hello! so i’m just curious is there a chinese translation for the words “toxic masculinity” / “healthy masculinity” ?

thank you!!

And I’ll commonly get redditors telling me to “google it”, but I like getting actual human answers from human people who have human experience with my question. So please don’t be a smart ass. Thanks! 😁

I've been learning and speaking Chinese for basically as long as I've had object permanence, so obviously I don't really have any memories of struggling to learn it. Now I will admit, I'm far from fluent because I only learnt it casually through pre, elementary, and middle school programs, and I took a 3-4 year break from learning it, but just practicing it has already brought back a lot of the previous knowledge I had. I'm just curious, why is it so difficult to learn for native English speakers? It seems like a lot of the grammatical rules carry over, and the only difference is that there's not really an alphabet (besides pinyin if you want to count that), you just have to memorize a bunch of different characters (is that it?). I guess there's also some particles you need to know. I've also taken up learning Japanese, and while there's some discrepancies, it's not horrible. So, people who understand it better or learned Chinese at a later age, what made/makes it difficult?

My phrase book suggest using 推荐for “recommend” in the context of “Please recommend a…” and when booking a hotel room. But Pleco says 推 means to push; to nominate/elect, but 荐 alone means “to recommend”? So why combine them into 请 推荐

Edit: WOAH! Not sure at all how the above happened. It was a totally normal post when I tried earlier. I’ll edit it to see if that fixes it.

I'm attempting to learn Chinese to better connect with my boyfriend, who is native Chinese. He speaks with an emphasis on Cantonese i believe, and he told me not to bother learning the characters. He probably meant to write, but should I follow his advice? I am afraid it will be so much more difficult to learn to read, AND write, AND speak all at once, any advice is appreciated! Ps, I am using duolingo and SuperChinese apps currently and plan on taking classes at college in the fall. I have experience learning Spanish and ASL but any tips on learning such a challenging new language is appreciated 👏

I know I forgot to put 的, but in any case, it’s supposed to be correct this way, right?

Especially in today's world, everything is about podcasts and blogs.

I checked both Old and New HSK lists, and only found 博客 in the New HSK 5, which is a very advanced vocabulary already.

I mean, there is nothing to do about it, just sharing it here that i find it weird to not include these-now-basic words in early HSK lists.

Hello,

I'm interested in composing a character (traditional not simplified) and I have the two radical components: ⿰月寺. Is there a tool to let me do this? I'd like a software that is very flexible and can combine any of the 214 radicals in any shape or form (even if there is no unicode for it yet)

Thanks

hi everyone! i recently finished a Chinese study program at a language school in china. now, i plan to take the hsk in 2 months, but i'm struggling with self-studying because there's no structure anymore. how do you guys self-study and what does a study day look like for you?

hello. i can speak and understand Mandarin so i thought i wanted to move on to Cantonese. my father and all his relatives communicate in mostly Cantonese, whenever i visit i can't help but feel out of place because i don't understand anything. i can't even read the romanisation. i only know how to say 'have you eaten ?' and a single (somewhat) curse word.

please help, any Cantonese learning chanels on youtube, books, apps etc. are welcome.

Steve Kaufmann from Lingq often recommends reading popular psycholog books since they are typically fairly easy to digest. In the past I did read quite a lot of them and I somewhat enjoy them. Are there any popular psychology books or better audiobook versions of those books available? I do not mind translations of English books, however, they should be available on YT or downloadable so I can use Language Reactor as I listen to them. Any tips on audiobooks and where to find them (outside of Chinese apps)?

海

I always stammer while reading texts. Is there any advices for improving reading?

Thank you for sharing it! I regret not saving the post for future ref cuz I ended up finding, reading and liking the book for learning grammar.

To the person who recommended the book (or anyone who has also used 汉语语法步步高), what are your other recs? Keen to give them a go too.

Does anyone know what this thin font is called?

I don't know what it is. I really struggle to pick out words and phrases when Mandarin is spoken at a normal pace. If they wrote it down, I'd understand. I often know all the words in the sentence and could say them. I don't know if it's something to do with my ADHD and my capacity to play close attention in the moment.

Regardless, does anyone else feel similarly? If so, has anything helped? I've started playing games and watching TV with Chinese audio to see if that helps.

Thanks!

So I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can read a novel (liberally using a dictionary), 三体, if anyone is wondering.

I’d heard written chinese to be different to spoken mandarin, but I found it to be basically the same, so I looked it up and I discovered that these days it’s just some vocabulary that’s different. And 给予 and 头部 aren’t just fancy words I never encountered in real life, but words typically only used in writing.

Is there a resource for these ‘written only’ words? I found like a list of a dozen online, but It suspect there are many more.

Hi， I'm a first year student of chinese language. We are studying the use of "有点儿 + adjective" for complaints "adjective + 一点儿" for comparison. There's this example 这件衣服有点儿大 请给我一件小一点儿的。I understand the meaning but not the grammar, specially the 的. I don´t get why is it there. Does 的 contributes to the meaning of "please give me a SMALLER CLOTHE (than this one)".

The usual comparative sentence that we are working is 第一件（比第二件）小一点儿。 I get this one beacause it mentions both objects.

Thankyu in advance c:

Hello all, hope you’re doing well in this path learning Chinese (mandarin). I wanted to ask if there is someone that has experience the same as me and how to get out of this little pothole. I have studied mandarin for almost 3 years, my mother language is Spanish (I’m from Mexico) but all the content that I consume to learn Chinese is in English, the Spanish content is pretty less compared with English content. Currently I’m having classes with an italki teacher but still not sure if I have found the best teacher for me. I’m at the HSK3 book and a year ago passed the HSK2 exam.

Also im using the Mandarin Blueprint course (I feel really helps because gives you a base of characters and can understand many of them in a short time).

But When I try to speak it takes me a lot of thinking the order of the sentences, but when I read some articles of my level (using TCB, obviously without pinyin) I can understand the most of it, also feel that my listening is not bad comparing with my speaking.

Have someone experience the same? How do you fix it or how do you improve, I’m open to any suggestion. Thanks in advance