If, according to yourself, "standard Chinese is just one of those Mandarin dialects", it follows that "standard Chinese" is Mandarin. Besides, there are other Chinese languages than Mandarin, some of which even attract learners abroad, such as Cantonese (itself a dialect of a language different from Mandarin). And all these other languages are just as Chinese as Mandarin. Therefore, it is not only incorrect to refer to Mandarin as "Chinese" (as a noun rather than adjective), as if there existed a single Chinese language. It is also disrespectful and damaging to all non-Mandarin dialects. In this, it doesn't matter how most Chinese people tend to call the various languages and dialects in their own languages and current historical/sociocultural/political setting. Same way we don't care whether most Italians refer to their regional languages as dialects, when they are in fact languages, as far as philology and linguistics are concerned. The way most Italians have come to refer to their various languages, in their own languages, should never make us refer to such languages as a dialects. Plus, in the case of what we call Italian vs other Italian languages, it so happens that Italian was developed mostly based on Tuscan, but not exclusively. Italians, as a nation, gave themselves an initially artificial standard to serve their nation unification and building project. In China, they didn't pug together such a standard. They just picked one language, in one of its dialectal forms, which happened to be basically the same of imperial China of old, spoken by its rulers from Beijing, a Mandarin dialect. That is for sure A Chinese language, but not THE Chinese language. It is a language among others that was made to prevail, rather than some new standard agreed by all that came to prevail. This is surely disputable and less clearcut that stated here, especially if we pick Italy to compare it with China. But we could take other examples, such as Spain and Spanish, which are less disputable. Spanish started to be called Spanish only as Castile was overpowering every other peninsular nation and starting to appropriate the name of Spain, in an imperialistic (not consensual, unlike Italy) nation-building project. Until the late 16th snd early 17th centuries, "Spanish" was an adjective that simply referred to Spain, understood as English for Hispania in Latin, i.e. the Iberian Peninsula. In all European languages, Spain, Espagne, etc., referred to the Iberian Peninsula, not to any particular nation within it. Castilians viewed Catalans or Portuguese as other "Spanish" nations, and so did Catalans and Portuguese. Not unlike the English, Welsh, Scotish, etc. being all regarded as British (before the Kingdom of Great Britain). All people in Great Britain were and remain British. They can remain British to the extent that the English never appropriated the name. Had they appropriated the name and sought to impose their language calling it British, denying other British nations and languages, this would have met resistance, been rejected, and made it impossible today to call the Welsh and Scottish by the name of British without being a genocidal imperialist. But this is exactly what happens in "Spain". This is why Catalans, for instance, have historically tended to keep referring to Castilian as such, and not as Spanish. Only over the last 10 years, as a majority of Catalans finally gave up on the idea of Spain as a possible future country embracing its national diversity, did they start using more and more "Spanish" to refer to Castilian, as they assumed Spain to definitely be a foreign nation rather than the historical geographical notion of Hispania, i.e. the Iberian Peninsula. Ironically, Iberia was the Greek name given to the whole peninsula after the Greeks discovered, traded, and even settled a little bit the eastern fringe of the peninsula, where the Ebre/Ebro river ends and the "Iberians" lived. Those tribes, which spoke and wrote Iberian, were ethnically different from other ethnic groups to the south, west, and north of the peninsula named "Iberia" by the Greek. Tartessians, Celts and Basques were not Iberian. The Iberians, ethnically speaking, overlapped with today's Catalans. Getting back to China, there has always been and still is an imperialistic nation-building project, with the Han and Mandarin at its core. Today's regime in China, for instance, under Jimping, started to impose Mandarin and ignore Cantonese in Hong Kong, while cracking down on democrats, as part of that imperialistic nation-building project. Same way they invaded and annexed Tibet, and have been claiming, to justify that, that Tibetans have "always been" Chinese. They weren't and still aren't. People from Hong Kong are indeed Chinese, but "Chinese" (i.e. Mandarin) is not their language. As foreigners, we should try to be as accurate as possible and never contribute to imperialistic campaigns that deny other people's identity, language, and rights in general.
