Saying "我不說中文" (I don't speak Chinese) instead of "我不會說中文" (I can't/don't know how to speak Chinese) makes it sound like you're refusing to speak it (as in "I don't drink"), which honestly fits the gigachad energy way more.
Is the 中文 the best choice here? For some reason I thought it is for written language, while there is 漢語 for the spoken. Also by Chinese we usually mean a specific dialect putonghua. So for me it a bit hard to understand what 會説中文 actually means.
@@BestHolkin (Sorry for the long post in advance. I really have a habit of rambling esp. when it comes to languages...) TL;DR: Using 中文 in this way is pretty normal in everyday contexts, though the word is ambiguous and does not have a consistent usage. From my experience, lay people use the term 中文 annoyingly ambiguously (imho lol), which could either mean the whole Chinese language family or Standard Chinese (Mandarin/Putonghua). But I don't think the distinction between the spoken and written language is drawn in most everyday contexts. So saying "我會說中文" or "我不會說中文" is perfectly acceptable, again, in most contexts, barring some specific circumstances. As for 漢語, it is somehow used just as ambiguously, and is treated as a synonym of 中文, but with a more formal connotation. You don't really hear the term in daily conversations. Within the PRC, people call Standard Chinese 普通話 (Putonghua), but they also sometimes use it interchangeably with 中文. Outside of the PRC, the term Putonghua isn't really used. In Taiwan for example, it's common to call it 國語 (the national language), which is also used interchangeably with 中文 for some reason, despite it not being technically correct since the government now recognizes multiple national languages. Chinese-speaking linguists, on the other hand, often refer to Standard Chinese as 華語 to distinguish it from other Chinese languages, which is what I stick with, as a pedant that I am, when I try to be clear. However, lay people by and large have not caught on to this usage, and doing so normally just confuses the hell out of them. So, in conclusion... idk what word to use when referring to Standard Chinese and it's been bugging me for years
@@BestHolkin Here's the summary. In daily life we seldom use those academic words such as 漢語, just like most people even never hear about "Mandarin" instead of "Chinese". We simply say 講中文 (speak Chinese) or 寫中文 (write in Chinese).
With learning Chinese, at first it seems super hard, but then you actually dive into learning it and so many things seem so easy and straightforward, but then moving through the language there are unexpected bits that make the language harder, such as memorizing all the dozens of synonyms a word can have and homophones and words with MANY different meanings. I agree that the varieties of chines sound beautiful, and I love the caterpillar diagrams you drew to represent the 5 tones!
As a native speaker of High Valyrian living on Mars, I can confirm that your Chinese accent is solid and is more than enough to shock natives and make them spontaneously combust
@@nobleondynamite5157 Yep. Though I cannot vouch for how good that course actually is, but it's almost pointless anyway as it's a lesser known and unrelated conlang (when compared with Esperanto at least).
High Valyrian is a dead language. No one speaks it anymore except law professors and clergy. Pick a spoken language like Asapori Valyrian or Yunkai Valyrian so you can actually communicate with the locals when you visit.
The coolest thing about Chinese is that it's a perfect language for fast reading. Chinese speakers are never afraid of subtitles in movies since you just take a glance at a sentence and you will get the whole idea without even thinking about it. That's the power of logogram.
That's true btw, idk if you're being sarcastic or not, but I've been studying Chinese for just 1 year and if subtitles are mostly made of characters that I already know, I can read them pretty fast
@@sasino Yep, can confirm. I committed treason to Kim Jong Un by watching a (what I assume is North) Korean Drama's Chinese dub and subtitles. Felt dirty, but was comprehensible. And then I watched Alice in Borderland (1st season; 2nd out now) just with Chinese subtitles and even though I can read maybe 200 characters confidently max, I understood the Sushi language much better that way. I guess, practice makes the master.
@@whohan779As a native Chinese speaker, understanding the kanji in Japanese sometimes makes you understand the context and even the meaning of the entire sentence, really useful indeed.
@@EpiCrimson Yeah, there's many occasions where a character is exactly the same (apart from the fontset, since Japanese has its own). Several simple concepts get lost in translation anyways, but sometimes it helps with synonyms as many Japanese Kanji expressions are merely outdated/deprecated Chinese ones (obviously usually different pronunciation). For this reason I think an intermediate or below may confuse a sentence in Kanji for being Ming Dynasty or prior Chinese or in some cases even modern. The fact that Japanese Kanji don't strictly depict one syllable, enables very condensed written speech if certain Kana aren't used (useful for gaming speedruns). Learning Chinese first, I still think it could use a few Kana-like grammar points.
