Reading Garden [ZH,KR,FR]

[Axon]

It seems to me that these dialogues suffer from the typical redundancy found in Chinese texts for learners. They're not wrong, per se, and the words are usually good, but the speakers seem to repeat things that would get left out in ordinary conversation or text chat. I ran into this problem when I was trying to get natives to help me write dialogues. Everything we came up with was artificial sounding because ordinary conversation switches topics so often and relies so heavily on context.

If you're reading and understanding these dialogues, no matter how slowly, you should try finding some native text chat partners. I was way below your level when I started and it was a big boost to my reading comprehension even though I was machine-translating almost everything.

[smallwhite]

呆 = foolish / stupid / expressionless / blank / to stay
One of these things is not like the other.
Never seen this in a hanzi before.
对，我下周二去香港，会在那里呆两个晚上。
下周二 was also confusing but had Eng translation.

Wiktionary
Chinese

呆
* dull; wooden
* dull-minded; simple; stupid
* Alternative form of 待 (“to stay”).

獃
* This character, 獃, is a variant form of 呆.

So blank/dull -> thick/slow -> foolish/stupid
and dull/still/motionless -> stay/stuck

To me and in Cantonese, the basic meaning of 呆 is expressionless, speechlessness and/or reactionlessness (as in dumbfounded or blank stare due to dementia or alcohol) (dementia = 老人痴呆症 although being reactionless is just one of the symptoms), while 呆坐/呆企(呆站)/呆等 are also common phrases which mean sitting/standing/waiting with nothing to do and feeling rather bored and annoyed.

[mouse]

呆 = foolish / stupid / expressionless / blank / to stay
One of these things is not like the other.
Never seen this in a hanzi before.
对，我下周二去香港，会在那里呆两个晚上。
下周二 was also confusing but had Eng translation.

As smallwhite says, the meanings probably aren't connected. The key is the sound. In the Mainland, the sound dāi meaning 'to stay' has tended to be written with the character 呆 and in Taiwan with the character 待. The sound and meaning don't change, but the way of writing it down does. This sort of thing happens a lot in pre-modern texts, before standardisation in the 20th century. The character 呆 itself was originally a variant of 梅 ('plum') — note the visual similarity to 杏 'apricot' — and was borrowed to write dāi meaning 'stupid'.

The use of the character 呆 to write dāi 'stupid' goes back at least to the Yuan dynasty, but dāi 'to stay' seems to be a more modern word, and that might be why it doesn't have it's own exclusive dedicated character.

[smallwhite]

但 周末 对于浩来讲 还是 要看书，
but
weekend
for 浩
still, nonetheless
need to read

“书中自有黄金屋，书中自有颜如玉”
(idiom)
in book there is gold house
in book there is 颜如玉
(ie. reading brings you treasure and goodness, reading is good for you)
(颜如玉 is the name of someone)
自有 as opposed to 有 ("there is") I think means "there will be eventually, don't you worry".

啊!
yaahh~
y'know

[mouse]

I thought 颜如玉 was a way of describing a beautiful woman, rather than a person's name?

[smallwhite]

I thought 颜如玉 was a way of describing a beautiful woman, rather than a person's name?

What I remember from primary school could indeed be wrong

[smallwhite]

Okay, so the meaning is actually:

“书中自有黄金屋，书中自有颜如玉”
in book there'll be gold houses
in book there'll be beautiful women

"颜 如 玉" = face like jade = refers to beautiful women.
I thought 颜如玉 was some respectable scholar we look up to.

So this is just another money and women thing Not happy

[samuelb123]

Hi,
Where do you find these Chinese books? my level is HSK 6ish and most novels are still a pain in the ass too read?

[Sayonaroo]

Week 45
普通话
Reading: 10-31
JLC: 李曼的决心 E

Barely reading. I feel like I only read one paragraph every few days This time for real I will read everyday and if not this story than a story from Du Chinese.

Español
Reading: 11-2
Spanishpod101 N1 [22/40]
Practical Spanish: AB Readings [3/13]
Gramática de uso del Español A1-B2 [0/126]

Listening: 11-3
Language Transfer [7/90]
VideoEle A1 [8/34]

I'm apart of a project on base so I can be on the computer for about 3 hours in the mornings so I read and listen to Spansihpod101 dialogues, 10 at a time. I wish I could do a full on Listening-Reading method with my mp3 player but my base doesn't allow electronics during the duty day I tried listening to Language Transfer at this time but I just can't stand how fast it goes. I'm very much a visual learner so without the pdf open, I dont learn much. Maybe next weekend, I will try to listen to a few tracks.