I wrote a lengthy comment on why it is inaccurate to call Mandarin by the name (i.e. noun, not adjective) of Chinese. My comment, which took time to write, seems to have been censored. Therefore, I'll be shorter this time, and here is the bottom line. When you claim that "standard Chinese is just one of those Mandarin dialects" you acknowledge that "standard Chinese" is indeed Mandarin. Other languages might be just as Chinese (and this is an adjective, referring to a region, polity or broad ethnolinguistic group) and some, like Cantonese, even attact foreign learners. It doesn't seem accurate to privilege one particular language over all others, assigning to it the noun "Chinese", especially when it has its own specific and well established name. In other languages we shouldn't care how the Chinese tend to call their own languages. I gave the example of Italic languages, which we shouldn't call dialects in spite of Italians themselves usually referring to them as such, in their own everyday speech. We shouldn't. Much less, in the case of China, when there is a political regime that happens to be ethnonationalistic, imperialistic, dictatorial, and even genocidal, which revolves around the same traditional Chinese imperial tenets of the Han ethnicity and Mandarin language. Which is something that people of, say, Hong Kong, Cantonese speakers, are enduring since Jinping took over: their language being curtailed, while Mandarin is being privileged, as a very traditional trick in imperialistic nation-building. We should never contribute to that. To refer to the Mandarin language as Chinese language is a perfect way to blurr things and thus contribute to PRC's imperialistic ethnonationalism.
I'm a Chinese English teacher in China. Fascinating sketch about tones in Chinese, in China we have a very famous joke about the tone, and it's about a woman from Sichuan who's lost her 鞋子 shoes, but in putonghua it's pronounced as 孩子 children. But because all the tones in Chinese are fixed, I find it more difficult for Chinese English learners to utilize tones as tools for expressions in English.
This is the first time I’ve actually been able to understand the numeric classifiers, great explanation! (as someone who has never studied Chinese, but has heard of the classifiers)
@@DaveHuxtableLanguages Erm... Is that "language NOT like me" (in CC) also some subtle word play lost on me? (3:50) In which case, "pls explain" : ) Addendum - while at it, at 6:32 CC reads _"This is the sun, the moon, a mountain, a horse, and an elephant"_ while the spoken part recites only _"This is the sun, a mountain_ [which sounds like "mounted"], _and an elephant"_ 10:08 - _Its grammar and vocabulary, AND mostly similar..._ ?? 10:56 - rather peculiar example, if you ask me... See, many years ago I heard an anecdote about some "translation issues" - can't remember details now, but AFAIR (and "as far" is the operator here), so anyway reportedly one of American presidents visiting Communist China started to talk about "human rights" and the interpreter stopped talking. "What's wrong with you, can't you translate it?" "Sir, there's no such concept in Chinese - you can 'say' this phrase but that would be meaningless, like 'dry water" or 'flying pigs'". Again, I don't know how it actually works in Chinese, but "there" the primary source of law is the Emperor (or its modern incarnation, aka The Gensek), i.e. his wish becomes a law. And "the people" are NOT "be-all and end-all", but "quite the contrary". And it certainly isn't "what the Chinese state can do for you?" because your happiness (or the lack of thereof) is the least concern of The Ruler - it's the "well being of The State" which is of the utmost importance. The Emperor fulfils the Will of Heaven (from where his mandate comes), and "da peepl" (aka "the fertiliser of/for the history") are there to fulfil all and every Emperor's wish and whim. I mean, this is what they are for, aren't they? (According to principles of Chinese Civilisation, that is... but I digress here).
@@MrKotBonifacy Thanks for pointing out the typos in the transcription, which I have now corrected. As for my choice of text for the dialects, I had to go with what I could find. China is a permanent member of the UN Security Council and Chinese is one of the organization’s six official languages. The idea that there are certain concepts for which Chinese lacks words is a pervasive myth.
Alright... now Japanese. I'm American and studied abroad in Japan in high school for a year. My high school at home didn't have Japanese, so I took Chinese. Mandarin was much easier to pick up than Japanese, also knowing characters and knowing counter words definitely helped. Also the point on collecting characters was hilarious.
Really glad you mentioned dialects in this vid. Most people simply assume Chinese is a single language and neglect a range of variances, which arguably are closer to and better in preserving features of classical Chinese before the Mongols took over in the 1200s.
My family are Hakka speakers, and although I'm not fluent, my basic knowledge of the language helps a lot with learning Japanese kanbun as well as other chinese dialects, since Hakka preserves many of the Tang dynasty pronunciations. In fact, we still call ourselves T'ong ngin (Tang ren / Tang people).
@@freemanol From which it can be inferred that China Town's Chinese name, Tang Ren Jie (literally Tong People's Street(s)), probably derives from Hakka.
@@rosslol1184 I'm not sure if it's exclusively a hakka thing, the Hokkien and Teochew might also call themselves the same in their dialect, but i have never heard a Mandarin speaker use the term, that's for sure.
