Chinese language (split)

[firebane]

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Best bet is to go to T&T, go up to a random Chinese person, say "NIHAO PUNGYAO!" and ask them for good mooncakes.

Chinese people love it when white people speak Chinese.

lol I know that nihao is like a hello but no idea what that other word is.

[Xtrema]

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lol I know that nihao is like a hello but no idea what that other word is.

Hello Friend.

The problem with starting that convo that way is the follow up.

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Best bet is to go to T&T, go up to a random Chinese person, say "NIHAO PUNGYAO!" and ask them for good mooncakes.

Chinese people love it when white people speak Chinese.

Sorta. Was in a Chinese joint and white lady is speaking perfect mandarin to owner except the owner is Cantonese and can't really reply and kinda annoyed. It's basically like walking into a Micky D in AB and ordering in French.

[Buster]

Dont they send you to concentration camps.....err....retraining facilities....if you can't speak Mandarin?

[firebane]

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Hello Friend.

The problem with starting that convo that way is the follow up.



Sorta. Was in a Chinese joint and white lady is speaking perfect mandarin to owner except the owner is Cantonese and can't really reply and kinda annoyed. It's basically like walking into a Micky D in AB and ordering in French.

LOL yah don't get your languages cross they get super annoyed and sometimes angry. Was once told it is almost like insulting them.

[suntan]

Only stupid Chinese people don't know both dialects.

[Xtrema]

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Dont they send you to concentration camps.....err....retraining facilities....if you can't speak Mandarin?

Well if you consider Shenzhen as a huge concentration camp... sure.

There are 130M Native Cantonese speakers in China alone. But you won't be able to do any official business if you don't know Mandarin.

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LOL yah don't get your languages cross they get super annoyed and sometimes angry. Was once told it is almost like insulting them.

Depends which side of the border they were on when the immigrated. And most of that is between HK and China anyway. True Cantonese could care less.

[Xtrema]

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Only stupid Chinese people don't know both dialects.

Until the 2000s, the only dialect tied to $ are Cantonese and Shanghaiese

Mandarin speaks like you write so most Cantonese can understand it even if they can't speak it.

[bjstare]

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LOL yah don't get your languages cross they get super annoyed and sometimes angry. Was once told it is almost like insulting them.

I’d be insulted if someone assumed I was a French Canadian.

[jwslam]

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Only stupid Chinese people don't know both dialects.

@suntan fight me. I speak TeoChew.

Teochew preserves many Old Chinese pronunciations and vocabulary that have been lost in some of the other modern varieties of Chinese. As such, Teochew is described as one of the most conservative Chinese languages.[

[firebane]

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I’d be insulted if someone assumed I was a French Canadian.

[Buster]

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Until the 2000s, the only dialect tied to $ are Cantonese and Shanghaiese

Mandarin speaks like you write so most Cantonese can understand it even if they can't speak it.

How does that work, with no alphabet?

(On another note, how can a country invent gunpowder, paper, and bronze but not figure out an alphabet?)

[jwslam]

Well it's like English can be read in Canadian Dialect, British dialect, or Australian dialect.
But telling a Canadian it's "over the road" doesn't mean jack shit.

off the train tracks here:
So in English I can come up with a sentence like "I read that it's good for you to read daily" where read has two different sounds for its two tenses.

In Chinese a sentence like this exists:
去香港買的香很香
You can see that 香 is repeated 3 times. The sentence reads "Go to 香港 (Hong Kong) to buy 香, and it's very 香 (fragrant)"
In different dialects this is read differently.
In Cantonese, the 香 is pronounced the same all 3 times. Same in Mandarin.
In TeoChew, it's three different sounds for 3 different meanings.

I'll volunteer to continue this blabber over dimsum one day.

[Xtrema]

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How does that work, with no alphabet?

(On another note, how can a country invent gunpowder, paper, and bronze but not figure out an alphabet?)

Chinese is pictograms, it's all memorization. So instead of 26 alphabets, you have 100 or so pictograms that form basic sounds. They can stand on their own or combine like Voltron to make words.

日 = Sun
月 = Moon
明 = Bright

盟 = Alliance

End of the day, each word kinda make sense if you dive into the components. But its really all memorization. Once you get about 2000 of these under your belt, you should understand most written Chinese.

Koreans used the same characters but ditched it since it's too complicated and came up with Hangul which is phonetic.
Japanese still use these characters as Kanji but only in official capacity. People uses Kana which is phonetic in daily life.

CCP wanted to promote literacy and save ink and came up with simplified Chinese which is basically traditional characters but less strokes.

[suntan]

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Chinese is pictograms, it's all memorization. So instead of 26 alphabets, you have 100 or so pictograms that form basic sounds. They can stand on their own or combine like Voltron to make words.

日 = Sun
月 = Moon
明 = Bright

盟 = Alliance

End of the day, each word kinda make sense if you dive into the components. But its really all memorization. Once you get about 2000 of these under your belt, you should understand most written Chinese.

Koreans used the same characters but ditched it since it's too complicated and came up with Hangul which is phonetic.
Japanese still use these characters as Kanji but only in official capacity. People uses Kana which is phonetic in daily life.

CCP wanted to promote literacy and save ink and came up with simplified Chinese which is basically traditional characters but less strokes.

Koreans still have to know some Chinese, Hangul is very verbose so we like to shove in Chinese characters to save space.

[Xtrema]

[Buster]

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that's really interesting, and reinforces my initial thoughts that a phonetic alphabet is a better way to go about a written language.

[jwslam]

That's far from the only way Chinese is typed.
Most of HK will use this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cangjie_input_method
Or the simplified method where you type just the start and the end code.

Per @Xtrema's post above, 盟 would be typed 日 月 月 廿 (which equates to ABBT on a qwerty)


Generally, the words with longer codes will not have conflicting "options" to choose from in the cangjie method.
In the PinYin method video shown above which you can try here as a website, a user can type "shuijiao" and would come up with choices for

水腳 - which means "water foot", which means "a tariff for transport by water"
水餃 - which is a type of dumpling
睡覺 - which means sleep
說教 - actually doesn't belong here because this is "shuojiao"
水餃麵 - dumpling noodle (extension of option 2)
水蕉新村路 - the name of some road

There is a way to reduce the options as technically the difference between dumpling and sleep is by the way you say it (shui3jiao3) and (shui4jiao4), but options 1 and 2 both fall in the same pronunciation.
Improvements in software over the years have also helped. For example on most smartphone keyboards you could type an entire sentence by pinyin, and it knows grammatically that this is the combination you're probably looking for as other combinations don't make sense.

You can try the ABBT code in CangJie here, and you'll see that for the singular word you're looking for, there's only one option for 盟
To get the same word on the (Mandarin) pinyin input, the sound "meng" comes up with 28 options where you have to properly choose 盟 before accidently using a homonym.
Similarly, the (Cantonese) JyutPing method, the sound "mang" comes up with 13 options to choose 盟 from.

not saying that CangJie is the best method, but it is the most "traditional Chinese" way to type Chinese non-phonetically.

[S-FLY]

Now write: "That older brother is older than that older brother"

[jwslam]

[suntan]

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that's really interesting, and reinforces my initial thoughts that a phonetic alphabet is a better way to go about a written language.

Of course phonetic is best. With no casing either. Therefore Hangul is the best language in the universe.

It's so easy even a super-whitey like you can learn it in minutes.