is it so different?
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- čas přidán 29. 02. 2024
- This video is for those who have maybe wondered, "how does Chinese even work, like, at all." Chinese, on the surface, seems so different from our own language, but I hope that this video makes you see that they are perhaps more similar than you thought.
I am a university student studying Mandarin Chinese, and pronounced things to the best of my ability. That being said, I am a student and I had to sacrifice some accuracy in my explanations for the sake of simplicity. Although, I believe everything in this video is true to the best of my ability.
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As a Chinese speaker, the third misconception is also commonly shared by learners for English in China. If you don’t know about Latin and other old indo-European languages, every English word seems arbitrary and you just have to memorize it.
In that sense, Japanese and Chinese seem less arbitrary than English. Where some of the words quite literally describe what they are. Recently I learned the Japanese word for bruise; 打撲傷 (dabokushou), which quite literally means "Hitting business place", which I find quite funny.
While learning Japanese I've found that English is actually way more complicated and difficult than I ever realized.
@@EddoWagt Yea I'm sure if you knew Latin and a bunch of other Indo-European languages, English words would make a lot more sense. It's just that the Japanese and Chinese compound words have their roots in the same language rather than another ancient language.
English is like three guys in a trench coat that have kidnapped Greek and Latin to use as arms.
@@PandorasFollyAnd the three guys are Anglo, Saxon, and Norse.
@@a1ethioS Where do you leave French then which 41% of English vocabulary is?
No dumb clickbait and straight to the point, I love this video!
Thank you!
@@nanjec9960 Thank you for being an honest creator! Subscribed!
I have found that I learnt more about grammar from studying Chinese language than I ever did when learning English !
Can you explain how
I would want to know with examples how Chinese language grammar simplicity helps appreciate complex grammar of many other languages please.
@@MrRejikuruvilla Ok I study Chinese with a set of books called Elementary Chinese Reader , sadly this book is now out of print
The book lists grammatical terms for example
Pin Yin Ming2ci2 Noun
Dai4ci2 Pronoun
This series of books explains the structure of sentences
For example
Wo3 Xue2xi2 Han4yu3
I study Chinese
Is of the form Subject ( I )
Verb ( Study )
Object ( Chinese )
Please note I got the order wrong it is
Subject Verb Object
I have learnt by studying the language how Chinese and also English language works .
I think that to gain an understanding that you would need to get study material on the Chinese language .
I hope that this helps you but an in depth description of the language is probably beyond the scope of a You Tube comment .
Best wishes from England .
As a native Chinese I learnt more about grammar from studying English than I ever did when learning Chinese. I think this is just a general case for anyone that is learning a second language.@@MrRejikuruvilla
@@rexnemo Thank you for the example. In English, I would be the subject and Chinese would be the object. You say it is opposite in Chinese for wo3 xue2xi2 han4yu3
@@MrRejikuruvilla I must admit that I am not sure in this case , I checked the grammatical structure of English and it goes like this I ( subject ) then verb ( Study ) , but here is where I am confused because Chinese is also a subject .
So this would be a Subject , verb Subject sentence I think .
So a sentence like I Sit on a chair would be more like Subject (I), verb(sit) , adjective(on ) ,Pronoun (a) object (Chair )
Now as a caveat I did not study English grammar at school so may not be correct .
I am going to buy a book on English grammar as I think that it would benefit me to learn the subject .
One of my friends decided to learn French and mandarin at the same time. He said French started off easy but got challenging very quickly, while Mandarin started off challenging but didn’t get harder because it was mostly vocabulary, vs learning the intricacies of liaisons, irregular verb conjugations, etc.
this is an really well made video and as a native-ish mandarin speaker i think your pronunciation is perfectly understandable! very easily digestible, great job!
Teachers would definitely have "tshh'd" him a couple of times for incorrect tones, but yeah, other than that, a great primer to debunk all the nonsense even learners spread. I especially like that he pointed out how very few characters (like around 10% or so) are pictographs - when so many people sell fairly useless mnemonic readers to new learners with neat pictures... as if learning 50 characters that vaguely resemble the real thing is going to make a dent in the journey to understanding the nuances of Chinese vocabulary.
