JJ Lin’s Tips If You’re Struggling To Learn Mandarin (Or Sing In It) | Talking Point Extra 

*Editor's Note: 04:19 should be "You're cleaner with a 洗澡 (bath), a 冲凉 (shower) you're not as clean.

I find it incredible CNA managed to get JJ Lin here and he offered excellent pro tips and sang a line of chinese song!

Taiwanese here. My understanding of the difference between 沖涼 and 洗澡 is that it's actually more of a matter of regional dialect than actual semantics. You rarely say 沖涼 in Taiwan or Northern China, even if it's a shower v bath. And in Cantonese speaking region, you always say 沖涼，and almost never say 洗澡，whether it be shower or bath.

I grew up in a world of English very much simillar to JJ. When I first start a sales discussion with the mainland Chinese, I realized I was a many many generations behind mastering to a most basic mandarin conversation. From that time on I emphasize more on listening and speaking mandarin. 10 years on I had achieved the decency level in daily mandarin conversation with the mainland

thanks for having JJ here to share his tips on mandarin, his is my idol , such talented musician yet a very humble person

JJ Lin , our SG pride 👍

Love JJ Lin and his music since his first album

The interviewer and JJ Lin are both awesome! I'm going to share these videos to my friends who are learning languages

Thanks for having JJ Lin, I simply love him

wow ! thanks for having JJ here, my favorite idol for almost 20 years ! always feel proud to be his fan

실수를 두려워말구 계속 해나가기 ♡ more JJ LIN 💓💓💓

Steve's dad jokes are on point 😂😂

JJ is so adorable! 🥰

Speaking as an SCGS Secondary alumni who had to sit through MANY Chinese lessons where my bullies would deliberately speak English or Chinese with an ang moh accent in Chinese class, props to Ben Kheng for earnestly trying!

Malaysian origin here. I dont speak mandarin only hokkien as I went to a national school. I spent several years in Singapore building my career but never advanced my mandarin as I could get away with just speaking English. But JJ is right..be encouraging. I remember my first years in Sg my colleague laughed when I tried to say something in mandarin, saying I had a weird Malaysian accent. Needless to say I never attempted it again in front of her and elsewhere

In reality, 洗澡 is really the same as 冲凉. In mandarin, most of the Chinese only say 洗澡, because 冲凉 is a word used Cantonese. Some Chinese may also use 洗澡 in mandarin because their mandarin has been influenced by Cantonese, like maybe they also Cantonese speakers. In mandarin, 洗澡 is general concept of taking off all your clothes, and cleaning your whole body. So even if you are going to take a bath, you can sitll say 洗澡，though if you wanna be specific, you can say 泡澡. In Cantonese, it's the same. If you are going to take a bath and you wanna be specific, you can say 浸浴。

so happy to see jj lin...im indonesian fans xihuan jj lin from 2007

That's how I got to know about JJ Lin's music, I started studying mandarin and surrounded myself with the language all I could, including the music I hear.

I love JJ Lin and all of his songs, ♥️♥️♥️♥️

JJ will always be Singapore's pride 💜

I'm actually learning mandarin through his songs😍

Always feel proud to be JJ ‘s fan

The point he made about fast speed of the language is one of my barriers in learning Mandarin. If I speed down a Mandarin lesson it's easier for me, especially since it's a tonal language and even more foreign for an English speaker.

JJ Lin💜

WOW JJ ❤

OMG 😆 JJ Lin is on CNA ✌️✌️✌️

jj lin!!!

Perfect 👌 Thanks jj. ❤🌻👍

JJ Lin ❤️ 😍😍😍😍🤩🤩🤩🤩 More JJ Lin 😁

WOW JJ LIN

Yo JJ you can't just assault me with that melodious voice out of the blue like that man

Love JJ so much.

JJ is on CNA?? WHATTT?? 🤩 🤩 🤩

好帅啊！老林😘

JJLin 👍🏻

His songs are among the best. I use his songs to learn Mandarin.

Thank you guys! 👍👍👍

wow jj

JJ lin is effectively bilingual!

Omg jj Lin🤗🤗🤗🤗💝

沖涼, 巴士 are words used in Cantonese, which have the same meaning as 洗澡 and 公交 in Mandarin or written Chinese

Who’s going to JJ’s concert???

Ermmm oops JJ, your advice came a bit too late for me HAHAHAH already graduated from sec school like three years ago already lmaooo. But the weird thing is that I really hated learning Chinese in school, but in around like upper sec, I started listening to some of your songs, then when I graduated and moved on to post-sec education, I started getting more interested in relearning Chinese because I got more interested in Chinese entertainment, and it all started coz I wanted to watch your interviews and understand what you were saying, coz most of your interviews didn’t have engsubs, since your music and all were more catered to the Chinese side. And then from there, I found more singers and idols to stan, and started getting more interested in the language.

