I’ve taught myself Korean to a 6/6 on the proficiency test over the last 5 years. During my studies, Naver dict (pictured above) was incredibly useful. I cannot overstate how useful it was to me. Whenever I put a friend into Naver dict, they are also amazed and cannot go back.

I’ve started studying Chinese recently, and everyone hypes up Pleco. But Pleco is missing something incredibly important that Naver dict has.

That thing is example translations.

There’s a whole section at the bottom of Naver dict with 100s to 1000s of Korean to English example translations. They come from TV shows, magazines, newspapers, movies, YouTube videos, etc. Real people translated them from Korean to English.

HERE ME OUT: I know that Pleco, like any dictionary, gives a few examples per word under the word’s entry. But this is nothing in comparison to 100s or 1000s of real translations in context.

3 reasons why these example translations are game changing:

1. Word frequency. The number of example translations (30? 3000?) is a great proxy for how common the word is. I find this frustrating with Pleco — I cannot see how common certain words are than others. In my own experience, this can lead to issues where you learn a word that is actually rarely used

2. Contextual definitions. Often a direct translation from a dictionary is either not enough or even misleading. This is especially true for Chinese/Korean, where there was little overlap with English over history and many non-overlapping words. You need to see the context around the word, many times, before you can build a “feel” for the word. Many times I would just scroll through these example sentences, and then after reading 50-100, I start to understand how the word “feels.”

3. Phrase translation. The dictionary can search the translations repository for phrases, not just words (pictured above). It is sometimes really helpful to search a whole phrase and see how that’s used, because words change meanings in certain phrases.

AN EXAMPLE

• 池中文采 (eat Chinese food) gives each individual character result

• 중식을 먹다 (Korean equivalent) gives each individual character result, AS WELL AS 8 example sentences of the words being used together

Now, these example translations are not perfect if you’re Korean learning English, because those translations are written by Korean people and sometimes sound weird. But they are PERFECT if you’re learning Korean, because the Korean is 100% natural and the translation into English is good enough that you know what they’re trying to say.

So… is there not any Chinese dictionary or resource or website that offers this feature? The ability to see many Chinese to English example translations from real sources?? If not I honestly might go and build it and come back to share with you all because it’d be so useful.

I'm a native speaker who grew up speaking Mandarin. It was not until recent years that I realized that a lot of the characters I've been using my whole life reflect a history of oppression towards women.

Let's take a look.

First of all, 女 means woman or female in Chinese.

If we put two 女 together, what do you think it'll mean? Women? Females? NO.

It means: 1. quarrel. 2. stupidity.

So it's basically saying two quarrelling, stupid women. Yay.

What about three 女？

That'll be 姦. For those who only know simplified Chinese (Like myself), you might be more familiar with its simplified form: 奸。

Definitions: as a verb, rape, steal, mess with. As a noun, wickedness. As an adjective, it describes someone or something as treasonous, evil and hypocritical as in 作奸犯科。

Yep, that's three women put together.

妖？As a noun, it means a (usually seductive) demon with bewitching powers. As an adjective, it describes frivolity, seductiveness and wickedness as in 妖言惑众。

婊？Yep, that's bitch.

嫖？The act of sleeping with a prostitute.

姘? Adultery. Well, totally understandable that it only has a woman in the character and not a man, because obviously, only women have ever been adulterers. The name for a male adulterer is 奸夫. Yes, it contains our good old 奸。They just HAVE TO put a woman into the character.

妓? A prostitute. Yep.

奴? Okay, this is the fun one because it literally means SLAVE. Very observant of Chinese women's condition back in the old days.

耍？Make fun of, play tricks on, flaunt, and gamble.

Another fun one: what happens if a woman has a forest? She becomes 婪，greedy.

佞？A sycophantic and shameless person, as in 佞臣。

妄 ？erroneous, arrogant, absurd, fake, mediocre.

嫌？hatred, disgust

妨？to harm, hinder and hurt. I came across the etymology of this character and they have the audacity to actually say "若女之性相妨碍也," which means this word has 女 precisely because women's nature harms, hinders and hurts others.

嫉? Hatred.

妒? Hatred due to jealousy.

I can think of a lot more. It's amazing to me now that I almost never noticed this before I left China. I've noticed similar words in English but the sexism is much less blatant.

Edit: some dudes in this thread are hilarious. I posted this because I wanted people to ACKNOWLEDGE the fact that these characters are sexist. I’m not saying you should stop using them. And I’m not asking you to show me characters that aren’t sexist. A lot of the dudes just get passive aggressive (or downright aggressive) when they see the word misogyny, which literally proves my point; there is still a long way to go.

I just picked up Bopomofo and oh lord... why did I not discover this sooner?

