Im a lefty, so I have either to press really hard, or chance my handwriting being so poor as to be illegible. Took me decades to train my English to be decent, and it still takes a lot of effort. Can’t wait until I learn Chinese well enough I can write in total slop and still have it be semi-legible.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/58663641

This is still a work in progress, and I would love for other people to contribute to grow this project.

I think given some more attention, this could turn into a valuable asset for language learning of many different languages (could easily be modified for Japanese) - as I personally find it slightly more entertaining than standard flashcards. And if you are anything like me, learning something is more about staying interested and motivated than it is anything else.

Repository: https://github.com/GreenAnts/HSK-3.0-Study-Game WebApp: https://greenants.github.io/HSK-3.0-Study-Game/

While it isn't anything super special, I do think it is more effective (at least for me) than simply using Anki flashcards, as it keeps me slightly more entertained and interested - but I think the project could definitely be gamified a bit more. The primary goal of this project is to eventually create something that actually keeps the user interested in drilling through vocabulary.

---

Disclaimer: The project is mostly just a couple files, and was put together with AI, not using any type of framework or anything. If the project gets future collaborators, we would likely need to refactor the project to be more workable.

我發現很多中國的漢族人開始反抗共產黨的綁架宣傳了。在 YouTube 上看到了一個叫 吃瓜蒙主 的博主的視頻，感覺她講得很好。漢族本來是世界上最優秀的民族，現在卻被壓迫。希望漢族同胞可以團結起來推翻共產黨的壓迫。

I am trying to get a good list of common pronunciations that fuse multiple syllables together into one. Let me give you some examples:

中央电台 - 装垫儿台

不知道 - 不儿道 / 不绕

告诉你 - 告儿你

这样 - 酱

摄像头 - 上头

西红柿炒鸡蛋 - 胸是炒鸡蛋

老师好 - 老儿好

不好吃 - 抱吃

特好吃 - 套吃

图书馆 - 图儿馆

I have not found a comprehensive list anywhere. Can someone give me some recommendations?

Wiktionary: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%96%9D%E8%8C%B6

Not following any "traditional" rules or anything... kinda free verse lolz

[crossposted from: https://piefed.social/c/ocpoetry/p/1581227/oc-xiao-dao-the-island-bilingual-chinese-english]

It's more like a song lyric... but I'm too voice shy to make a recording and I don't even know how to like... do music... so... just Lyric-Poem then:

(If you know Chinese, you will notice a lot of rhyming in Mandarin... but whatever, too bad nobody here would understand for real)

「小岛」

遥远的荒岛，陆地去不到
天景这么好，却哪里都探不到

站在这孤独的岛岸，寻找着答案
直到凌晨黑暗，深夜里无法看

血缘，已断绝
亲戚，已把我淘弃，已拒绝
朋友，还不如小狗，相思他我悔后

老天，请饶了我这贱命
我站在这崖边
别逼我上天

朝廷，继续探索我踪影
我既然固执行
走灰色的路程

到天涯海角
前路已断桥
想回头没岸
我无处可逃
连梁山都不愿收好汉
找不到答案，怎么办？

小小的岛岸，前路无法看
孤独的存在，被埋在这海滩

「The Island」

On a deserted island far away, cannot reach landmass
The weather is so good, yet the destination cannot be found

Standing on this lonely shore, searching for the answer
Until the midnight's darkness, unable to see in the dark

Blood Relations, are cut off
Relatives, has abandoned me, rejected me
Friends, is not even as good as a dog, regret that we ever met

O' Heaven, please pity me and spare my poor life
I'm standing near the cliffs
Don't force my soul towards the heavens

The Royal Army, continues to search for my trail
Yet I stubbornly continue
On towards this legally grey path

Standing at the end of the world
The bridge ahead has already been broken
There is no shore to go back to
There is no path to escape
Even Mount Liang¹ refuses to provide refuge
I can't find the answer, what do I do?

