我們學漢語 / 我们学汉语 (Chinese Study Group)

An area with study groups for various languages. Group members help each other, share resources and experience. Study groups are permanent but the members rotate and change.
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reineke
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Re: 我們學漢語 / 我们学汉语 (Chinese Study Group)

Postby reineke » Sun Jan 06, 2019 12:45 am

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Querneus
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Re: 我們學漢語 / 我们学汉语 (Chinese Study Group)

Postby Querneus » Mon Jan 07, 2019 3:49 am

I asked a native speaker to clarify the various verbs meaning "to visit" for me, and these are the notes I took:

    拜訪 bai4fang3 'to visit [a person, a place]'. The normal word for "to visit". You can generally rely on this word to render "to visit".

    訪問 fang3wen4 'to visit [a person] (to discuss sth)'. This word is used for people and it implies that a meeting will take place with the purpose of an interview or a discussion. The travel implied could be great, this could be a head of state going to another country to talk to another president.

    參觀 can1guan1 'to visit [a place]'. This word is particularly used for museums and galleries.

    看望 kan4wang4 'to visit [a person, especially at a hospital]'.

    看 kan4 'to see'. This really means "to see", but is commonly used in the sense of "to visit [a person]".

ロータス wrote:Was doing Clozemaster and saw this sentence: "有了我,我们已经多一个人了。" Has anyone seen this kind of sentence before? Clozemaster says the English translation is: "And with me, we are yet one more."

What surprises you about that sentence in particular? The 有了我 part, or the 多一个人了 part?

They make perfect sense to me, but I haven't come across them before, no. Looking them up in corpora, it seems this use of 有了我 (or 有了他, etc.) is not that common.
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Axon
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Re: 我們學漢語 / 我们学汉语 (Chinese Study Group)

Postby Axon » Fri Jan 11, 2019 3:06 pm

Image

I've been intermittently using the HSK 5 vocabulary builder book pictured here, and today I found the HSK 6 version in a bookstore and purchased it for 42 RMB. I recommend these two books for improving your vocabulary at an intermediate reading level.

Each book is laid out like so:

Image

I like this a lot because the definitions are the only English on the page and so you don't automatically read the English translations of the examples. The example sentences are fairly dry, but realistic according to native speakers. They're also not too complex, frequently using words and phrases that are from lower HSK levels or elsewhere in the book. Reading through each entry is fast and easy and keeps your mind in Chinese reading mode the whole time.

I saw another HSK 6 vocabulary builder book but decided to pass on it because the layout was relatively poor with small text and too much whitespace between entries. It also had no English, which is a good challenge but I personally prefer simple English definitions that can quickly stick in my mind.

If there's interest, I can easily return to that bookstore (I plan to anyway) and make more detailed notes about different resources. They have a good selection of books for Chinese learners.
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Querneus
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Re: 我們學漢語 / 我们学汉语 (Chinese Study Group)

Postby Querneus » Fri Jan 18, 2019 6:19 pm

For bonus points in some homework at school, I made short analyses of some texts in various languages, including the whole of 三体 san1ti3, LIU Cixin's The Three-Body Problem, by which I mean all three books (the first book was read in LLorg's 2018 book club). Altogether, they're about 2.5 times the length of Herman Melville's Moby Dick. The books contain ~770900 Chinese characters, but there are only 3600 distinct Chinese characters. 的 de alone accounts for almost 5% of the text. Some characters that occur only once: 馋 烷 踌 祠 嘤 谵 竺 芳 嘉.
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Re: 我們學漢語 / 我们学汉语 (Chinese Study Group)

Postby Querneus » Tue Jan 29, 2019 5:36 pm

A hint about where the future of Standard Mandarin might lie:
Of further interest in the development of regional Mandarins is that, due to regional prosperity and connotations of wealth, upbringing, and trendiness associated with new regional urban centers, many regional Mandarin varieties may, in time, come to command greater prestige than Mandarin spoken in its northern birthplace. Ding (1998) has observed that “many Chinese regard the Beijing accent as pompous,” and notes that his fellow academics have found the Mandarin of Taiwanese newscasters to be more pleasant-sounding than that of their northern counterparts. Zhang (2005) writes that well-to-do yuppies working in Beijing’s international corporate offices choose not to speak with a local Beijing accent, but instead to speak in an accent that selectively incorporates features of Mandarin spoken in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore (Zhang 2005, 444–458). According to Zhang, the choice of this “Cosmopolitan Mandarin” over Beijing Mandarin is not for the purposes of communication, but to signal a distinction in social status. As these speakers switch between Beijing Mandarin and “Cosmopolitan Mandarin” according to interlocutor, situation, and domain of language use, as Mandarin spreads far and wide to remote dialect regions and these regions give back by replenishing the superstrate language, we are in many ways witnessing the dawn of a new type of Mandarin-based diglossia taking root in the Chinese-speaking world, perhaps the second such cycle in as little as two centuries.

Source:
Li, Chris Wen-Chao. 2014. “Shifting Patterns of Chinese Diglossia: Why the Dialects May Be Headed for Extinction.” Divided Languages? Diglossia, Translation and the Rise of Modernity in Japan, China and the Slavic World.