The most useful thing I learned from this is the last thing: the Romanized chinese accent symbols do exactly what they look like, if it ticks upward then the tone goes up. Nothing is ever that easy, it's really surprising 😂
when I was in Chinese kindergarten the teachers taught us tonal marks by telling us to imagine a car initially on a flat plain going up a mountain, into and out of a valley, then descending the second mountain. Those are the four tonal marks.
Great video. The morpheme breakdown of 圖書館 / 图书馆 would be better broken down to "picture-writing-building", i.e. building that houses pictures and writings.
This is actually a "Chinese" term that was invented by the Japanese during the Meiji period, adhering to Chinese language rules. In order to describe newly introduced western concepts, the Japanese invented quite a few other such terms like this, for example 電話 (denwa/dian4hua4) telephone, 哲學 (tetsugaku/zhe2xue2) philosophy, 博物館 (hakubutsukan/bo2wu4guan3) museum, etc. Whats interesting is that many such terms eventually made their way over to China, where they were adopted and have now practically become native words.
I wonder if people will ever start using ̀and ́for Japanese, since Japanese has Pitch Accent, which is basically the patterns of Tone 4 and Tone 2. It either goes low or high. So, for example, 博物館 would be Hakúbutsùkan. You can even see this pitch pattern in dictionaries.
i thought that 图 is blueprint
@@sakesaurus1706 You are right, 图should mean blueprints or charts rather than paintings, 书should also just mean books, not writing.
I grew up knowing 图书馆 just as what it’s supposed to mean, I never really thought about what it means “literally”. I guess I took many words for granted?
@@WmannMany people learn languages as only a tool for communication. Not everyone has to dabble in the art of languages and research what it means to use language. If we did, we would get overwhelmed very quickly, just like how people get overwhelmed when they try to think too much about the complexity of Japanese when learning it. They get too stuck on why it has multiple readings for the Chinese characters, and ultimately forget their goal of why they’re trying to learn Japanese in the first place.
the edit on this is sooooooo fucking good! clearly a lot of heart and hard work in this video, props to you
Excellent. Most people have no understanding of language and yet by hold fast to a hundred misconceptions. It is refreshing to see a simplified approach to the subject.
the "autobiography" example was very understandable
This is not "how to make a bong" second part
Yeah fr this guy went from meme video to incredibly well produced video essay, and I genuinely learned something. Its like watching the birth of a channel
Even though Mandarin doesn't have verb conjugations, it's just as hard to learn which word to use in which context. For example, "wǒ shì měiguó rén" means "I am American," "wǒ zài zhélǐ" means "I am here," and "wǒ hěn máng" means "I am busy."
Zài means "to be somewhere," shì means "to be," and the third sentence doesn't have a verb in it.
The contextual thing also applies in other languages no less Indo-Europeans like Spanish
@@comradeofthebalance3147you mean like “ser” and “estar”? It’s true that there’s not distinction for it in English which is why it’s probably very confusing for English speakers. It’s really interesting to see how depending on what languages you already might find a new language easier or harder
@@albaaviles7148 Indeed. That is why I don’t see any language ‘hard’ in absolute terms, only relative as long as you know the basics of expression in language.
think adjective as verb, it will save the world
6:56 the word for ball is actually in second tone - qiu2. This is the first time I have found a mistake in Chinese, that means my Chinese must be getting better 🤣 The video is splendid by the way, very nicely done, good job 👏
Good catch 🤦🏼♂️😭 thank you!
@@nanjec9960also 丢 mostly means to lose(as in I lost my keys). 仍(toss) or 投(shoot) would be better
Also (and this is not a criticism of a great video):
pu3tong1hua4 instead of pu4tong1hua1
tu2shu1guan3 instead of tu3shu1guan3
nv3 instead of nv4
Just for the sake of completeness, I can't help it on account of the minor residual trauma left by classroom exercises. We even had some poor tone-deaf folks who would just adjust the volume in frustration trying to get there, let's just say that tonal languages are unique in that they can be very much unfulfilling if you can't discern relative pitches. I mean, you can definitely wing it, especially with compound words, in 95 % of the cases, you can just infer what lexeme we were talking about. It still will sound off and, by that virtue alone, make it more difficult to understand.