0:06 "我不说中文" can be literally translated as "I don't speak Chinese", but it sounds like you're saying that you don't usually speak Chinese or you're refusing to speak Chinese, like when you say "I don't lie". The correct way is "我不会说中文" (I can't speak Chinese). 5:30 That's not even a tone in Chinese, man. 7:58 That's not how it works, actually. It sounds weird if you just say "我吃" or "我吃了". It's really hard to explain but basically there's no context and it doesn't sound natural, it's not what a normal person would say. In many languages we can say "I ate" and people will understand that we ate a meal, and not just a candy or something, even if you didn't specify what you ate, but it's not like that in Chinese. Te correct way to say "I ate" is "我吃饭了" that literally means "I ate" or "I ate meal" (depending on if you consider 饭 a noun or part of the verb "eat"), but its connotation is more like: "I already ate a meal", or something like that. "吃" by itself is used when you specify what you're eating, for example: 我在吃一个苹果 (I am eating an apple). 8:02 Same thing, "吃" should be "吃饭" and 会(huì) is not the best option in that case. You should say "我要吃饭". "我会吃饭" is like you plan to eat but you're not completely sure if you will be able to. I hope this helps :)
As a Chinese person, I'd say that its difficulty depends on your target. If you just want to know the basic and impress some random native speaker, you can do it in just a couple of days. But on the way to a higher level, you will discover so many tricky things that it makes it almost impossible to archive a near native level. The problem is the vocabulary, especially the compound words. To pick the right one in the right context is even a challenge for native speakers. Because since the grammar system is so simplified, you need a gigantic amount of vocabulary to be able to make a good expression. So you can make yourself understood in Chinese fairly easily, sure. But to make your expression truly right and even beautiful is a totally different thing.
@@Cloudkirb Not just i'm afraid. Depends on how you define "fluent". My German colleague, being a passionate language learner and having been living in China for more that four years, could definitely make himself understood in writing (although with tons of mistakes). But with speaking, you have to play a guessing game with him. It's a combination of using wrong words, questionable sentence structure (yes there is definitely grammar in Chinese as well, just not that systematic as the European languages) and tonal problems.
As a Chinese, I’d like to add a funny fact , we have so many dialect that different place people pronounce the same word different, and some is extremely hard to understand even for Chinese (the extreme situation happens in 2 villages, distance between them is less than 20km , cannot understand each other’s accent) but once we see the characters, we can find even in the ancient time, in the same period, people write almost the same style. This is what we call “write with the same characters, Drive with the same trail.” From qin’s 1st emperor.
For your next video will you review the dialect of American known as "English"? It is a backwater dialect of American spoken in an island nation that is north of France - sort of the Japan of the West. But they don't speak Japanese; they speak a dialect of American - and instead of an emperor, they have a king. For unknown reasons these islanders spell the word "color" with an extraneous "u." They are disinclined to pronounce the letter "r." Also, they refer to cookies as "biscuits." Why do they debase the American language in this way?
@@jaylewis9876 I wish american had a national language. Im not a a native american speaker and it's very hard to pick a way to pronounce some things like: neither
Hey I'm Taiwanese and thank you for mentioning Taiwan. It's ok to call us a country or a chinese province. I don't mind. Most of the videos just totally ignore us, we appreciate it that our name appeared in the video.
Normal Americans will have this very distinguishable accent, when speaking Chinese compared to local Chinese speakers (it is very hard to learn a very good Chinese accent, but if you’re Chinese, it’s easy)
Finnish is truly a gigachad language but very difficult to learn Yall that the saying "Ask a finnish person to teach you finnish and you have a friend for life. Not because they appreaciate the sentiment but because it takes exactly that long for you to learn it" The Hungarians have unlocked cheat codes tho.
As a hyper polyglot giga chad white guy who speaks Chinese fluently. I was in a park in shanghai today talking to my friends and had 3 different locals come up to me and freak out over my Chinese. I have taken the language to an extreme level where I now speak two dialects of Chinese (Shandongese and shanghainese) for additional shock factor
You’ve not learned traditional Chinese characters…. These are all simplified communist characters. You should support Taiwan 🇹🇼 (a free country) that has preserved the traditional characters used for thousands of years...
