Modest Mao posted:

that's not what that means yo

Hobo By Design posted:

MM = 妹妹

[mčimči / mei4 mei4]
noun.
Little sister, young girl, pretty girl, or a girl’s private part. Often written as “MM,” which usually refers to a young girl or pretty girls. It can also refer to a girl’s vagina, her “little sister.”

icantfindaname posted:

they've been a cartoonish failure for decades. i think the government has gone bankrupt, like actually defaulting on bonds bankrupt, like three times in the last 50 years. they can't get credit anywhere, and just a few months ago an American court basically barred them from ever doing business in the US again until they pay back decades of interest on loans to American banks, which will never happen. it's not really entirely their fault but lol anyways

oohhboy posted:

I approve of hurt Chinese feelings.

icantfindaname posted:

they've been a cartoonish failure for decades. i think the government has gone bankrupt, like actually defaulting on bonds bankrupt, like three times in the last 50 years. they can't get credit anywhere, and just a few months ago an American court basically barred them from ever doing business in the US again until they pay back decades of interest on loans to American banks, which will never happen. it's not really entirely their fault but lol anyways

waitwhatno posted:

Barrack Obama tweeted:

"Lol, meeting for dinner with hollande tomorrow. hope they will have something without frogs, snails or fries on menus. Lol. Siege heil!

Miggles posted:

Chinese tourists are awesome.

icantfindaname posted:

they've been a cartoonish failure for decades. i think the government has gone bankrupt, like actually defaulting on bonds bankrupt, like three times in the last 50 years. they can't get credit anywhere, and just a few months ago an American court basically barred them from ever doing business in the US again until they pay back decades of interest on loans to American banks, which will never happen. it's not really entirely their fault but lol anyways

ElGroucho posted:

And yet Argentinians believe themselves superior to all Latin American countries at a level that would make the most ardent Republican blush

ElGroucho posted:

And yet Argentinians believe themselves superior to all Latin American countries at a level that would make the most ardent Republican blush

Cursed Lumberjack posted:

ElGroucho posted:

And yet Argentinians believe themselves superior to all Latin American countries at a level that would make the most ardent Republican blush

Cursed Lumberjack posted:

Accretionist posted:

I want to breathe that office' air.

Miggles posted:

When plants don't have sunlight, they use oxygen and produce carbon dioxide.

I don't see no windows.

Miggles posted:

When plants don't have sunlight, they use oxygen and produce carbon dioxide.

I don't see no windows.

Tusen Takk posted:

"Huirong, why am I so sleepy?! Three cups of coffee has done NOTHING!"

ElGroucho posted:

Yes, and they say poo poo like "vosotros" and call each other chico

The fresas of Latin America

Modest Mao posted:

Chinese has only 417 (iirc) words if you count by phonetics, and 4 tones for each of those. Virtually every word makes use of all 4 tones, but not all of them (給，誰，能，日 don't) or some are obscure. So you've basically got ~1600 possible spoken words in Chinese but 80,000+ characters many of which have multiple meanings. A lot of nouns are two nouns put together (movie is 電影 － electric shadow) but that's basically it. So you pretty much cannot read roman characters for chinese words and hope to have any idea of what's going on in them.

Modest Mao posted:

So you pretty much cannot read roman characters for chinese words and hope to have any idea of what's going on in them.

Bloodnose posted:

Yes you can.

edit: jerk above me already brought up vietnamese which is the primary nail in the coffin for the "can't romanize Chinese" argument.

but also the fact that in mainland China, children's books are written in pinyin supplemented with characters. and in the 20th century there were pro-romanization Chinese linguists who did their work in pinyin (without diacritics even!!) on principle.

Vorgen posted:

Electric shadow? ELECTRIC SHADOW!?! loving awesome!

pentyne posted:

That could always be applied to most cultures. There are always a few extremely smart people who do not succeed in traditional academic environments but can self teach themselves a trade like programming, web design, etc. and be loving amazing at it. I knew a guy in high school who graduated with a 1.8 g.p.a, and he scored a 1540 on his SATs (when the max was 1600) and got a perfect math score. He took the score around to his teachers and flat out told them "Look, I cannot make myself interested in this class, but I'm really loving smart, just let me do the bare minimum and coast through, I'm joining the military when I graduate" and they didn't give him any poo poo after that.

Bloodnose posted:

Yes you can.

edit: jerk above me already brought up vietnamese which is the primary nail in the coffin for the "can't romanize Chinese" argument.

but also the fact that in mainland China, children's books are written in pinyin supplemented with characters. and in the 20th century there were pro-romanization Chinese linguists who did their work in pinyin (without diacritics even!!) on principle.

edit2: romanization would work especially well for mandarin because mandarin loving hates monosyllabic words (note the addition of 子 to any goddamned monosyllabic word for no purpose other than to make it disyllabic), so you don't get that many minimal pairs.

syscall girl posted:

I remember reading somewhere that the Chinese for computer is 'electric brain'. The way they make new words from old characters is cool and funny.

GATOS Y VATOS posted:

Traditionally this was done in Japan as well; for example the word for telephone is actually "denwa" which means 'electric talk'. Japan has no problem generally with borrow words though.

JaucheCharly posted:

How does this language work if you're talking via a bad connection or at a place that's loud? Just guessing words from the context?

Modest Mao posted:

It's 電話 (dian hua) in chinese,, same meaning. Cell phone is 手機 "hand machine" though.

edit:

Some other cool compound nouns

Scooter is 機車, machine vehicle.
Car is 汽車， air vehicle.
Train is 火車， fire vehicle.
plane is 飛機， flying machine.

"chinese is the hardest language" lol

Croc Monster posted:

If train is "fire vehicle", what's fire truck?

Modest Mao posted:

yeah but like 90% of pinyin I see outside of textbooks has no tone markers and spaces those disyllabic words inconsistently. If you're fluent or a native speaker you can parse it out with context most of the time but it's not really usable the same as the way western languages use roman scripts.


edit: and you could only really parse every day language, and only full sentences. I don't think you could read a book in chinese in phonetics alone. I don't think you could make a quick list of objects.

Bloodnose posted:

I love Chinese characters and I read and write them in my everyday life. But Chinese is just another language, like English, like Italian, like Spanish, whatever. You could invent a dumb system to write European languages with characters too (I think an experimental linguist actually did develop a system for writing English in Chinese characters).

Periphery posted:

One thing I noticed on a holiday to China is that a lot of street signs and train stops with roman character translations on them sound nothing like the Chinese word when a dumb english speaker pronounces them phonetically. Why is this? It's highly likely that I could just be stupid, but some of them were so different that it was just ridiculous.