Shoutouts to LanguageTools for trying to correct "lexeme" to "legume."
@@passionfruit7617丢 can mean to throw sometimes, and it’s not incorrect in the context, but I do agree that 扔 is a better character to use.
Finally a video that's not shitting on the Chinese language
The pronunciation may be off but it still nice to see people actually understand
ps, 马码玛犸 are mǎ, 吗 is ma (轻声/soft tone), and 蚂 is má
圖 can be a verb
1. To want: 意圖
2. To crave for what you should not deserve:
貪圖
3. To scheme in order to get something: 圖謀
4. To plan to do something: 企圖
And... Pretty sure "map" is a good way to describe its meaning then. In math "map" is literally a one to one conversion, and no matter whether it's 意图 or 地图 it should be such kind of conversion.
Or maybe just use picture. "Picture out the idea" means "telling the thinking" and thus 意图.
in 40 years of speaking Chinese, I've never used these words, except the fourth one, and the translation feels wrong. 意圖 is more like having a reason to do something, and if I were to use it, it would be as a noun like: 他的意圖是... . and 企圖 is more like attempting to do something, but not the same usage as English attempt. Translating between the two you have to grab the feeling of what's expressed then translate that feeling back into each language's own words.
This was such a well made video i went to your channel to see more and was so surprised that your other video is "making a bong in minecraft" LOL!
ugh i LOVE your editing style. it's so cool
Thank you!
Tones and characters are insanely difficult for foreigners to grasp. Everything else about the language is not so difficult
Hey, Chinese + Cantonese speaker here. Chinese is actually quite hard to grasp, as the tones and stuff are hard to get. If you go back in time and learn ancient chinese, you'll actually discover a pattern of grammar. Chinese characters are definitely hard, but it actually makes sense after a while as the prefix of the word can give a sense of its meaning.
Do you mean Mandarin or another dialect? ("Chinese + Cantonese")
@@FunctionallyLiteratePerson When people say "Chinese" they usually mean Mandarin
@@theodiscusgaming3909 this is true for the layperson as well as speakers who only speak Mandarin, however they also mentioned Cantonese. I almost never hear someone say "Chinese + [dialect of Chinese]," they usually list both dialects
The retro style of your video is amazing!
Agreed, also starlight heals my inner child
great! video but i think 图 means picture. 图书馆 would be picture, books, place. = place of pictures and books. 地图 would be ground, picture. = picture of the ground
This video is insanely well made. I was hooked from start to finish, great job man!
This is giving me motivation to start studying Chinese again. I studied it for a couple of years in primary school, but didn't continue on secondary school. It's not even been a year yet of my last Chinese lesson but I already miss it, even though I didn't like it much then.
Don’t know any Chinese but I’m a Japanese learner and I had that same realization when learning kanji. Like learning 自転車 means “bike”, I’m like oh yeah… a bike really is just a self-revolving-cart. Then applying that understanding to how we combine word roots and it demystifies a lot of how the writing works-it’s the same. Different methods but not alien like a lot of people seem to think.
How tf does this only have 30 views? algorithm gods blessed me today.
Thank you!
I really love this video! You summarise so succinctly what fascinated me about the language when I was first curious about it and what got me hooked when I started learning
The misconcept of every single character has it's own meaning is kina true in Classical Chinese and several southern Chinese languages/dialects, many noun words are represented with a single character rather than two or more in Modern Putonghua, if you break down some of the nouns you actually sees two character that means the same or similar things put together, for example 欺騙 lying, both mean lying or fraud, in Classical Chinese the noun or sometime verb is written with only 欺. now the problem with this is that a character sometime have two meaning, like 欺 can also mean bullying, so that's why most Chinese speaker can't really read a classical chinese text without not understanding couple of words even with high education.
