReaderSeries.txt TalesAndTraditionsSeries.txt TheIndependentReader.txt ThoughtAndSociety.txt