Somehow that "Four Handles"... or was it "Fork Candles"? - can't seem to remember now, so anyway that "here you are, four candles!" - "nah, fork'andles! 'Andles fo' forks!" sketch just came to my mind... ;-)
@@DaveHuxtableLanguages Yeah, I know "that one" too, but it's far less known and popular - and that "you should have said so" has this clear ring of _"Hose! Say "hose", say that..."_ line from "Four Candles". Also, that "Blackberry shop" sketch doesn't have even half of the ingenuity and pun of the original, and these references to "a dongle" are, well... Speaking of "crude" (and while at it) - this is what Ronnie Barker has said regarding the ending of this "probably the best sketch of theirs" - and probably you know it anyway, but "just in case" lemme share thistotally useless bit oof Two Ronnies trivia: _"Ladies and Gentlemen, I've a confession to make._ _When I wrote that sketch, I was never happy with the ending to the sketch. 'Billhooks' - I didn't like it: bit too obscure, bit too coarse - but I couldn't think of another end, so we did it. Then latter, just before we did the sketch at the London Palladium, the perfect tag came to me. I was so pleased, it was so simple: instead of the young man being called on, a big, slovenly girl in an overall came on, took the list from Ronnie, see, looked at me, looked at it and said: 'right, sir, what kind of knockers you're looking for?'"_
The word we have in English for the equivalent of "measure word" in Chinese is "collective noun". Found this out after asking an AI, then via a post on my high school English teacher's FB page.
You might have noticed that those from Beijing, and North East (Dong Bei) or; East North to the Chinese, have a very distinct accent, they tend to round their "r" sounds, instead of saying, "yi dian dian", they will say "yi dianr dianr. When I started to learn Chinese, the phrase book which I purchased encouraged talking in a Beijing accent. My wife is from Taiwan, and I spoke Chinese using the Beijing accent with her Taiwanese friends, and they encouraged me to talk with a more "standardised" Guoyu, or Putonghua accent. Their reasoning was that many regional Chinese did not like "Dong Bei", or Beijing people, or the accent.
I have mainly lived in the south, so never used much ‘erhua’. When I moved to Beijing I found I needed it to ease communication. My standard description for taxi drivers of where I lived was 朝陽公園南門的對面, which I had to say as Chaoyang gongyuanr nanmenr de duimianr to be readily understood.
I'm Chinese too and I also agree with your wife. I can't stand northern accents especially Dongbei/Beijing. They talk so loud and they sound like pirates
@@hayabusa1329 yes, although Chinese is not my first language, I can distinguish when a Dongbei ren is talking. The accent sounds quite harsh and loud compared to other regions.
Your videos are always hilarious; your French-accent pronunciation of Chinese is the best haha. Your Irish sounds fantastic btw, far better than most Irish people, Lol
In the English translation of Liu Cixin's novel 'The Three-Body Problem', some of the characters meet an American who speaks 'perfect Modern Standard Mandarin'. Is this the version of Chinese that is usually taught to non-native speakers?
Hi, as a Chinese, I think this description is exaggerating, because lots of Chinese do not speak the so-called perfect modern standard Mandarin, especially those from Southern part of the country. Only the newsreaders of CCTV( Chinese national broadcast）speak it, otherwise people may find you phony or showy. Most of us either have slight or heavy regional accents.
Granted I'm Taiwanese, not Chinese, but I don't think the word the Chinese people use to refer to Mandarin is the same as Chinese. The language is referred to as Common Speech (Putonghua). Before the communist party took over, it was referred to as the National Language (Guoyu), which is Wasei-kango a term they borrowed from the Japanese. Even earlier than that during the Qing dynasty it was just called the Beijing Speech (Beijinghua) or the Official Speech (Guanhua), which is pretty much what Mandarin means, despite it being a Hindi term that the Malay borrowed, that the Dutch borrowed, that the Portuguese borrowed and finally borrowed into English to refer to Chinese officials and the Official Speech. Since it was a Hindi term, it ultimately shares an etymology with other Indo-European words like mantra, mind, automatic, comment, dement, mantis, mental, mention, mentor, money, monitor, and so on, from the PIE root *men-, to think. The Mandarin that the Portuguese encountered in the 16th century is a completely different language than Mandarin today. Mandarin today slowly developed in Beijing's inner city where the Manchu elites lived through out the Qing dynasty, and didn't take over the whole of Beijing until early 19th century. Prior to that, Mandarin spoken by the Ming dynasty and through out most of the Qing dynasty was closer to Nanjingese, also called Nanjing Mandarin.
