mauveOkra

@mauveOkra@lemmygrad.ml

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨China Called the US To Recognize Pacific Island’s Independence | teleSUR English⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago⁩:

  I really thought this was about samoa or even Hawaii 😳😳

  Still 🔥 though

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don't China tries to increase it's cultural influences?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago⁩:

  You could check a used bookstore or libgen for textbooks to learn grammar and have basic examples, use the smartphone version of pleco for a dictionary and free notecards based on the different hsk vocab levels. Also please study grammar, don't use the duolingo model. To practice writing characters look up tianzige （田字格）and write each character a lot of times and say them out loud as well. It helps if you start with some radicals, I think there are 40 major ones (at least my textbook listed ~40 major ones). To type characters, I recommend using the pinyin layout, you don't have to type the tones but it will guess them and give you options. Other typing options and handwriting input and strokes. You can translate chinese to chinese on google translate to get pinyin for larger texts, and deepl will translate with better grammar and syntax if you need that. The hardest parts if you're doing this alone will be checking your work if you're doing exercises, since you won't have a teacher to ask questions and explain your mistakes, and it will also be hard to practice speaking and listening alone. For basic pronunciation I am not sure what is best for free online options. There are children's songs videos for bopomofo which covers all initials, and there may be ones for the finals. Google translate or pleco will have pronunciation for characters and words, but whichever I used pronounced each character individually and did not give you the tone sandhi, which is the change that happens when pronouncing certain tones in order (not as hard as it sounds). You should also read the wikipedia page on 儿化 (erhua) because even if it is in your textbook it probably won't give a good explanation. You can find podcasts for basic listening by searching 学中文 （xuezhongwen) or 学汉语 (xuehanyu) on any podcast platform, though you shouldn't immediately start with this, it is at a late-beginner early-intermediate stage that it may become useful. You will probably gain listening abilities faster than reading ones, but you could also look for graded readers. I haven't looked into them too much at my stage of learning but what I have seen is paywalled so I can't offer much advice there.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don't China tries to increase it's cultural influences?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago⁩:

  As others have said, China is interested in mutual development, not US style hegemony of which the high cultural influence is a part. I would also add that spreading a language is part of cultural influence, and this may occur regardless of China's geopolitical stance because as they become increasingly important people will learn Mandarin to work and study with them, and in the process getting access to and being exposed to Chinese culture. You can see some cultural export with the Confucius Institutes which the US for the most part forced universities to close down, but notice that these were also about teaching Mandarin.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Don't listen to the fucking history of china podcast⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago⁩:

  Have you checked out Carl Zha's silk and steel podcast? I've only listened to his episodes with Xiangyu on Taiwan and an interview about US black radical's relationship with China, but he has a lot more on Patreon I think. Only issue is that his audio quality is bad. I don't know what his political views are but he usually defends China, and Xiangyu is ML.

  There's also the War Nerd podcast which isn't ML but has interviewed Carl Zha about the Tang dynasty invading three kingdoms Korea (if I remember correctly), China's involvement in WWII, and the rise of the Mongol Empire in addition to many other good interviews. I have that link somewhere if you're interested.