Like how do you fit all the Chinese characters on a Chinese laptop, wouldn’t that take up a shit ton of space?
Sorry I’m a big ignorant American who barely speaks English so I got no fucking idea.
Like how do you fit all the Chinese characters on a Chinese laptop, wouldn’t that take up a shit ton of space?
Sorry I’m a big ignorant American who barely speaks English so I got no fucking idea.
Interesting, I’ve never heard of pinyin before.
I wish I had the time and energy to learn Mandarin, always thought it’d be interesting to learn a language that so structurally different to European languages but sadly I just don’t have the brain for it. I’m still trying to get decent at Spanish.
Learn it. Is fun. It doesn’t have to be a chore, it can be a hobby.
我相信你
Is 我对你有信心 a better way to say “I believe in you”? I feel like I have only ever seen 我相信你 mean like you believe what someone is saying
Not native, but, I don’t think that’s a better way to say it. 我相信你 can, contextually, also mean ‘I believe in you’.
谢谢你。我的汉语不太好。我总是忘记了对的语法和词
还有更自然更地道的说法：
老是比“总是” 会听起来更加 colloquial 反而“总是”听起来更加书面一些
“记不住”这个语法搭配 ［动词+不住］特别好用。意思就是根本做不了[什么]。［记不住］是你怎么也［记住不了］语法和词汇
I’m so shit at this language
Sorry I didn’t want to discourage you. I want to give some targeted grammar tricks to say the same sentence in a smoother way. I also went through the same learning steps as you and would have previously constructed my sentences in the same way, til I encountered the more ‘natural’ sentence constructions
(Also, I tried to give my feedback in Chinese cos I know you’d be able to handle it, rather than Englifying it for you)
May I ask what methods you use to learn? I’ve been plateaued for over a year.
Language classes and tutors. I can’t self study. I need an external teacher or tutor, and classmates, to keep my nose to the grind stone.
Unfortunately that’s it, I’ve learnt that I am not motivated to download and use apps consistently (Anki, HelloChinese), or go through online materials. I can’t even get by on ‘change your UI to Chinese’ or ‘Play videogames in Chinese’ (both of which I did) because my brain just glosses over the words to skip the effort.
The only apps I used were Hellotalk and iTalki to meet language partners who may have incidentally been Chinese teachers, or who were patient enough to try to break the grammar down for me.
When I was in-country I also did extra tutoring as a ‘volunteer student’ at a private teacher training college.
I also picked up some hobbies (both in China and here) that were 100% in Chinese. Even if I my Chinese was shit, I still got social value out of it.
I don’t trust myself sadly :(
But maybe I’ll give it a wing, at worst I’ll learn how to say “where is the bathroom” in Chinese which is the most useful phrase ever.
洗手间在哪里？
洗手间 - Bathroom [literally wash-hand-room]
在 - (is) at [many usages but here it means is]
哪里 - where? [a where-question pronoun together with a character meaning inside]
All of these are words contained within the first or second official level of Chinese for foreigners (the HSK exam), and building a basic sentence is actually quite easy :)
It can be daunting to start learning Mandarin because of the characters and tones, but the total disparity from English makes it fun to explore - a whole different world of language!
In addition to pinyin, people also just write the characters by hand using their fingers, like on a phone. There’s also things like Zhuyin, used in Taiwan, that are usually harder for non-native speakers to learn than Pinyin. You learn the most common character components/sounds and then ‘build’ full sentences that way.