hi yunyu! i was wondering if u could share some advice on learning how to read chinese. for context, ive technically studied the language for 10 years but im only at like, the very basic, level. how do you build vocabulary and NOT FORGET IT also what even is grammar. ty for ur time!
CHINESE IS HARD. SO HARD. SO SO SO SO SO HARD TO LEARN TO READ.
I’m here 4 u my friend.
LEARNING THOSE FUCKING CHARACTERS
Radicals are the KEY. You gotta learn them. YOU GOTTA. Make flash cards. Make mnemonics. Visualize how the radical is like its meaning. Once you start seeing most characters as compounds of components, they become MUCH easier.
Radicals are the KEY, part deux: the other reason radicals are the key is because it makes it so much easier to look characters up in dictionaries, if you’re not dealing with a computer character that you can copy and paste. Even when you’re using your smartphone to draw the character, you will much more accurately recreate the character because you’ll be drawing it in the right order.
Principles of stroke order. Muscle memory can work for YOU. And again, computers are much more likely to recognize input when you use proper stroke order.
Manhua is so ideal for practicing Chinese, honestly! You’ve got the pictures right there to help you learn the meaning. A manhua aimed at teens and adults will generally be lower in difficulty than a novel aimed at the same audience, because most of the text in a manhua is dialogue and tends to be straightforward.
GRAMMAR / IS / HIS / MOTHER / POSSESSIVE / WHAT / THING
There are grammar books specifically for Chinese, pick some up. My favourite of the books I own is probably the one called Chinese Grammar Without Tears (although the title is a lie. A lieeeeeee!).
Mentally parsing Chinese into “Chinglish” helps my brain transition into “Chinese mode”. Once I’m in Chinese mode fully, I am thinking totally in Chinese and feel a bit like Neo in the Matrix. But on the way there I do something like this: 那裏有一些忍者在追我。That / place / has / one / some / endure / -er / continuous marker / chase / me.There are some ninja pursuing me there.哎唷! 是你, 你是卡卡西老师, 对不对? 你用忍术变成了我的样子.ai / yo! / is / you / you / is / ka / ka / xi / old / master, / right / not / right? / you / use / endure / technique / change / become / change of state marker / me / possessive marker / appearance / diminutive suffixHey! It’s you, you’re Kakashi-sensei, aren’t you? You used ninjutsu to take my appearance.只求曾经拥有，不求天长地久。only / seek / once / pass / possess / have, not / seek / heaven / long / earth / forever.It’s better to seize the moment, not to look for the eternal. (It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.)I did this instinctively, but there’s a book called Urban Chinese which uses the same approach and calls it Chinglish.The extremely helpful dictionary mdbg.net will do this to a string of text more or less automatically! The machine parsing isn’t perfect but it helps ENORMOUSLY.
Using Chinese disfluency markers (那个，嗯，诶 etc) and liberally peppering your speech with what I will call casualness markers (啦，呀，咧 etc) makes you sound both more authentic and cuter. People will want 2 protect u bc u sound like a smol bean. (STREET SMARTS!)
LEARN THOSE MARKERS. 了 is such a deceptive little bitch! Look at it there, practically just one wiggly line, WHAT IS IT DOING??? COULD BE ANYTHING. This is where the grammar books come in so handy, you just read read read about all the ways that grammatical markers work in Chinese. Because Chinese doesn’t have conjugation, grammatical markers like 了 and 过, in conjunction with “result” suffixes like 到, do all that work.
Long sentences can be very disorienting in Chinese for English speakers because information that grammatically goes at the beginning in one language goes at the end in the other, and also Chinese does this thing where the sentence just keeps going on FOREVER.Hopefully @natiyrm doesn’t mind if I use her NejiTen fic Grill Party as an example of the thing I mean:“本来按照宁次有条不紊的计划，订婚庆祝仪式应该在市内的高级餐厅，邀请两家人吃一顿饭即可，结果不知道谁走漏了风声，在大家的起哄下，变成了今天闹哄哄的烤肉派对，而且还是在宁次平时用来冥想的自家院子里办。”So that’s just one sentence in Chinese, but here’s how I would translate to English:“According to Neji’s typically thorough original plan, the celebration of the engagement ought to have been held in a high class restaurant in the city. Just two families meeting for a meal, that’s all. But somebody, no one knew who, must have leaked it out, and under everybody’s hassling, it turned into today’s wild barbecue party in the inner courtyard. It was being held in Neji’s own private place that he ordinarily used to meditate.”Basically don’t panic with long sentences, just try to break it down.
Hope this helps!
哈哈哈哈哈哈哈考古到羊老师转发注册老师的硬核科普笑到打嗝，天才的中文教材哇！（对不起发现我打漏字了编辑一下TAT）
