Chinese is such an archaic language, it will be very difficult

I doubt that somehow

The one I quoted was easy so no credit for that. But the one with the Urshirt…

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Urshirt is a good one :joy:
'how many do you want ’
'i will have your shirt ’ :rofl:
Well done Milker.

This was close, it was actually 、 我要走、:grin:

I added two more above …Have a crack at them .

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你看你的?

OK, this one is definitely way out there.
苦力也很懶的?

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Good one Milker. 你看你的 was translated as ‘mind your own business’.

Yes the last one is saying 'The coolie is also very lazy '(it was preceded by ‘The cook is bad’). :sunglasses:

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Very useful if you’re running an opium ship, ha.

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For some reason buying enamel was a thing back then . And there’s a lot about boats and horses in there. Kinda fun.
A lot of if would be comprehensible and useful to this day though , well done Giles ! (But with a teacher telling you how to pronounce them properly :smiley:).

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Cloisonné ware could be sold for huge profits back then.

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I was working on those and when I got back they were solved already,

nee muynt pu shirt how ren :expressionless:

This is an interesting one, Miao, its on the border of Chinese and not Chinese, you’ll definitely catch Chinese words and phrases in it, not sure if those are just borrows, or if there is a deeper parallel. recon its further off the scale than Cantonese and Hokkien though. There are also various mixes of Miao with Chinese dialects. Tried to twist the missues arm to speak this at home, but she flat out refuses. Thinking about recording it on the next new year trip.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqhuZmOiPL8

I understand Miao and Hmong are closely related.

Miao is the Chinese word for Hmong. So basically its the same. But for Miao in China there are various amounts of Sinicization. In the town that I visit, linguistically its as per my guess- 75% Chinese, 25% Miao. This is the dialect Maojia dialect - Wikipedia

But out side the town there there are still some 100% Miao speakers

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nee muynt pu shirt how ren
你母音的不是好認?

Fricken dublanders… :laughing:

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did you catch much off the video? I recon the numbers, but some other bits too? I recon this is identical to shanghainese :laughing:

Hilarious!

Nothing, word here or there which seemed Chinese. The Shanghainese seemed recognizably Chinese at least

This popped up in feed

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Marshall Unger on how fun learning characters is:

I have taught the Japanese language since 1975 to students in New Zealand, Hawai’i, Maryland, and Ohio. Before that, I was officially a student of Japanese for ten years–though for a native English speaker, one never really stops being a student. Wherever I go, I am sure to find a knot of bright-eyed enthusiasts fascinated by those inscrutable Chinese characters, some so intensely that they lose sight of virtually all other aspects of the Japanese language. I know I am not misinterpreting their behavior, for I was once bitten by the bug myself.

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Maybe this is just related to my wife’s family not having a lot of experience speaking with non-native speakers, but has anyone felt like speaking Mandarin with Mandarin-Only speaking locals is more “strict” than it would be for a similar situation in English? As in there is less flexibility with word order / use / tone mistakes?

The other day I was trying to say “Don’t let me fall down” to my sister-in-law and came up with “別丟我在地上”. Even after trying to make the motion of falling down, it was obviously I was not making any sense. It was only after asking my wife for a translation that I was looking for “別讓我跌倒” but I still sometimes (perhaps unfairly) feel like if someone said “don’t throw I on ground” while making hand motions I could get pretty close to their meaning

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I have never lived in Beijing or spent much time there. I ran a factory a few miles north of Nanjing for 4 years. The local NJ dialect is not remotely mutually intelligible with Mandarin. Actually just south of NJ gets into some bizzare mystery dialects. The Gaochun dialect (now part of NJ) was used as an unbreakable code language during WW2. I have worked all over rural China. Can everyone speak Mandarin? Yes sure. Do people usually speak Mandarin in their daily lives? Not many adults outside of major cities speak Mandarin at home or among their peers. They will only switch to Mandarin for my benefit. Is it good standard textbook Mandarin? Not often. But bad localized Mandarin is still understandable to most 外地人. I stick with my opinion that Mandarin is a pretty forgiving language and many (most?) people who insist they cant understand us foreigners are usually just being jerks.

I stand corrected. Mandarin was originally called 官語 not 管語, sorry (it even looked wrong as I typed it). The term Mandarin is a Portuguese derivative of 官語. At least that is what I learned in a horrible Chinese linguistics class so long ago. And I won’t swear it’s true.

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According to Wikipedia Shanghaiese has 5 tones. And the tone change rules are really different. When I ask Shanghaiese to explain the tones or sandhi rules they seem totally oblivious to what I am talking about. I don’t know if they don’t know or just don’t know how to explain them. Taiwanese are all too eager to explain Taiwanese tone changes to me when I get them wrong. In fact I wish they would stop.

Tones, I go with the pretend there is no such thing approach, never seems to actually make a difference. No idea about how important they are in Taiwanese, but I’ve heard that there are no tones in Shanghai dialect, now I like the sound of that!