@@MrKoalaburger why that ? It uses a convinient case system that tells you the function of a noun in a sentence which allows for a more flexible word order.
@JW-ph8kw honestly a magnitude of four-character compounds are being seen everywhere even in our daily lives. Fair to say it's not easy to command the language even for native speakers.
The hardest thing in learning Chinese in my opinion is that it's ambiguous all the time. Take "wo我 hui會 chi吃" as an example, it can mean "I will eat" or "I know how to eat" or even "I would choose to eat", depending on the context.
if u think about it english is all about context as well. when i have to translate a word to my italian friends i always ask: yeah but in which context? because english has lots of words that change the whole sentence. it’s fun if you think about it :) try to consume lots of chinese media like cartoons so u get used to those weird combinations
As a Chinese, I think the "ambiguity" you said is instead a way of simplicity and concision😂 When we learn other languages, we always get so confused why there exists verb conjugation!😵💫😵💫
You've discovered the difference between analytic languages and synthetic languages. 😉The problem? How to resolve ambiguity. The solution? For analytic languages, usually auxiliary words and word order. For synthetic languages, usually word conjugation and tenses. Chinese and English are analytic languages. Spanish and Finnish are synthetic languages.
@@yuqinggus2701 english is dumb but in other languages you can write the sentence in any order and its the conjugation and inflections that make that possible. time for my racist bit - the reason china never produced great science and philosophy is because the language is too loose. languages like german are much better at constructing a complicated system of thought.
Russian is so easy dude, it's a properly standardized language that has tons of content to learn from. Try learning something harder like Polish, Czech or even Slovenian. Multiple types of conjugations and declensions for each gender, without any pattern behind it, single plural AND Dual conjugation.
Haha, nice. When you started, you sounded a bit like "小马在纽约" xiaomanyc, only that you didn't claim to speak "PERFECT Mandarin to show xyz on the streets". Same level of pronunciation. Love your comedy about the people who SHOCK Chinese by speaking their language. And it really works. I come into a round of Chinese, they ask me "你会说中文吗？" and I answer a simple "会" (really, not more than just repeating one of the words they just asked me) and they nearly fall off their chairs and compete to praise my perfect Mandarin skills. I wondered many times if it would be worth to give up my self-respect and honor and just make money with such videos as xiaomanyc. It's just too easy to impress Chinese. Bad thing about that is that you'll rarely get valid feedback from Chinese. They are all like "哇，中文通。", "your Chinese is perfect, I can't distinguish it from a native Chinese speaker" and so on. Even if you say "泥号，卧角小马", they'll praise you and tell you that you've already exceeded any living Chinese person in your language. In the beginning, it's motivating, later, it's frustrating because you are on your own to improve or get into this delusional world of thinking that you are really awesome while in reality, your language skills suck. I pride myself in speaking pretty descent Mandarin with good pronunciation but if I record myself speaking longer and more complex sentences, I can still hear that I'm a foreigner. But Chinese always tell me how they wouldn't be able to distinguish me from a Chinese if they hadn't seen that I'm a 2m tall white guy who doesn't have any Chinese features. Maybe on the phone and maybe if I limit myself to shorter sentences but not for a longer conversation. Or they'll think I'm from another province and just accept the one or two tone mistakes. Mandarin is really easy for my kids. My 3yr old could read simple sentences very easily because it's like in her picture book. One image = one word. But later, it becomes much worse because there are so many similar characters and homophones. The limitation of "syllables" makes it easy to get the pronunciation right (if you have a talent for tonal languages) if you invest enough time because as soon as you got all those right, you can basically say any new word. (ok, tones will vary if the words are spoken in a sentence but if you also got that right, nothing can stop you) I totally gave up on handwriting but can type and read more or less everything I can speak, read books, watch subtitled movies, etc.
As a Chinese, i don’t fully understand his tone in which he has a very unique accent in Chinese which i find hard to fully process. Like when he said 说 shuō it sounded like shuò 0:07
Remember that the Chinese language has a really unique writing system compared with the latin languages, knowing how to pronounce the chinese doesn’t mean knowing how to write it, and the chinese characters are actually more closely related to the culture.