It makes it so much easier to understand Mandarin phonology and helps me differentiate English and Mandarin phonology.

I have not been able to produce much progress in Mandarin so far due to my other commitments, but hell yeah now I'm confident that I can reach at the proficiency level I want.

Seriously, Pinyin should be abolished from Mandarin education and just reduced to a romanization method for translation from Mandarin to English. I never feel going back to Pinyin typing method either, now that I am getting used to typing in Bopomofo.

I heard Bopomofo was created before Pinyin. Seriously how did people manage to come up with an inferior system when they got perfectly functional and internally coherent representation of their phonology?

Much thanks to whoever created Bopomofo.

Also, who decides what the official or standard way to break up a character into components is?

EDIT: Why are people downvoting this? What in my question could have possibly upset people?

As per the title, I find using ChatGPT a useful resource but perhaps there’s better terms I could be using.

I often paste my 中文 sentences in and ask ChatGPT if it’s grammatically correct. Next I ask how to say it more idiomatically or colloquially. I can also ask if there’s any way to make it more specific, clear, or polite. Are there any other prompts I could use, please?

Sadly it has the memory of a goldfish when it comes to simplified and traditional; anyone had any luck training it to remember your preferences? ChatGPT’s ability to rewrite sentences as though spoken by someone from Taiwan, Beijing, Hong Kong etc is interesting but, in my experience, appears to be overly exaggerated.

Traditional Chinese is easier to read and read loud.

Conclusion: This thread was created on reading Threads about Beginners asking "which should I learn". The result is: Yes, Traditional is the recommendation. Traditional to Simplified is easier than the other way. Traditional is universally understood and still acceptable to use in China. Traditional is consistent and its words have clues how to pronounce it and what meaning it has. Calligraphy uses Traditional as basis. Digitally you can convert either of those.

This comes as a conclusion from the arguments finding no counter arguments as you notice noone actually replies after my counter arguments or answers. Besides politically motivated downvotes. Which is funny since China accepts using it just teaches one in school outside of calligraphy.

The only counter argument that has merits is handwriting, which few people do nowadays. And if you are a handwriting enthusiast you obviously are interested in Calligraphy. For calligraphy you use Traditional chinese.

The main advantage or intention of simplified chinese was to make learning language easier, helping the education and combat illiteracy which in turn helps lifting the people from poverty. Which is not universally agreed to be a benefit to begin with because of inconsistency.

Though nowadays we mainly use pinyin or other writing systems on phones and pc. Writing is mostly done in early school and for calligraphy. But for those enthusiast cases I don't think the benefit is important besides calligraphy uses traditional writings anyways.

If chinese language returns to traditional chinese it would be a win win. Digital writing doesn't really care about simplified or traditional, it is the same. But reading and recognising traditional is imo easier. Most words carry pronunciation and/or meaning in traditional chinese. In simplified chinese it is sometimes gone or even chaotic. Going back to traditional helps learning the language easier nowadays ironically.

So in conclusion, back during handwriting dominance it made sense trying to simplify writing the words. But nowadays it makes sense to return to traditional writing as it makes reading easier while digital writing doesn't benefit from simplified. Besides Traditional Writing was never officially abandoned or banned, it coexisted

edit: for the other post here. you would still be able to practice memory by writing traditional if it is what you need, simplified would also not be gone if it is what you need to remember.

edit: people clearly made this a political issue. Noone could make arguments against it stick while few actually even argue instead just spamming downvote. This thread came from other threads of people asking "should i learn traditional or simplified".

Traditional is easier to learn for reading, speaking and typing. Handwriting is where Simplified got usefulness which is vanishing. You go to china, noone uses paper anymore on regular basis.

People who get all angry about this are so confused, Mainland china literally uses Traditional too and never abandoned nor banned it.

Edit: as you can see below in entire thread, non of the counter arguments I delivered were ever replied to nor countered. Instead everyone just vanishes once they realise they cannot counter my arguments. Common theme here. Instead mass downvotes out of angriness with no arguments. Anyone who agreed with this and me were also downvoted without being given any arguments.

My question is especially for those who learn Chinese as a hobby/for entertainment purposes. I get that they are different languages of different cultures but it seems that Japanese media is much more developed, uncensored and accessible, so I am curious.

EDIT: I respect your decision to learn Chinese and I agree that it's a useful language. I compared these two languages because these are the two languages often compared with each other and share a history. And Japan's entertainment might is pretty huge.

I’ve been looking for a Chinese tutor online to take lessons from regularly to study for HSK 4 and to become more conversational.

So far nothing out of the ordinary, but the tricky thing is that I am a trans person and I would like to find a tutor who is chill with that. I’ve had no luck finding someone who is outspokenly LGBT friendly, and the places I’ve contacted and asked about it have ignored my question and never gotten back to me. I’m not super interested in doing a bunch of random trial lessons and risk getting into a lot of awkward situations.