The writing for Chinese appears to be slightly like how words are made in ASL, for example the word for science, do it with a b hand shape and it’s biology, with a c and it’s chemistry
I’m planning on doing a whole video on the similarities between ASL and Chinese, because there many and it’s very fascinating to see the parallels, especially considering that basically each morpheme is an individual character/sign, so then you end up with a similarly structured language. Super interesting stuff, but gotta do some more research 👨💻🤠
@@nanjec9960 Dang im really glad I made this comment then, until I saw this I thought it was strange connection
It must be the fact that words in ASL have nothing to do with their pronunciation (bc there is none) so signs are inherently linked with their meaning.
My ASL teacher is deaf and she says* Deaf people are much more direct in conversation and I suspect this is why. When words are tied to their definition its harder to make a euphemism. For example if we dont wanna call someone fat in English we can say 'obese' or whatever, but the sign for obese is to puff out your cheeks and act like your holding your belly: no ambiguity there.
The part where the grammar wasn't too different was a surprise to learn, thanks for sharing!
Great video, beautifully made! I think you are onto something! Keep the great work!
this new short docu-video format/trend is somthing i welcome. great video
“new” lol
@@cashnelson2306 like 3-5 years but it only in the last year everyone started doing it
Native speaker here. 传 in 自传 (as autobiography) does not mean to "pass along". It means "records" as in 传记. 自传 literally means story of oneself, ie auto-biography. You were thinking about 转 with radical 车 which is usually associated with machines.
Also when 转 means pass along its pronounced chuan2, when it is zhuan (3) it means a change (in nature, or direction). 传 is 4th tone, not 3.
Not a native speaker here, just someone who has read a fair bit of Classical Chinese. I am very sure that chuán as in "pass along" or "transmit" should also be spelled 传/傳, not 转/轉 and every dictionary I consulted said the same thing. It's still different from zhuàn, obviously, but the mistake is understandable.
Wow… a bit embarrassing that a native speaker can’t even get something like this correct and I, someone who hasn’t lived in China since childhood, can.
传 absolutely can also be pronounced “chuan2” (second tone) in which sense it means “to pass along”.
And 转 can be associated with machinery but it’s not absolutely or even mostly so. When you say to a person “turn around”, that’s the character you’d use. Or to a ballerina spinning around. It can never mean “pass along” nor can it be pronounced “chuan2”.
it's just a typo. @@acrupio211
@@musAKulture It can't have been a typo. The main point of the post was that the creator of this video probably confused 传 and 转.
What would the comment even be supposed to mean if it was a typo?
传 (verb - to pass along): chuán
传 (noun - record): zhuàn
转 (to turn): zhuǎn
The visual style is so unique, loving it.
Thank you!
wow this video was really informative!! super underrated channel
I think you know how to express yourself really well, and your curiosity and love for languages is really cool, this video was really well made. Great job .
love love this video. in particular the editing style and your tone when presenting this information, super nice content here
I embarked on the Chinese course on Duolingo previous week, so this video was very pleasing to watch at this moment of life. I loved the design of the video and the fonts, thank you!
This video format is brilliant!
Very well made giving an overall brief overview on the language.
I like the editing style as well, keeping the whole video interesting.
Btw, I really think your pronunciation is quite decent, even as a native speaker I'm quite impressed, good job!
beautiful video! should be the intro video played in any Chinese intro class! Masterclass work Mr.Nanjec
Love your font choices!
🤩
Well made video! Thank you for making this video. I've learned stuff about Chinese (Mandarin specifically) from this!
Thank you for watching!!!
Not only is this video informative and interesting for people interested in languages, but also it is just so satisfying to watch...
you sound like a paid bot
A very aesthetically pleasing video, thanks!!!
your voice is relaxing to listen to!
Wow, great video! you laid out all of the basic building blocks of the language in a clear and conscise way. While Your graphic design format & editing style made the viewing expirence all the more easthetically pleasing.
very great video, i love the leap form the minecraft bong to a detailed detour into mandarin
Really well put together video!
