Mandarin: Year 4.5

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My first message from Macy's: 很高兴认识你
Nice to meet you!

Them:
哈哈！ 我也是！
Ha ha! Likewise!
Presumably the laughing was due to my incredibly tardy response to 你好. The 我也是 kinda threw me for a moment, as I've never actually seen that as a response to 很高兴认识你 before but I suppose it makes sense and I filed it away for future use.

In my part of the Chinese world, the phrase "很高兴认识你 / nice to meet you" doesn't exist, so it would be weird for me to respond to it in Chinese. You'll probably get all sorts of different, random, ad hoc responses. Your own random response would be as good as anyone else's

Them:
没有! 我在旅游
Nope! I am on a vacationy-trip.
Again I have to have a screwed-up translation but 旅游 seems to only apply to vacation-type trips, and... apparently.... the national holiday doesn't count as a 旅游 but NOW they're on one.

"我在旅游"="I'm travelling". Away from home + for pleasure. It has nothing to do with whether it's a public holiday or not.

华人 means Chinese but not from China, basically.... an ABC

I learned something new Never noticed that "华人" doesn't include those living in China. It refers to overseas Chinese, then; ABCs and immigrants.

Them:
China is amazing 是的！哈尔滨非常冷 是东北
English, then: It is! Harbin is very cold! It's in the northeast.

That they wrote "是东北" as opposed to "在东北" I think conveys "That's the northeast" as opposed to "It's in the northeast". Kind of like "Yes, Harbin is super cold, that's the NE, you know!"

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Tips: compare your sentences with their's.

Me:
你现在庆祝节日？
Them:
我在旅游

Me：
她说哈尔滨是非常冷.
Them:
哈尔滨非常冷
Them:
纽约也很冷

[Aozu]

Thanks! Any time anyone mumbles about Chinese having easy grammar I just have to point them to my continual misuses of zai and shi.

I think I read somewhere at some point a while back that 华人 is only ABCs, but looking it up now, I think that's wrong and it includes any Chinese person not in China. But in either case I would have assumed my conversation partner meant ABC due to my shoddy typing.

Funny that 很高兴认识你 doesn't exists in your part of China... which is Cantonese I assume? Is there any equivalent that translates into characters that make sense in Mandarin?


Oh, speaking of zai, there is a thing I noticed when I was recording myself, and then subsequently noticed with other English speakers learning Chinese. Often I (and they) will start a sentence with a zai early in it, either xianzai ____ or ta zai ____ or something like that, and then we have a pause there while we think of the rest of the sentence. But, our pause includes the zai so we say something like wo zaiiiiiii or ta xianzaiiiiiii, and (1) it really does a number on the tone, and (2) I don't hear Chinese people do this... if they pause it's a silent gap: wo zai (pause) restofsentence.

I almost hesitate to call it an accent, since it nothing to do with the sound of the word but more like how.... long... it is but I don't know what else to call it. Anyway, it was a weird thing I noticed recently and I'm on guard to stop doing it now.

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Funny that 很高兴认识你 doesn't exists in your part of China... which is Cantonese I assume? Is there any equivalent that translates into characters that make sense in Mandarin?

I don't mean just my part of China. I actually mean: I don't think "很高兴认识你" exists in Chinese at all, but with 1b population, who knows, maybe some village in the NE do say it...

Do you know if "很高兴认识你" is actually said by Mandarin natives? Or is it just something taught to English speakers (because they expect to learn it)? In this website that teaches English to Chinese speakers:

http://www.daisy-online.net/everydayeng ... ker01.html

, they actually have to teach how to use the phrase "nice to meet you", which suggests that Chinese people don't know how to use "nice to meet you / 很高兴认识你".

Anyway. In Cantonese there's this "幸會" (glad meet), but it sounds stilted. Not sure if it's also Mandarin.

Often I (and they) will start a sentence with a zai early in it, either xianzai ____ or ta zai ____ or something like that, and then we have a pause there while we think of the rest of the sentence. But, our pause includes the zai so we say something like wo zaiiiiiii or ta xianzaiiiiiii, and (1) it really does a number on the tone, and (2) I don't hear Chinese people do this... if they pause it's a silent gap: wo zai (pause) restofsentence.