On this small island, I can't see the path ahead
Surviving alone, buried by this beach

¹Mount Liang is a reference to the story 水浒传, it's a place where outlaws set up their camp or something like that... forgot the exact details... I think they were portrayed as heroes that fought against the royal government

(Kinda depressed right now, hopefully I didn't make a mistake doing the translations or typos or whatever...

Wouldn't be surprising if I typed a 同音字 (character with the same sound) lol, I did that before)

枪林弹雨

枪 Guns
林 Forest
弹 Bullets
雨 Rain

I understand this phrase intuitively as a native speaker but its so hard to translate it.

My best attempt is: "As if there are as many guns as there is trees¹ and its raining bullets." Or something... idk...

¹Context would be like, imagine it was a battlefield, 枪林弹雨 would be what's used to describe the chaotic scene. Its more descriptive than just the English word "gunfire".

I thought this was interesting and since this comm is kinda dead, wanna make it less dead lol...

As with previous threads, the idea behind this is to have a - not quite - weekly post where learners of all levels, heritage and native speakers can post the Chinese content they have been consuming this week in whatever form. If people also give an indication of their level (or the level of content) as well it can act as a way for people to discover new content which may be suitable for them.

I'm currently studying Chinese abroad which explains my absence from here a bit, but unfortunately (or fortunately?) I'm quite ahead of the course so currently I started tackling "Thought and Society" by Vivianne Ling, and used by some of the most intensive programs in Taiwan, and so far it's really fun reading more academically inclined essays.

[crossposted from: https://piefed.social/c/ocpoetry/p/1509802/century-twenty-first]

This is an original poem written by me, first written in Chinese then manually translated by me into English (I understand both languages). English is my primary language, but I just wanted to see how much Chinese I still remember.

《世紀貳拾壹》

零與壹的境界，
建觸不的虛廈。
話音與書紙，
變為微細電子。

數億粒電子，
就似天空星星。
計算中的電脈，
就似天之銀河。

數據散播全球，
詞語點起火焰。
革除天命，毀除皇宮，
破裂牆壁，穿越界線。

(If I made a mistake, let me know lol)

So I've been learning Chinese for a while, but I still struggle to balance between very clearly articulating each tone, and not focusing too much on them. I've found that when I'm very careful and pronounce each of them, people understand me, but I speak extremely slowly and they get impatient.

On the other hand, when I try to speak faster, my tones are harder to understand and people tend to misunderstand what I say.

Is there any good guide or trick or trick to stringing tones together efficiently? Like, I'm sure the tones don't sound the same in the isolated theoretical sense as they do when they're together in succession.

Hey hey, I just returned from two weeks on vacation in China and I'm returning seriously embarrassed about how bad my Mandarin is. I live in the US and have very little experience learning Mandarin so far and my pronunciation is horrible. I want to work to improve my vocabulary and pronunciation. The 4 tones are very hard for me, as my hearing is not great to start.

Any ideas for a complete beginner would be greatly appreciated. For instance, will I learn faster with a teacher / in person lessons, or is online learning good enough these days?

I have experience learning other languages, FYI, including Spanish and French and a little Dutch. Cheers for keeping this community alive!

I think mine is just, consistency. To just do something every day, and not a lot a few times a week.

As with previous threads, the idea behind this is to have a - not quite - weekly post where learners of all levels, heritage and native speakers can post the Chinese content they have been consuming this week in whatever form. If people also give an indication of their level (or the level of content) as well it can act as a way for people to discover new content which may be suitable for them.

I'm currently going through SinoLinguas graded readers available on Pleco, the ones at around 2500 words!

As with previous threads, the idea behind this is to have a - not quite - weekly post where learners of all levels, heritage and native speakers can post the Chinese content they have been consuming this week in whatever form. If people also give an indication of their level (or the level of content) as well it can act as a way for people to discover new content which may be suitable for them.

As for myself, I've been a bit unfocused lately since I was sick, which threw me off my study streak of these last few months. Trying to get back into DuChinese and 許三觀賣血記 this weekend :)

I'm curious about people's experiences of using AI to help them with their learning. Perhaps particularly relevant to us Chinese learners given the recent success of models like Deepseek.

