r/ChineseLanguage

If I start today, can I pass HSK 4 with 2 months of preparation? If anyone can suggest how to prepare, it would be really helpful.

Greetings fellow sinologists / Chinese language lovers.

I am compiling a large amount of data for a project and it requires me to go through a bunch of Chinese character data. It's very lonely work and not many people around me are as nerdy about it as I am, and so I thought I'd reach out to this community and share with you an anecdote of one of the strange things I come across in my work. This particular phenomenon is called something like graphical convergence or just standardization (something like the process simplification went through).

My latest encounter, just minutes ago was with this character 具 which looks like it's made up of something like 目 一 八 (in the unihan database which I work with daily it's identified under the 八 radical. But delving into my favorite website dict.variants.moe.edu.tw, I came to discover that what looks something like a 目 is not an eye, but instead is a reduced form of an older character 貝, that used to mean a type of shell used as currency which was used as currency / for trade (see this link for details, couldn't share the screenshot due to Reddit blocking it). https://dict.variants.moe.edu.tw/dictView.jsp?ID=2786

Not only that, but the extending legs like the 八 component of the 貝 are not what is connecting to that bottom separating 一 stroke, because remember the 貝 is a reduced form that looks like 目 🤣🤣🤣 confused yet?

Instead, what is causing the appearance of that extra horizontal 一 stroke (count them, 1, 2, 3 in the middle right?) is actually the top portion of this ancient component 廾, which itself has now converged into 一 and 八.

Long story short, it's not technically what it looks like. As you can imagine this has happened a lot with the Chinese language and for me and my purposes of uses unicode glyphs, it is a source of intrigue and anguish. Indeed the Taiwanese Ministry of Education (and I assume other similar sino-sphere institutions as well) have identified this and made rules about the stroke order and convention of these characters.

Dunno if that was interesting for you, but at least I can share these crazy things with the world of Reddit.

AI is very handy in translating the Chinese there as it is very academic and old school (and above my level 😅).

Like when writing the words in pinyins

Hello! I've been learning Mandarin Chinese since this past september, and I've been doing it through university courses. I completed the elementary mandarin course, and have to wait about 5 months until I get back to school to continue learning mandarin.

Does anyone have any good exercises, activities, etc. to do between classes? I've considered getting a private tutor, but I get scholarships for doing language learning at university so I can't do too much learning outside of it.

I have been playing an rpg in Chinese and have been practicing translating the dialogue and stuff (which is going pretty okay and I'm learning some new words and grammar and stuff, and its good practice) but its very slow and mind-intensive. Any thoughts or ideas appreciated

谢谢！😄

Does anybody know Chinese novels for someone at hsk1 level? (well, maybe even lower, I’ve been studying Chinese for like a couple months) I really like duchinese stories for hsk 1, find it quite fun.

Hi :D
I have question about translation for this scentence:
“Don’t even tell mother about these things, otherwise she will get angry” translation: 你千万别告诉妈妈这件事，否则她会生气的。
I was wondering if i could use 不必须 instead of 千万别

I've studied Chinese on and off for years including formal academic study and professional training. In school I used flash cards. During the professional coursework our instructors told us that flashcards don't really help and that using words in context (listening, speaking, and writing) was what actually sets them in memory.

I'm partial to the learning-in-context approach (see an actual subway sign for example and the words becomes real.)

Thoughts? Do flash cards really create lasting word memory or are they just a way to pass a test and then quickly forgotten?

I am a native Chinese speaker, but I recently really feel that inputting by pinyin to distinguish ta (male 他) and ta (female 她) is very low-efficiency. You almost always have to stop when inputting this and choose this single word specifically. I was just reflecting why cannot we design a new input method, like tanan would map to 他 and tanv would map to 她.

I'm gonna take HSK 5 and I do a lot of mock tests. and I can't find an information about questions 99-100. the question is how many characters can I actually write? because my texts are always much more than 80 characters, usually it's about 130. will I get less score because of that?

p.s. sorry for my English, I'm not native

I heard HSK 3.0 will be introduced second half of the year overseas . any news from grapevine they will parallel run both

In Mandarin, “520” is commonly used online to mean “I love you,” because 五二零 wǔ èr líng sounds somewhat like 我愛你 wǒ ài nǐ.
It’s especially popular in texting and around May 20th.

https://preview.redd.it/ckjpjoe73e2h1.jpg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e35a31fde1416044dc067201c6b96761ecf5d263

[Old HSK3]Hi all,

I am planning to go China to study in a non-degree program. Do you think expat-dense cities prevent maximizing of the process? I am not sure but my thought path is like less international - more chinese - better learning environment. I will be there only for one year.

The cities I consider are Qingdao, Tianjin and Chengdu.

Or I am just overthinking?

I’m studying, and was wondering;

In the sentence “女人在看着男人”, why use “在看着” instead of just “在看”? Does the meaning change with /without the “着”?