Thread: Let's practice our Chinese

Do you learn russian at university? actually I think it is more interesting learning in a group than by yourself I learnt for a while by myself. how come no one ever replies to guests?

Ni hao, ren2. Wo3 kan4 bu2 zhe4 yi4gen1. Wo3 ye3 gu1du2 he2 Zhong1guo2. Wo3 shi3 chux1xue2zhe3 Zhong1guo2 de. Qing3 ni3 shi4 zi4you2 dui4 wo3de cuo4 zi4. Xie xie.

My language list;

English- native, hence fluent, though deliberately deface it with my own grammatical conglomerations.

French- I have moments of fluency. So I can feel it coming, but I bumble around most of the time. (My concentration as a person is quite dismal).

Swedish- I know stuff

Danish- I can follow the films to the same degree as Swedish ones (not great), but I don't know as many words so have catching up to do.

Others- I know the alphabets and the basic phrases ('yes', 'how are you?') etc. in maybe 10 other languages. And a further 10, the same deal but haven't stuck them in my mind yet.

My priorities; Perfect my French so I'm 'consistantly' good at it. Become fluent in Mandarin or Cantonese (yet to be decided which one I'd get most conversational interactions with), and Arabic. After that, I'd like to be able to make small-talk in Turkish, German, Spanish and Hindi.
Zen3 me yang4?

I know html Hyper text markup language

Brettyugan, 你怎么不要学俄文? 你常常在MasterRussian,学俄文把! BTW I couldn't understand your pinyin that well, other than that you were saying you learn Chinese and asking to correct you in the last part. What were you trying to say?

BTW, if you can't read characters, download the excellent DimSum program from this site:
http://www.mandarintools.com

Copy, paste, "Annotate Again", and you get popup defs for the characters. Cool, huh?

As for my language list, I used to want to learn bunches of languages, but it's too hard for me, за двумя зайцами погонишься, ни одного не поймешь. I'm concentrating solely on Mandarin Chinese now. I don't know what to do about my Russian; I still make mistakes from time to time and I can pick up most of what they say in movies and news, but I still miss some. I think a trip to a Russian-speaking country is the best thing.

This is what I attempted to say; 1. Hello everyone. 2. I didn't see this thread. 3. I'm also lonely with (my learning of) Chinese. 4. I am a beginner at Chinese. 5. Please feel free to correct my mistakes.

I'm struggling to understand the set-out to my Starters Dictionary. In the English>Chinese part of it, it seems to integrate grammar. (Measure words, perhaps?). Whereas, the Chinese>English half has just raw word I want on its own. So, my context and grammar is not quite existent at this point in time.

Sentence 2-
"yi4gen1" is supposed to be 'thread'. But, I didn't find any translation for it on the Chinese>English side. Perhaps a knowledge of characters is needed before I know exactly which word and accent mark, to look up the word 'thread'.
In my attempt to say "I didn't see (...this thread)", I don't know how to 'past tensify' Chinese sentences. I don't know any non-present tense grammar. I just looked for the word 'past' in the dictionary, but didn't use it because I'd have been just clutching at straws to say "Me no see word for past tense this thread". It felt, i dunno.. just not correct.
Sentence 3-
I looked up the word 'lonely' on the English side of the dictionary and found "gu1du2". But again, I couldn't find this pinyin in the Chinese side. So, I most probably (certainly?) mis-used this word.

I dread to find out what Bretyugan means in Russian. I think VM or bad manners suggested it was a derogatory thing? The reason I dread it is because Professor Brettigan was my nick-name, and one freind still calls me that. So I hope he doesn't discover any derogatory Russian translation.

At this time, I've not gone into characters with any depth at all. I only know how to recognize a couple of the simpler ones, and know how they came into being. Basically, I've only pursued character 'theory', as yet.
Sometimes the characters do show up on the screen, sometimes it doesn't. I don't know why that is.
I'd like anyone's take on what I wrote in pinyin, and see if you can enlighten some of my short-comings? Xie xie.

A valiant effort, Brett! But oftentimes you can't translate directly from English to other languages and this is no exception. I really doubt that the Chinese use the word "thread" as in "a piece of string you use to sew stuff" in the meaning "collection of replies to a post on an internet forum." Problem is I don't know the right word for it either. But I'd say something like "wo3 mei2 kan4jian4 zhe4ge...(thread)."

3. I'm also lonely with (my learning of) Chinese.
It sounds kind of strange in English but I think that the use of "lonely" in the English version is almost idiomatic, and you know how it goes when you try to translate that type of thing.

1. Hello everyone
I think 大家好(da4 jia1 hao3) is probably the best way to say this.

4. I am a beginner at Chinese.
Hrmmm...I could rephrase it, but I'm not sure how I would say it exactly like that.

5. Please feel free to correct my mistakes.
Ah, I dunno!

BTW learner's dictionaries often leave out things here and there on either side, but I'm a bit confused why you couldn't find it. It's a pinyin dictionary, right? Thing is, say you are looking for "yigen." There are many characters which are pronounced "yi", so you have to find the right character and then look it up. At least that's how the one I have works.