Even besides all the great info and communication, what a stylish video! Great job man.
"library"or"图书馆" in chinese used to have a different representation which is in just one character. That is 圕. It is quite straight forward to understand for chinese speakers. Beacause it is literally books(書) surround by walls(口).
I'm learning spanish and whats hard about it is the conjugations, which means that there are technically different words for the same word depending on who is being spoken of and the tense. So "tener" (to have) is the "base word" so to speak, and "tengo" is the present tense first person talking about themselves. So there are also "tiene", "tienes", "teniendo", "tuve", etc. There are 5 tenses and 6 "perspectives" (i guess that's the correct term). And that's just the "indicative" voice. There are 3 main "voices" in Spanish. There's a tense in spanish that exists _just_ to talk about hypothetical situations!
The big saving grace is that the tenses and perspectives are all similar for each word. So "I have", which is "tengo", is similar to "I work", "trabajo". And the main base word is always at the beginning of the word as far as I'm aware.
I'm only familiar with the present tenses. :(
I could get this channel has a lot of experience and videos.
Excelent job!
This video is a jem!
Great video, you explained it well. I hope that you do more videos in the future about Chinese, as I’d be interested in watching them
Very cool video! I really wanted to watch a video like this, but it was hard to find since most videos on the subject are actively trying to teach you Chinese.
Excellent video! This is basically all the rants I deliver, frequently, about Chinese.
Hahaha 100%! thanks for watching 🙌
This sounded so profesional! Great upcoming channel. Could even do a “mistakes” or “lies” episode adding all the stuff from the comment section.
This is such a cool video!!! im a uni student studying ling and ive been learning mandarin for about a year, i guess i knew the information in the video already but it was such a fun simple way to explain how esp the morphology works :) loved it. So real that your other most recent video is making a bong in minecraft that's the duality of man
LMAO, minecraft bong 😭
the typography in this is great, almost as good as the theme and overall art direction. great piece indeed!
Your video was great, thank you for your explanation.
your ending scene is so cool
Quality video, hope it will get more views.😃
I like your style!
super helpful, thank you! that's the most accessible mandarin chinese has ever seemed to me. very interesting that there aren't verb tenses
Super glad to hear that! And yeah, it’s very interesting. One way that they add tense is by adding a time reference: i.e. “I, yesterday, go to the store” as opposed to having to conjugate “go” into “went.” Thanks for watching!
圖is not map. 圖iis just “picture/graph” . 地圖 “earth/ ground picture” is map. 圖書is just book (with words and pictures/ graphs)
圖窮匕現、圖亦有地圖之含意。
genuine question, how do you manage yo read those characters on a computer? Because on my end "圖" looks like a cube with two white cubes inside, it lost so many of its strokes it seems you would confuse it with many others that share a similar structure
@@canoa223 by using context
@@canoa223u can differentiate them by observe properly. Because they all are different just some looks similiar. But recognise them by context is much easier. Actually english can have similiar trouble, aint it?( or is it just me😂) intimidate, imitate, intimate are so alike for me.
@@canoa223 even without the context, it's not that hard for native speaker. Similar yes, but still not the same
Thank you for using the Fraktur script.
I think it is beautiful.
Just a good video. Thank you for creating and uploading this
When I was studying Mandarin, we fondly referred to it as Yodaspeak, at least when talking about the grammar. Because while subject -> verb -> object order is maintained, there are a lot of other grammatical/word order differences between Chinese and English.
LOVE the total lack of conjugation, though! When I was learning German, by far the hardest thing for me to wrap my head around was the various cases and genders of words. The conjugation itself wasn't that hard, barring a few special verbs (like 'to be'), but it was an added layer of complexity to an already complex system of grammar. Chinese grammar is extremely simple, and like you said, elegant.
Bro I am learning chinese rn and this is so helpful bro u underrated!
One of the concepts that was a game changer for me in beginning to have a framework for understanding Chinese is that characters are monosyllabic. This idea then helps explain the tonal nature of the language of well.
wonderfully made, visually appealing, and simple yet appealing storytelling. Thank you for the effort you put into this video.