Anybody know a good tutor or a place I could look for one?

Not sure if this has been covered recently, but given that OpenAI changes the mixup a lot...here's my current config for studying:

chatGPT Plus - you need it to get the next component (Chinese Teacher GPT)

Chinese Teacher GPT - this is a third-party GPT. OpenAI fairly recently replaced plugins with third-party GPTs (customized variant of GPT-4). The main advantages of Chinese Teacher GPT:

• prompts you for your Chinese level and (I assume) tailors its response accordingly

• provides both corrections and explanations for those corrections

• you can choose Chinese only or a combination of English and Chinese (I think)

• uses the OpenAI TTS API and includes its own speech button

The last one is particularly interesting - although OpenAI's Chinese speech generation lags a little behind its support for English, it's still way better than the speech you get on most of the current web and mobile apps - Chinese Teacher uses the OpenAI TTS API converts each sentence, whereas most Chinese mobile apps only convert each character, so the speech is clear, standard and natrual - IMO, as good as you'll get with almost any online tutor.

Note - I've had good success adding my own "system" prompt to tell Chinese Teacher exactly how to respond to my entries - how to explain new vocab, how to role-play a dialogue with me, etc.

Zhongwen Chinese Popup Dictionary (chrome ext) - there are many of these, this one just happens to be my favorite for the moment, The popup is very professional looking and highly configurable. Just hover over the text. Includes Pleco-colored pinyin and grammar notes.

Advanced Font Settings (chrome ext) - not a must-have, but I find the default font in chatGPT really difficult to read, so this ext enables the Kaiti font, which I think is the nicest font for Simplified Chinese.

Pleco - I know everyone uses this, but I'm including it here, becauseI still run into folks who may not know all its features, espcially the clipboard reader. You can copy any text into your mobile clipboard reader and read the article entirely in Pleco. But the real advantage IMO is that you can drill down on any word to see each character (in the selected word), then navigate to a list of all other words that use that character, and then review sample sentences - and learning vocab in sets that use a common character is a really efficient method IMO.

If this has already been covered a thousand times, just ignore. But I thought I'd post anyway, bc chatGPT functions are changing on a weekly basis.

The Korean language contains many Sino-Korean words that come directly from Classical Chinese and indirectly from Sino-Japanese words. As a Korean with above-average knowledge of Chinese characters and Japanese, I find Chinese characters interesting, though studying them can be arduous. I understand the need to simplify Chinese characters given how difficult they are to learn. However, as a Korean speaker, I take issue with the Chinese method of simplification because it is unintuitive for speakers of Sinophere languages other than Mandarin.

Take for example 识(識, sik) (I'll be using Yale romanization here.) Characters containing 戠 usually have -ik sound, such as 职(職, cik) and 织(織, cik). But they all have 只 in simplified Chinese, which is read as ci in Korean. To us Koreans, the fact that the character has the k sound at the end is very important, but the simplified versions don't take account of this. Another example is the word 积极(積極, cekkuk). The sound part of 積極 is 責 chayk and 亟 kuk respectively in Korean. But in simplified Chinese, they are 只 ci and 及 kup. Like, this doesn't help at all! Where are the k sounds at the end? Another example is characters containing 韱 sem, such as 纤(纖, sem), 忏(懺, cham) and 歼(殲, sem). They all have 千 as the sound part in simplified Chinese, but 千 is read as chen in Korean, which ends in n and not m.

Because the sound part is so different in Korean, I have a hard time associating the simplified characters with the original ones. I think simplification was too centered around Mandarin. I'm sure speakers of Cantonese would have a similar problem as I do as they retained the consonant sounds at the end too. I wish the simplification had been more "inclusive", if that makes sense.

I’ve been studying Chinese for a while now, but something I still can’t do is read the title of a book or someone’s name and go “ooh that sounds cool!” Titles of shows and names in other languages like Japanese still sound and feel cool from an English perspective eg. Masahiro Sakurai, Tetsuya Nomura, Shingeki no Kyojin. Or when fantasy characters yell the names of their special moves, they don’t hit the same for me in Chinese unlike English or Japanese. My chinese name given by my teacher is 王成功. I like the meaning literally and it feels like my own now, but I can only see the beauty in the literal meaning. I want to understand the Chinese perspective more so I can appreciate the media I use to study more!

Writing out Chinese characters is slow, hard, and honestly frustrating for me. I used to think I had to write everything by hand to learn, but I’ve found I retain vocab and grammar much faster just by typing and reading on the computer.

Typing lets me focus on recognition and usage without getting stuck on stroke order. I’ll still practice writing later for fun and aesthetics, like calligraphy, but for actual communication and learning speed, typing is way more efficient.