After working on the project, I have time to read Spanishpod101 dialogues, AB readings and now lessons from Gramática de uso del Español. When I'm released for the day, I listen to one VideoEle video over and over again while looking at the Spanish subtitles. I also found a Spanish radio station on the stock FM radio on my phone that I listened to this morning. Of course understood nothing besides when they say state names xD

Doing all this listening practices reminds me of why I always skipped it. It is discouraging to listen to the same thing over and over again and still not understand what is being said fast enough. Its like I have barely worked out the first sentence I heard and the audio is already on the three or four sentences x.x I know its suppose to get better with time and a lot of listening but before that happens, it feels a little pointless. To help with my listening, I have started using Flashcard Deluxe SRS with the 5000 most frequent words for Spanish. I think Flashcard Deluxe is the only flashcard program besides Memrise that shuffles the cards as you are learning them. Such as learning 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 one round while missing 2 and 3 and the next round is 2, 4, 1, 3, 5. I like this more than keeping the cards in the same order because it is easy to just memorize the order and not the words. I'm also not using multiple choice and just the front to back type with audio on the front. Right now, the short term goal is to speed through the first 500 (skipping verbs) then speed through the next 500 (also skipping verbs). If I even get to 1000, I will see how I'm doing in my readings to decide if I will push on to 2000. I'm skipping verbs because those are the words that change the most based on tense and would rather learn them through reading.

I can relate for Spanish. I've been using workaudiobook to learn spanish since it automatically repeats the audio selection however many times you set it to. I need that because I can't hear spanish lol. At the same time I don't obsess over not being able to hear stuff because me listening to this a 100 times at this moment won't make it so that I can hear it. I know that it will come with putting in the time. I set it to repeat it 9 times.

I use workaudiobook along with readlang.com (to generate anki cards), lingoes (off-line pop-up dictionary), anki, deepl translator, reverso, and multiple chrome dictionary pop-up plugins (such as transover), autohotkey (with a gaming mouse to use deepl and reverso). As a result I exclusively learn from stuff that have audio and transcript or subtitles. I must mention that for anki I don't take it that seriously since I know that even if it's in my anki deck there's still a high chance I won't be able to catch it in real life spanish since my listening comprehension is lacking. Therefore, I have my anki settings as lax as my korean deck which I started in 2012.

My first goal for Spanish is to understand youtubers without subtitles since I notice that most English-speaking beauty-gurus/vloggers tend to speak boring, simple English lol. I assumed that it would be an easy goal but it was not since Spanish is fast and it's easy to talk continuously due to the constant vowels. But recently I noticed that I was able to follow/understand better. This is the spanish-speaking youtuber I found. I remembered that the first time I saw one of her videos I was overwhelmed with the speed and was lost even though she probably wasn't saying anything that complex. I'm pleasantly surprised because I don't feel like I put in that much time or effort into Spanish but I already notice a significant improvement.

I recommend reading and listening over flashcards because knowing words won't help you understand people speaking Spanish since listening comprehension is a different skill from reading. I knew from my 5 years of taking Spanish and getting straight A's must mean I got some vocab gain but I knew I had poor listening comprehension since I didn't put in much time towards reading and listening. I currently have no interest reading in Spanish without audio because audio makes learning so much better and also I think I still don't know all the sounds of Spanish.

have you tried re-listening to the stuff over and over passively (ie having it play in the background ) ? I find that to be helpful if I went through the audio with a transcript before relistening.

[SGP]

Switched back to German because it makes my long term goal more easier if I start now and not later. Been looking at the tests you can take to measure your German knowledge and all of them have oral parts Dx. For right now it will be just input and getting used to the language and once I'm operational, I can think about taking some German classes or italki lessons that focus on output.

Did German already become a bit more familiar to you than it used to be at any time before?
For me (reverse situation, native of German who learned English a very long time ago), the beginning really was difficult, but then after some years, it started feeling more familiar. [Explanatory only] today there are only a few reasons that prevent me from calling German and English two variants of one "It is Not All the Same But it Also is Far From Being Entirely Different Single Language".