Chopin at the end. Nice touch
wow really nice//informative!
wow great video especially for such a small channel
I love your style, please do more videos about china. It looks so elegant and classy. Sort of like a wes anderson movie. Love it. New fan ❤️
Nice video. You are making high quality content
Great video !
Loved the video!
I appreciate it! Thanks for watching
太棒了！the character's font is incredible!
It’s the amount of strokes for a single character for me
i like the concept of your video and your voice is nice. good job and good luck with channel
where'd you learn to edit videos so good?
Good video, I've not learned much new, but I loved the presentation
Great video. I went to check what other cool linguistics stuff you might have, and holy shit did I have a surprise 😂😂
wow this video is extremely different from your other videos. I hope you make more like this
amazing video, I feel like this is a great subject intro. I'd want to be told this day 0 of classes
Nice vid, thanks!
An informative video!
I speak 4 foreign languages and can understand a couple more but Chinese humbles me, mostly with the tones.
This is very fascinating
Excellent - very clear.
i rly hope this dood makes more vids
wonderful video, keep up the good work :)
this is a great video! as someone from china i really appreciate you putting in your research for this and i also appreciate that you can talk about an aspect of china without having to bring in the government
2:03 Common writing system, but they are all different languages.
My native language is Cantonese (HK), and Mandarin speakers couldn't and can only guess what I am speaking in order to understand.
Different language, different set of vocabs.
4:28 圖 means picture might be more suitable for this context
Anyways this is still a great video! 👍😄
I mean, don't libraries have maps as well? Or are pictures more common? Or is it both?
The word 圖書 mostly refers to books, but can also refer to periodicals, photos, maps, documents, etc. A 圖書館 is the place where such things are stored.
@@danielantony1882 actually "圖書" is a word, means pictured books
But i hear that cantonese, wu, hakka are different languages with different grammar and vocabulary, but all write in same mandarin characters, and thus different sinitic language speakers have no issue to communicate. Is this understanding correct?
@@MrRejikuruvillaPutonghua is a common literary and spoken language in China. A, for example, Cantonese speaker would not write out exactly what they were saying verbally onto paper, but rather "translate" what they speak into a formal literary language, i.e Putonghua.
Take for example the sentence "I like eating cake", a Cantonese speaker would say "我鍾意食蛋糕" verbally, but when written out in the literary language, it would become 我喜歡吃蛋糕. No matter what Chinese language a Chinese speaker speaks, they would all write it out like this formally, which allows for speakers of different Chinese languages to understand each other.
It's similar to Latin in medieval Europe, a literary language that is somewhat similar to everybody's native language, understood by everyone when written, but not spoken unless in a formal context. The only distinction between Putonghua and Latin is that Putonghua is based on a living language, whereas Latin is a dead language.
Unique, elegant, and clean animation style! I like your incorperation of Chinese phrases into this, and your pronunciation is better than some of those "learn Chinese youtubers" out there! I especially appreciated your explanation on how "Chinese" varies based on region. As a Cantonese and Mandarin speaker, I don't really like the word "dialect" as it is very misleading. Languages like Serbian and Croatian are so mutually intelligible yet they are distinct languages; yet Cantonese and Mangarin are often referred to as the "same language" even though they are not mutually intelligible. Thanks for the video, it was satisfying and enjoyable to watch.
Only three suggestions that seems to have not been mentioned yet:
1:54 誤解一 is more correct here.
7:09 a more correct translation of "in Chinese" would be 中文裏/中文里.
8:36 having 是 and 的 would not be necessary as the characters are inferred through context.
i am also a university student studying chinese (about to finish my first year). clicked on this video out of curiousity and mild boredom. good editing and presentation
A well-edited video by a small channel? me likey
Great video! Subscribed
Im a native mandarin speaker and just watched a video explaining chinese in its entirety lol
Jokes aside, this is a great video and I can totally see someone without knowledge of the language seeing this and using it as a starting point to learn chinese, its simple yet not misleading, a hard feat!
love this video!
Awesome and very educational ❤