I think Chinese people don't draw out their "在"s because words in tone 4 ARE SHORT or JUST CAN'T BE LONG to them. Just like you won't draw out the English schwa no matter what. You won't say "I'm thinkiiiiiiiiiiiiing aaaaaaaaaaabout submiiiiiiiiting"

[Aozu]

Amusingly, I copied 很高兴认识你 from what several HelloTalk people said to me after I said 你好.

I'll have to pay more attention to where people are from to see if there is any geographical area they all share... or maybe they're all in on the joke.

[smallwhite]

Amusingly, I copied 很高兴认识你 from what several HelloTalk people said to me after I said 你好.

I'll have to pay more attention to where people are from to see if there is any geographical area they all share... or maybe they're all in on the joke.

So it's me who lives in the odd village in the Southeast

[Aozu]

Sorry you had to find out this way....

[Adam]

My understanding of 华人 (華人 in fanti) is that it means ethnically/racially Chinese. It is mostly used by 华人 outside of China (and hence would have the meaning of ABC - where "A" is America in your case, and "Australia" in my case), because it wouldn't be needed much within 中国, where the 'default' 人 is one of these.

I think it has a (possibly quite innocent and un-noticed) element of chauvanism and racial superiority, as suggested in its etymology (first picture is from Richard Harbaugh's website http://www.zhongwen.com), and its occasional usage (the "bi-lingual" sign shown in the second picture was photographed in Sydney).

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[Aozu]

Not accomplishing much lately. I'm not sure why I can manage to keep up - and more - when I head out of town but when I get back everything is a big disaster for a while. Happens every time. Perhaps because I'm trying to catch up on work? I dunno. Anyway, hopefully this week will be better.

[Aozu]

Finally finished FSI Module 3 and moved on to 4. The Restaurant and Hotel modules were pretty interesting. Basically they go through some new vocabulary, repeat it once, then go into a whole dialogue. Fairly easy for me at this point, and not really any actually new words, but I'm not sure how they would go over for someone starting from scratch. Though I think the grammar was pretty simple. Anyway, onwards!

[Aozu]

Well, we finally finished Divorce Lawyers. That was, though a little long and stretched, a pretty good show, all things considered. I still don't understand the basic lack of proper sound micing in these shows. Now and again in Divorce Lawyers it would sound like one mic for the whole room in a potted plant or something - in some other shows I previewed to figure out what to watch next the whole show has that crummy sound. You'd think there's enough people in China to hire a couple of boom mic holders, but I guess not.

Anyway, we've been watching that since July - 46 episodes took a while! The most promising candidates for our next show on Dramafever:

Tiger Mom: shorter episodes, but seems likely to be too focused on kid hijinx.
Sound of the Desert: Good reviews, looks interesting, but it's the main actress from our two shows before Divorce Lawyers (the Bu Bus), we need more of a break from her I think.
P.S. Man: I watched 2 episodes of this. Looked funny/promising but the Taiwan accents bugged my wife and the episodes are oddly long and would be hard to fit into our schedule to watch together. I might watch this one myself.
Palace: The knockoff of Bu Bu Jing Xin that somehow came out before it. Looked a lot goofier. My wife was not interested, since we already watched the "original". Another possibility for just me.
Bitter Sweet: Looked like it might be funny but the sound was horrendous.
Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: Not a real contender for both of us but it did crack me up that this was actually on Dramafever. I'll probably watch an episode now and again.

And what looks like the winner so far:
"Unriddle": ugh the title. Anyway, from one episode it seems to be some sort of CSI/Hawaii 5-0 thing, and it also appears to be set in Singapore? Unclear where the show is actually from, but whatever. It's, at least, something different than a romance show. My wife's first comment was 'she's moving that pistol around so quickly!'. This'll be a good change of pace I think. Hopefully there is enough conversation. There were some stretches of just 'action' which had been a problem in the WWII drama I tried, but this does seem to have some subplots going on and whatnot.