Third tone mark was upside down 😁 As a learner of Chinese, I found this video very funny, mostly correct. It's an amazing language, sounds beautiful and it is often very logical. If you want a real challenge and a good language for your language review, try my native, Czech 😂
Well, as a native Chinese, it's not as easy as foreigners or beginners think. To reach a level where you can carry a conversation in Chinese is not too hard, but there are two more things I would like to dress. Idioms 成語 and ancient Chinese 文言文. Idioms are quite unique, and require a lot of learning, and they don't always mean what they directly translate to. For example, 臥薪嘗膽 means lying down and licking a bitter object. However what it actually means in a sentence is to work hard and improve. Also, the ancient Chinese is like another language on its own. Many idioms derive from these stories, and to learn the language to a high proficiency, it is necessary. One word has an extreme amount of meanings in passages, so it isn't as easy as what it is said in the video. With this, I'd just like to share my opinions on Chinese, and how a local perceives the difficulty of Mandarin Chinese.
9:00 I would not say it's accurate but it's definitely not far from the truth! One of the most frequently cited Chinese sayings goes ' Having a friend from afar, isn't that an exiting and pleasing thing? ' And speaking some basic Chinese is always seen as good sign for friendship. Just plz don't keep saying 'Bing Ji Lin'... Ice creams are better consumed with mouth not ears...
How not to feel embarrassed when speaking Chinese? I usually nail accents and pronunciation with no issues. However, Mandarin Chinese makes it a bit more challenging because, well, it is trickier and the fact I cringe (at myself) somewhat creates a mental blockade. Any suggestions, please?
No worries！Just calm down and try to employ your vocabulary to speak. The more you use them, the more you get familiar and confident. Imagine you’re singing when dealing with the tones🤣As Chinese, I feel really surprised when I hear people from other countries speak Mandarin😊加油🎉
I had a similar experience with Vietnamese in the past. I began learning Vietnamese a while ago (stopped after some time), and while practicing the tones, even though I was all alone in my house, reproducing the tones made me cringe. A way I combat this is thinking that what I'm doing is not cringe, but really cool instead. It's like I forcefully switch the way I see it, from cringe to cool, and try to convince me of that. I hope that helps!
Chinese is hard and not as universal as English, so Chinese people will be impressed even if you just babble a few words, also at least me and the people around me are definitely guys that are willing to help if you have problems with it.
As someone who has learned mandarin for years (i'm fluent) i can say that the writing and tones do make the language very difficult but the main difficulty is actually the fact that one word (single syllable words) can have DOZENS, yes DOZENS of different meanings. Like take "shi" for example, not only it has 4 tones with 4 different meanings, EACH TONE HAS LIKE 20 DIFFERENT MEANINGS! Seriously! So not even tones are enough to tell the words apart, you just gotta guess it from the context. And "shi" isn't an exception, almost all Chinese words have like dozens of different meanings attributed to the same EXACT sound with the same tone. This is nuts, because in most other languages, you can only find 4-5 words like that whereas in Chinese its the ENTIRE LANGUAGE. And the fact that grammar is insanely easy and simple, does not make it easier, it makes it HARDER! because simple grammar means no clue to whether a word is a noun, adjective, verb or conjunction word. Take English for ex, any word that ends with "-tion" is a noun, or at least 99% of the time. When you hear "-ing" at the end of a word, you can safely assume its a verb. But in Chinese, you don't have any of those clues! So understanding a conversation thoroughly is very difficult. In fact, Chinese might be the only language I can think of where listening is harder than speaking. Pretty much any other language in the world, you'd start understanding before you can speak, but with simple grammar, starting to form sentences in Chinese actually takes much less time than properly understanding what is being told to you. Also, thanks for the great content and I'd love to watch if you review my native language; Turkish!
Its very interesting for me as a Chinese cuz I never got the chance to stand at your point of view. thanks for sharing your experience, I never thought that grammar could be the difficult part 🙃
@@cottonbomb8272 grammar itself is easy. It's the simplicity of the grammar that makes the other aspects of Chinese harder. But I'm glad you appreciated my comment.
@@tyunpeters3170 我(I, me)窝(nest, curl)喔(wow)握(handle)卧(lay down)沃(fertile)倭(short)涡(vortex)莴(lettuce), etc... and the list just goes on if you type it in the Chinese input system😂
no but jokes aside they really do have a phonetic alphabet that was used before pinyin was introduced. it was called zhuyin aka bopomofo and it's still used in taiwan,, if you want to learn mandarin it helps to try it
@@sasino im literally chinese but when i learnt pinyin my spoken manderin got so much worse because all of a sudden i was relating it to english when the phonetics are actually completely different. i still use pinyin to type tho
@@mr.duckie._. Why are you Googling RU-vidrs? Lmao. And I can do math, genius. I asked if he really was born in 1998 because he looks closer to 40. Get some reading comprehension. Anyone can say they're a certain age- just because the internet believes and repeats it doesn't actually make it true.