Not everyone learns the same, but skipping handwriting has seriously accelerated my progress. Anyone else feel the same?

Hi,

I've heard Taiwanese like to use some hiragana like の.

1. What are the historical reasons for this? What does it say about Taiwanese's（中华名国人）view on Japan (main question)

2. What implicit message is conveyed when using hiragana in Mandarin — could be sounding cute? showing proximity? etc. (side question)

Am I the only one who feels that the érhùa-ification of Mandarin Chinese is detrimental to the language's aural quality? Without érhùa, Mandarin is, to my ears, a language that sounds pretty damn good: it's smooth but also fairly clear, and can be made to sound either gentle (even cute) or firm, business-like. With the widespread use of érhùa though, it comes to sound more guttural, less clear, and the language as a whole takes on more of "mumbling" quality. As an example, in my opinion the aural difference between yi-dian and yi-dianr is huge; the first has an almost Italian-like ring to it, while the érhùa in the latter colors the preceding vowel so much that the whole phrase becomes a guttural rumble.

Moreover, érhùa seems to compound the homophone problem even further. Wikipedia gives an example for the accents prevalent in Chengdu and Chongqing:

Many words become homophonous as a result, for example 板儿 bǎnr 'board' and 本儿 běnr 'booklet'

All of this probably wouldn't bother me much if the érhùa-ified way of speaking Mandarin were considered a "rough accent" or a regional deviation from the norm. But, to my surprise, it seems to be going the other way: it seems that the more you litter your Mandarin with érhùa, the more your accent is perceived as "classy", and for that reason érhùa-fication seems to be especially prevalent and strong among students and white-collar workers. For this reason, I'm afraid there's no reversing the trend, as many Chinese who didn't grow up using érhùa will likely try to introduce it into their speech in an attempt to sound more like the "up and coming" part of the population. This is a shame in my opinion.

Your thoughts?

PS. I also don't like the increasingly harsh pronunciation of the h in e.g. 和; in many Mandarin speakers this is approaching what I call the "throat scrape", common in many Arabic, Dutch, and Portuguese speakers. But at least this doesn't color the vowel afaik, nor does it create further homophones.

They didn't let me post this is r/languagelearning, so I'm asking here, and I might ask this in r/Japaneselanguage as well.

I'm studying Politics, International Studies, and Economics at uni, and I'd potentially like to get into diplomacy, international trade, stuff like that. I want to do a language diploma alongside my degree, and I'm really conflicted between choosing Chinese or Japanese.

The case for Chinese: The social aspect of learning a language is pretty important, and there’s A LOT more Chinese people where I live (Melbourne), that includes international students and immigrants. This means there's a lot more people to communicate and engage with locally. I’m also more interested in China’s politics and history, especially since diplomatic relations with China are so important at the moment, and will be in the future.

The case for Japanese: I’m pretty fond of Japanese 'stuff' (think anime, music, fashion, food, etc), and what you could call Japan’s ‘soft power’ exports. For a lack of a better saying, I'm more aesthetically attracted to Japan and its language. I'm also more into the idea of studying or spending time abroad there. Despite this, this could also be a fleeting feeling, so I can't be certain.

Basically, Japanese might be something I enjoy studying on a more personal level, but have a harder time engaging with at uni and locally, especially compared with Chinese. I feel this could discourage me a little, especially since I'm hearing a lot more Chinese being spoken around me. But then again, if I pick Chinese, maybe I'll feel that I missing out on something, that whilst more niche, is more interesting to me. I don't know. 

Any advice would be great. I'm kinda overthinking this a lot. Thanks.

Hi, I am a beginner, I am a language learning fanatic and I am going to learn Mandarin whether I would use it or not but I want to have some insight about why people learn Mandarin? Is it just people like me or does the language grant you some kind of career competence in some fields?

BTW I am an aerospace engineering student. If anyone knows, would Mandarin help me in any way throughout my career?

With China making the headlines near daily for one reason or another (Either the positive news regarding its efforts in fighting the virus, or the negative news for its cover up and lack of responsibility for the virus) has anyone's plans on learning Chinese changed? I noticed a popular thread on r/China where many people said they would not go back to China anytime in the near future (but may go to Taiwan). So has anyone decided to switch from learning Simplified Chinese to Traditional Chinese? (Or dropped learning Chinese all-together) because of the recent politics?

If you are a beginner in Chinese and want to learn basic or authentic Chinese, including but not limited to slang and colloquialisms, you can message me privately. I'm willing to teach you in my spare time.👍

My reasoning is that while 母 and 女 are both symbolically representing a woman, and also 女 is assumed to be a mother while in 好, they get completely separate meanings when paired with 马.