JJ LIN AGING LIKE FINE WINE WOWWW

天呐 唱的那两句好好听😭😭

After school I throw away the Chinese, but company send me to China, I quickly pick it up and relearn all for economic reason😅 I now love using Chinese more than English.

I think listening and sing Chinese song do help In certain extend. I am bad in Chinese tbh . But when I started listen to Chinese music I passed my Chinese .

ok now i'm going to check out 那些你很冒险的梦 video

Cantonese here.冲凉and 洗澡are same thing. The term 冲凉more use in south China like us. 洗澡is more formal and use in north China. “Bath” is 泡澡.

My experience is the opposite of those of most Singaporeans. To me, my mother tongue Chinese is, naturally, the easiest of all the languages. I spent much much more time to learn English than Chinese. Chinese is very straight forward and is based on simple logic, while English has been polluted with different European languages (French, Italian, Greek, German, Dutch, etc.) throughout the past centuries that we now find so many different rules, exceptions to the rules (irregulars) and "junks" inside English. 大家来学华语/中文 !

I know when he said to listen to more JJ Lin it was meant to be a joke but my mum really let me listen to Mandarin songs to help me improve in the language and it actually helped. I rmb '豆浆油条' and '老鼠爱大米' were the first songs I learnt through singing karaoke lmao.

看到JJ心裡立馬浮現成語--路易威登

Didn't know JJ Lin was bad in Chinese his so fluent in it.

I originally from china (living there for 16 years) but cannot tell difference between 洗澡 and 冲凉 lol. Personally I use 洗澡 more often and I think 洗澡 is for both bath n shower, 冲凉 is for shower only. More often If bath I say 泡澡 instead. But it doesn’t mean jjlin is wrong cuz different regions have different language speaking practices

A) these are excellent tips to learning any new language. Immersion or learn through breaking down songs/phrases little by little. B) Unfortunately, for Chinese, the language is a bit brutal with the tones and the lack of an alphabet meaning that at the end, there's a lot of memory work to build vocab. C) I'm kinda impressed that difficulty with Mandarin is something shared by three generations of ACS boys. As a person who definitely was not the most kentang guy in a school famed for kentang, I definitely have no idea what it feels like to completely struggle with the forced "mother tongue" that one's own father who also did not definitely go to the same school was totally definitely able to speak. In defence of the school, which I definitely did not go to for more than a decade, and to be absolutely fair, the Anglo part of ACS does come be for the Chinese bit. Its not China Free International School or Sino-England School... D) I honestly think things would have been a bit better if we would have learnt our "dialects" I. E. Cantonese, Hokkien etc. I understand the national policies around learning Mandarin but it's hard to see how useful it really is when everyone around you has learnt it as a second language or just doesn't use it. As a kid, you can't see the relevance. If I had learnt Hokkien, I'd have been better able to communicate with my other Grandma and the elder generation. Sadly, the languages of our elders will likely be lost here in the next generation. E) To end on a more upbeat note, it's worth browsing the Wikipedia article of our Mandarin here in Singapore and just seeing what a huge influence Hokkien and Cantonese have on the way we speak. J. J mentions the words "Chong Liang" in the video. That term is a Cantonese term just said in Mandarin. I can tell you when I lived in Taiwan, absolutely no one knew what I was saying when I used the term. Other dialect terms I honestly didn't know where dialect terms include kailan and ha chiong gai though I did some what guess the latter wasn't Mandarin... Yeah people had no idea what that was about. Anyway thanks for coming to my Ted Talk!! This has been Der Fledermausmann (the Batman)!! *Fades stealthily into the night*

In northern of China, 冲凉 means shower with cold water, 洗澡 is with warm water. 冲凉 in summer, 洗澡 in winter. So many years ago when I came to SG, my house owner said to me can use the toilet to 冲凉. Then I thought what?! Don’t allow me use the water heater?

One tip I got from my drama group senior on sounding more 标准 and less Hokkien (no offence) - is to take note of the Chinese words starting with X, J & Q. Eg. 心 （Xin）， 杰(Jie), 情 (Qing). Imagine that there is an invisible “h” in the hanyu pinyin, and try to pronounce them with a little 翘舌. Eg. 心 X(h)in， 杰 J(h)ie, 情 Q(h)in. Just a little, not too much, or you will sound like an Ang Mo.

No lie, my Chinese really improved from listening to JJ's songs.

It is so interesting to hear JJ’s Singaporean accent. I guess his accent comes back a little bit as soon as he speaks with the Singaporean. Anyway it’s kinda cute though lol

Omji, JJ Lin. The one and only song i know is ta shuo/she says? I really love it, the MV is so relate to all heart broken girl (like me lol) The girl is also special, usually always shining shimering splendid model. Greeting from Indonesia

good tips

It is very true when sometimes we read comment and indicate comment being deleted esp from cna.. So is true after my testing..