Aside from Video main content, which i really want to thank the author for his effort, but anyway... Is USA a freedom country? That's a good joke 😂 Just go outside and say Free Palestine loudly and boom! You get arrested for no clear reason... You see as an American you don't have one of the most basic rights that represents Freedom which is the right to have your own opinion!
@@trunksbrief6728 don’t be rude just because not a lot of people speak doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be included. Not a lot of people speak Navajo but it’s a beautiful Native American language. There is more rare languages that are underrated and amazing. A benefit of rare languages is the you can scream and curse at anyone and nobody knows what you are saying.
@@TheAmericanCatholic Only if the language isn't close to another big one anyway. Luxembourgian is also its own tiny language and I understand a lot of it knowing German, English and some French & Dutch.
@@trunksbrief6728 Its a review. I just want to hear the funny side of the language and history behind it. Even If only 4million people in world speak it doesnt mean its irrelevent it is one of the oldest surviving languages out there. Thats why a lot of linguists are intrested in it.
I started learning mandarin Chinese last year because my grandfather was Chinese and then realized 6 months later that he spoke an entirely different dialect of Chinese. Maybe it's not that different idk
chinese dialects arent technically dialects cuz dialect means its a derived language but the "dialects" are actually what chinese is derived from. so yeah theyre similar but different
Well if it was Cantonese, the written language of chinese for both are the same so if you were to write him he would understand, but if it is spoken then you may need to start over :/
Chinese is only one language in which I couldn't determine any sound. There was some chinese students in my university and their conversation seemed to me like a noise of wind in the trees😅
1:16 It's called imperialism. It's like when Americans send peace troops into a country but instead of performing a coup and moving out they stay there
I challenge you with this story if you claim you know Chinese: 石室诗士施氏，嗜狮，誓食十狮。施氏时时适市视狮。十时，适十狮适市。是时，适施氏适市。施氏视是十狮，恃矢势，使是十狮逝世。氏拾是十狮尸，适石室。石室湿，氏使侍拭石室。石室拭，施氏始试食是十狮尸。食时，始识是十狮尸，实十石狮尸。试释是事。
I wonder if knowing Vietnamese would give you a little leg up in learning Chinese? (our language is tonal and we import a decent amount of Chinese vocab) BTW: Language Simp, pls review the Vietnamese language. And don't worry, we don't hate Americans :))
Yes, same if you speak Korean or Japanese, you could occasionally confuse some words' meaning due to them changing meaning in different ways in these languages but overall it would be helpful.
I think Chinese should be easy for Vietnamese speakers. After all, Chinese grammar is easy and the difficulty for English speakers lies mainly with the tones, lack of similar words to English and writing system. As a Viet speaker, the first point is trivial and the second point is somewhat reduced because Vietnamese has Chinese loanwords.
It is actually very easy to learn how to speak Chinese but it is totally different level if you want to speak it. grammarly speaking, Chinese is one of the easiest.
Maybe in traditional sense, which involves handwriting, yes, it is very diffucult. But I agree that to learn to read, speak and write digitally with pinyin, it's rather easy.
you have to understand that handwriting those radicals and tones are not that common in all countries. like we have way too many characters, some even useless tbh and they all have different combinations and are hard to remember for foreigners. it’s not like chinese people don’t struggle with other languages, especially losing their accent
Classical Chinese is another level. Should not skip it, because Chinese people, especially highly educated ones, use them often. Knowledge of Chinese history is quite crucial when discussing high level topics.
As a Chinese, the most difficult part for the Westerners are the four and half tones, I have never met any foreigners that can manage the tones but the professor at UC Riverside, Perry Link(林培瑞). Go watch an interview of him and you will be shocked how good his Mandarin is. The second hardest part is the writing system. I have been living in he states for 10yrs and now there are a ton of words I don't even remember how to write/spell. The easiest part, like the vid mentions, is the grammar, probably the easiest grammar in the world. No gender words, no tense, no honorifics, no difference between subjects and objects, no BS.