Articles cited in the quote:
Ding, Yi 丁乙. 1998. “Guanyu Guifan Putonghua he Dazhong Putonghua de Taolun” 關於規範普通話和大眾普通話的討論 (Discussion on Standard Mandarin and Popular Mandarin). Yuwen Jianshe Tongxun 語文建設通訊 57: 14.
Zhang, Qing. 2005. “A Chinese Yuppie in Beijing: Phonological Variation and the Construction of a New Professional Identity.” Language in Society 34: 431–466.
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julio
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Re: 我們學漢語 / 我们学汉语 (Chinese Study Group)

Postby julio » Tue Feb 19, 2019 10:19 pm

ロータス wrote:Was doing Clozemaster and saw this sentence: "有了我,我们已经多一个人了。" Has anyone seen this kind of sentence before? Clozemaster says the English translation is: "And with me, we are yet one more."

如果只有这一句话,无法理解是什么意思。
但是,这句话如果出现在下面的对话中,是完全正确的。
例如:
早上我与室友小王要去学校,
小王问:“你怎么去学校?”
我说:“搭小李的车去。”
小王说:“能带上我吗?”
我说:“对不起,有了我,我们已经多了一个人了。”
--------
上面的故事,小李的车通常可以乘坐4个人,加上我,勉强能乘坐5个人,比4个多了一个。无论如何,也不能再乘坐更多的人了。
所以会说,“有了我,我们已经多了一个人了。”
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MorkTheFiddle
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Re: 我們學漢語 / 我们学汉语 (Chinese Study Group)

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Sat Jul 06, 2019 1:19 am

Can anyone suggest a movie in Mandarin with both Mandarin subtitles and English (or French or Spanish) subtitles? Any genre, any period, animated or not animated. I want to give emk's subs2str method a try.
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Axon
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Re: 我們學漢語 / 我们学汉语 (Chinese Study Group)

Postby Axon » Sat Jul 06, 2019 12:43 pm

MorkTheFiddle wrote:Can anyone suggest a movie in Mandarin with both Mandarin subtitles and English (or French or Spanish) subtitles? Any genre, any period, animated or not animated. I want to give emk's subs2str method a try.


Any Chinese film that got at least a moderate release in the West - so Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, House of Flying Daggers, and other Mandarin martial arts films are fair game. You may have heard that the Mandarin in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon is weird because the actors are from all over. It's no weirder than you'll hear people speak every day in China. There are some archaicisms to evoke the time period, though. Also, be sure that you're getting subs translated from Chinese, not a transcript of the English dub track (it's very different).

As for everyday films, From Beijing to Seattle, Forever Young, and I Am Not Madame Bovary are all pretty modern, very good, and mostly in Standard Mandarin. From Beijing to Seattle is definitely the most modern and most standard, though the narrator in I Am Not Madame Bovary has an absolutely superb voice.

If there is a Chinatown near you, there's very likely a DVD shop. There you'll probably be able to find HK movies dubbed into Mandarin, and as we know dubs are usually cleaner than original audio to study from. I don't have any recommendations here but just pick one with either two people holding guns or two people looking dreamily at each other. Then, with a bit of effort, you can extract all the subtitle tracks from the DVD directly.
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MorkTheFiddle
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Re: 我們學漢語 / 我们学汉语 (Chinese Study Group)

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Sat Jul 06, 2019 10:02 pm

Axon wrote:
MorkTheFiddle wrote:Can anyone suggest a movie in Mandarin with both Mandarin subtitles and English (or French or Spanish) subtitles? Any genre, any period, animated or not animated. I want to give emk's subs2str method a try.


Any Chinese film that got at least a moderate release in the West - so Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, House of Flying Daggers, and other Mandarin martial arts films are fair game. You may have heard that the Mandarin in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon is weird because the actors are from all over. It's no weirder than you'll hear people speak every day in China. There are some archaicisms to evoke the time period, though. Also, be sure that you're getting subs translated from Chinese, not a transcript of the English dub track (it's very different).

As for everyday films, From Beijing to Seattle, Forever Young, and I Am Not Madame Bovary are all pretty modern, very good, and mostly in Standard Mandarin. From Beijing to Seattle is definitely the most modern and most standard, though the narrator in I Am Not Madame Bovary has an absolutely superb voice.

If there is a Chinatown near you, there's very likely a DVD shop. There you'll probably be able to find HK movies dubbed into Mandarin, and as we know dubs are usually cleaner than original audio to study from. I don't have any recommendations here but just pick one with either two people holding guns or two people looking dreamily at each other. Then, with a bit of effort, you can extract all the subtitle tracks from the DVD directly.

Thank you for this. Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon is on MyList with Netflix, and I Am not Madame Bovary was already on order. I know nothing about either, but I remember the former for having a run in the USA and I liked the latter just from the intriguing title. And I like the Two Guns or Two Dreamy Faces advice. :)
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Axon
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Re: 我們學漢語 / 我们学汉语 (Chinese Study Group)

Postby Axon » Sun Jul 07, 2019 12:39 pm

MorkTheFiddle wrote:Thank you for this. Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon is on MyList with Netflix, and I Am not Madame Bovary was already on order. I know nothing about either, but I remember the former for having a run in the USA and I liked the latter just from the intriguing title. And I like the Two Guns or Two Dreamy Faces advice. :)


Wow, I'm pretty shocked that someone else has heard of I Am Not Madame Bovary. Excellent choice. However, I just went and watched the trailer again, and I'd forgotten that most of the main characters have heavy Jiangxi accents, like to the point where they'd probably have occasional trouble speaking with folks from the other side of China. I'd recommend starting with something more standard. If you do go ahead and study from it, it'll be a big challenge, but on the other hand you'll come away from it with a great tolerance for nonstandard speech, which is of course the norm across the entire Chinese-speaking world.
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