I suggest you start looking at radicals and that you buy one of those books that shows you how some of the characters developed, the ones that have a symbolic meaning, anyway. They account for less than 10% of all characters I think but it's fun to look at how they developed.

About the characters showing up it's an encoding problem, they should show up if you pick any GB encoding.

Also, I was writing why don't you want to learn Russian? You certainly spend a lot of time on MR

I just found da4jia1 in my dictionary. I didn't realize they were two sepreate words. But, I'm now reminded that every multi-syllable word is always made up of two seperate ones. So, yes I've found it, the hard way. You wrote the two words (da4 and jia1) seperately this time. I assume though, it was for my benefit? But, in the greeting, it'd be one word I'd guess? "Da4jia1 hao3"?
I need to learn characters to better utilize my dictionary (and learning in general). It does explain character development. I'm only now starting to realize that learning characters does actually help your ability to find your way around pinyin, somehow. I really must read all the sections in my dictionary. I tend to jump into the deep end too early. No patience . I think I've been mistaken that ignoring the characters is helpful for beginning. It seems I'm missing some helpful learning tools for the spoken language.

Why my Russian's not going anywhere? I've made a conscious effort to finally get my footing in Arabic and Chinese. I've neglected these two languages for too long. But I've got a fun Russian cassette/book program that I busting to use, but I've been exercising discipline by saying "No, your Chinese and Arabic are the ones you'll use everyday. Do one of those". So, it's out of sacrifice, not dis'interest that my Russian has taken a rest before it's really even begun.

Yes, it's one word, can't remember why I wrote it like that.

Characters are awesome, and they will help you learn Chinese. So you should learn them.

I've got a miniscule repetoire of characters, and was just flicking through a Japanese friends Japanese book. They have three written forms of their own, Chinese characters for words their scripts haven't accounted for, and romanization. Except for romanization, all these scripts are mixed together. I didn't know that. I was pleased with myself when I correctly recognized a few character amongst the tumoil. She explained how they all fit together though. Only one of the Japanese native scripts is an alphabet. The other two are characters. As is my understanding. Having this little success has inspired me to click into Chinese mode again. And pick up a bit of Japanese too. My country has so many Japanese people, though I don't know how many have permanent residency. Not many, I'm sure. I think most of our Japanese are either tourists, on work visas, or on work experience for their companies. Maybe to pick up a lived-in competence of English in their field of expertise, rather than just rigid formally taught English.

As far as I remember Japanese use a combination of Chinese characters and two syllabaries. The hiragana is for writing grammatical endings and Japanese words that don't have characters(for example, "anata") and the katakana is for writing foreign-derived words. Or looking cool. I used to have a little book that explained etymologies of some characters, although it explained the Japanese usage and pronunciation, not the Chinese one.

你好! 我叫古丽. 我也学习汉语. 你学汉语多年了?

我学了几个月了。但是现在没有时间，功课太多！

Wo3 kan4 le3 zai4 forum yi1. Ta1men xie3 yi2ge pinyin dan1ci2 he2 er4 bu4fen. Ye3 ta1men gei3 kan4 le3 tones.
- I was reading another forum, and they wrote double-syllable pinyin words seperately. eg wo3men---> wo men. And, no-one seemed to use this number code that we use to denote the tones.
I know that each syllable represents one character, but I thought in pinyin a double-syllable word was supposed to have both syllables joined. Is this not a rule? And, it seems counter-productive to not use the numbering code to denote tones when in the learning process.

This is how they would write what I wrote-

Wo kan le zai forum yi. Ta men xie yi ge pin yin dan ci he er bu fen. Ye ta men gei kan le tones.

I find this less educational as far as prepping one's memory of tones for the spoken language.
If I was to write the way I do (but with comprehensible grammar ), would people find it strange. I guess I don't trust the group's judgement to ask them directly, even though some of them are Chinese. Because I have no intention of not using this number code (eg. xie4xie etc.), because it totally helps me remember the tones for when it comes time for the spoken language. And, when I read others, I can sound the tones out in my head, too. I don't understand why beginners don't use it. Maybe this code just isn't that common.
(Though, I have now posted a thread showing this code. But, I don't really get the impression anyone will use it).

And, on that Chinese site you mentioned Prav, I resistered. Providing I get in, wo3de ming2zi shi4 "Ulven" .

Hmm. It just might be a habit of people over there. Technically, it should be "yi ge", spaced like that, though I usually see "women." At any rate, you shouldn't concern yourself too much about ways of writing pinyin; I'm sure there is some official way of doing it that some people follow and some don't. I haven't been on Chinese forums lately; it's actually kind of boring compared to this one.

I don't think there's any 'official' way as such, at least not in practice ... nobody ever uses it (except to help them type on a computer). Kids, I think, are shown it and use it but I don't know exactly how or how much.

All my learning products join the words 'women' and yige', including my Oxford Starters Dictionary, Routledge Colloquial Chinese and Language30/Chinese, so it can't be too unusual for others, I'd assume. In any case, I have no intention of changing the number system, anyway, and I quite like joining the word's syllables. It's just good to know what others are doing.

Xie4xie.