Watching this is like attending a Chinese lesson in school 😂

Also yeah, everyone’s tip when learning another language is to speak with the locals, or people who are native speakers of that language, because then they can correct you if needed

HE LOOKS SO GOOD IN THAT OUTFIT???

💖

Haha, Steve and JJ look like brothers. 失散多年的親兄弟??😜

清唱太好听了吧🥹

In Hakka we use "洗身“ for shower or bath.

Funny lol I really think 沖涼 is more of Chinese speaker, and 洗澡 is more of Taiwanese saying thou🤔🤔 my point of view of “quick shower” is 沖澡 or 沖洗😅 it’s tricky to fill in the blanks😆

@CNAInsider and @jjlin is there an ISO Standard or some internationally recognised standard for a "Shower" vs a "Bath"?!?!

Also, love how you can still detect a slight Singlish accent under his usual American(??) accent lol!!

Imo, listening to mandarin songs is great in picking up new vocabs (unless you are talking about those meow meow meow songs), but not that great in helping you to understand the grammar. For example, 那些你很冒险的梦 is not grammatically correct, but you can pick up vocab like 冒险

Is feng he re li one of the cheng yu’s Steve learnt ? I can safely say almost everyone knows this Chinese composition starter😂😂😂

When Can We listen to #stevenchia singing to this full Song Those Were The Days aka Na Xie Ni Hen Mao Xian De Meng #thosewerethedays by #jjlin 05:01

JJ don't need to teach me to sing his songs, I already know all of them... not even Chinese or of Chinese descent....

haha 沖涼 is mainly used in Hong Kong, perhaps more Taiwanese used the Canton terms. lol

Us taiwanese never say “沖涼” cuz thats more of a Cantonese term. 洗澡 doesn’t necessary mean bath.

A tip for youngsters to learn Chinese faster..... If they love costume drama or Chinese drama.... I use to buy I weekly every week and learn to read the whole magazine because I want to know about the celebrities. 😂 Also when I watch Chinese drama I keep the Chinese cc on.... I can better understand that Chinese char from the lines of those drama. 😂

He's already 40+ but still looks like in his 20s.

His skin is sooooo good as a 40 year old!

冲凉 is used more in Cantonese , there is only洗澡 in Mandarin.

Is "chong liang" an archaic saying in Mandarin or something? It's still commonly used in Cantonese.

When you’re mixing English and Chinese language into a song, sometimes the sounds flow but the specific combination might not work. Like when he came out with saranghae means I love you, the Koreans initially found it to be too cringeworthy but after a while for various reasons just said it was “cute” and he made a good attempt. I just think if you’re going to produce a movie, music, something that costs so much to make, at least ask the natives what they think.

How did JJ Lin cope with the sudden change to traditional Chinese fan ti zi in Taiwan? Curious.

Malaysian Chinese in KL here. Went to UCL, world's top 8 uni, and lived and worked oversea for the past 15 years. Fluent speaker of Mandarin, Cantonese, English and Bahasa with moderate fluency of hokkien/taiwanese, hakka and hainanese. Used to understand french and italian but now forgetting because long not in use. My ancestry is hainanese/hakka/cantonese. In Malaysia, especially in KL, multilingualism is daily life. Don't understand what is the struggle here. Singapore used to be as multilingual as Malaysia before 1980s. The problem here is the consequence of LKY's unnnecessary cultural genocide on chinese dialects and chinese vernacular school that made singaporean incompetent and limited.

Continuing on from the line JJ Lin sang, 我陪你去疯，折纸飞机碰到雨天终究会坠落

don't let this interview take away the fact that he is wearing a Bored Ape Yatch Club tshirt

请保留JJ的访问可以看久久!谢谢

do you know why is 沖涼？ its because you mixed the cantonese and mandarin up already. we use different words

我还是第一次见到jj说英语

An important lesson to living in Taiwan! Learn Mandarin whether you are a master, Ph.D. student, or employee! There is nothing bilingual in Taiwan 🇹🇼

see them speak chinese very funny

Every culture got their own style. Same bath can be call differently in China, Taiwan, hongkong, Malaysia. Who to judge that Taiwan mandarin is the absolute correct way? Taiwan hokkien is more commonly spoken than their Chinese. Just the type words Taiwan still using traditional Chinese while China already use simple Chinese.

xizao & chonglieng mean the same thing for me

i thought chong liang = shower and xi zao = bath but when i searched it up they meant the same thing = shower

I thought jjlin grew up speaks chinese. when did he start to learn chinese？

Why can't 冲凉 and 洗澡 be used synonymously

I'm fluent both in Mandarin and English. 中文跟英文真的已經算是很好學的語言了

OMG I feel like every celebrity is wearing this exact same outfit lmao