For me it isn't a primary tool, but I have used ChatGPT in a couple of different ways.

1. Speaking practice

I think the ChatGPT new voice mode is an interesting tool for language practice when you don't have too much access to native speakers.

When I have used it like this, I have prompted it to sort of create a single player role play scenario in Chinese. I then play through it in Chinese.

The biggest downside I'd say is that any hesitation in your speech at all and ChatGPT will interrupt. Not great when it's your second language.

2. Writing analysis

I think it's pretty good for reviewing things you have written.

For e.g. if you've written an email you can share it with ChatGPT and tell it what your intended meaning was in English and the tone you were trying to strike. It will then give suggestions with explanations, for e.g. "this sentence is understandable, but a little bit casual. You can say instead..."

Pretty good for correcting things that, perhaps aren't grammar mistakes but are simply not how a native speaker would phase things.

Anyway, curious to hear how others are making use of AI.

大家好！Due to the previous mod being inactive, I requested to overtake the moderation of this community. I'm usually not the person that likes to moderate, but I like the fediverse and I like Chinese, so it'd feel bad to let this community be ignored. As long as there aren't a huge influx of new people, I'd expect and hope that there won't be too much that I'll have to moderate. If that's the case, I'd gladly take any help that's offered (or maybe someone wants to act as an extra mod already?).

And as for me, I have studied Chinese for a couple of years and I've also lived in Taiwan. My interest in Chinese mainly comes from appreciation of the language itself as well as ancient Chinese culture, religion and poetry. My nickname on here actually comes from the Tang poet Wei Yingwu 韋應物. I'm far from fluent but I hope to keep up this lifelong journey :)

I hope to see this community keep growing!

Being able to access books and apps on a comfortable, distraction-free e-ink screen is pretty amazing. I got a Boox Page just to be able to access more Chinese material in an convenient way on an e-ink screen. DuChinese and Pleco work somewhat smoothly with some tinkering, and surprisingly enough, 微信读书 actually has an e-ink variant of their app: 微信读书墨水屏版. Even without an android e-reader, like if you have a Kobo or similar, it's still great being able to use KOReader coupled with the CC-CEDICT dictionary to read Chinese e-books. All of this has definitely increased my willingness to read in Chinese.

Just started reading 許三觀賣血記 by 余華 as my first real novel... going OK so far, not too many unknown words depending on the page, at least it doesn't feel like a slog to get through. Though I still need to get better at guessing what a sentence means through context, even if I'm missing like 1 one word.

As with previous threads, the idea behind this is to have a - not quite - weekly post where learners of all levels, heritage and native speakers can post the Chinese content they have been consuming this week in whatever form. If people also give an indication of their level (or the level of content) as well it can act as a way for people to discover new content which may be suitable for them.

I'm stealing this idea to get some activity going again. Paraphrasing from the earlier thread:

As with previous threads, the idea behind this is to have a - not quite - weekly post where learners of all levels, heritage and native speakers can post the Chinese content they have been consuming this week in whatever form. If people also give an indication of their level (or the level of content) as well it can act as a way for people to discover new content which may be suitable for them.

I've read extensively using DuChinese for nearly a year now (as just one of many resources) and I'm seriously impressed. Fun, interesting stories with an app that's excellently designed. I'm otherwise super skeptical towards modern language apps and resources, but DuChinese has really been an awesome resource that's increased my reading fluency by a lot.

If you've been thinking about subbing, I'd definitely recommend it. The only issue is that they don't have super many longer stories.

I'm trying my best at home but mostly looking forward to be able to back to Taiwan to study full-time again, hopefully next year

As with previous threads, the idea behind this is to have a - not quite - weekly post where learners of all levels, heritage and native speakers can post the Chinese content they have been consuming this week in whatever form.

If people also give an indication of their level (or the level of content) as well it can act as a way for people to discover new content which may be suitable for them.