@@DaveHuxtableLanguages People mainly say Guoyu, however those of us who oppose the KMT's illegal occupation of Taiwan would refer to it as what it is, Beijinghue, or Pak-kiann-uē as we say in Taigi. People never say Hanyu, and saying 中文 makes one sound a bit dated and usually only used when talking to non-Taiwanese. Even then, people would prefer calling it 華語.
@@Kaede-Sasaki When Robert Morrison wrote his Chinese dictionary in 1815, what he recorded in the city of Beijing was still closer to the Nanjing Mandarin. Nanjing Mandarin retained more phonology from Middle Chinese, and thus Peking would have been an accurate spelling of Mandarin at the time. See the Taigi spelling of Beijing, Pak-kiann for comparison. Taigi retained even more MC and even OC phonology.
Wonder why they couldn't make literary chinese the standard chinese? I like the tao and confucian-style one word, one character, one syllable logic. The trick was the pronunciation. They still haven't really standardized that as there are 10+ "dialects" of chinese. 道可道，非恆道 The Dao that can be stated, is not the eternal Dao Nice and concise 😊 * oddly enough, google translate can do literary chinese with regular chinese (simplified or traditional). Dont know if its because it was preloaded with the tao te ching or not.
hi, i enjoy your videos cos you are so lively, especially the one on California vowel shift. Anyway, i do have a correction for you in the current video. I am from Singapore and we do NOT call our version of Chinese - guoyu. Although we do have a Chinese majority in Singapore, the national languages are English, Chinese (not guoyu), Malay and Tamil.
Awesome video. I studied Chinese for many years, but not having lived in China, except for a couple of months, has hindered my learning process. Let me pick on a couple minor points, as an obsessive language learner that I am. The gender for the french word 'beurre' is masculine. And you can definitely say 'una leche' in Spanish, in a familiar context. At a bar, you can order 'a beer' after all, right? Anyway, it was still a brilliant introduction to the concept of measure words. Thanks for the video.
I'm a Hong Konger and I personally prefer saying "Chinese" to mean a family languages instead of "the Chinese language". Just because Chinese people do it, it doesn't mean it's a good argument to do the same thing in English. I definitely prefer saying "Mandarin" because I want to go against Mandarin-centrism and draw attention to the vast linguistic diversity.
I understand your reasons for calling it "Chinese", but I find "Mandarin" (or Hakka, Cantonese, etc.) a more practical label. Since the various Chinese languages are not generally mutually intelligible, saying "I speak Chinese" when you speak only Mandarin is kind of like saying "I speak Romance" when you only speak French-sure, you can probably understand written Latin to about the same extent as your Portuguese friends, but you're not gonna be able to communicate very effectively with your spoken languages. A big part of why people in (mainland) China are less inclined to make the distinction is political: Chinese unity is an important pillar of society under the CCP.
Politics plays a big part in the words we use to talk about language. I’m just going with what the majority of native speakers say. No one in France has ever asked me if I spoke Romance. Nor have they called their own speech standard Île-de-France Langue d’Oïl.
@@DaveHuxtableLanguages No doubt no doubt. Definitely nothing wrong with calling them all "Chinese" as you do, and you're right the analogy to Romance only really works from the non-socio- side of linguistics. In my own speech, I like to distinguish between different language varieties as much as possible-no matter which language I'm talking about-just for the chance it might get me into a fun conversation about linguistics! I have to admit, there's a little icing on the cake with the Chinese languages: the rebel in me relishes the idea that I'm defying the orthodoxy of China's oppressors in some tiny way (that they'd never notice or care about 😂)
I am a Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese user, when we read the standard written texts, we can automatically read and translate them in Cantonese, changing just a few words and verbs with those more often used in Cantonese. Because there’s no common standard for Cantonese texts, reading them is really challenging, especially those published in Hong Kong, they prefer to casually combine characters with similar pronunciations and radicals to write Cantonese characters. However, these characters mostly have original characters still used in standard written language, which are more commonly understood by most people. Additionally texts written in standard language are often written in shortest way possible, with more information, I’d rather write in standard language.
There are a number of reasons to call Mandarin "Mandarin" rather than "Chinese". 1) English is not Chinese, so how they refer to things in Chinese doesn't need to affect English speakers. (And I recognize that English speakers can also call Mandarin "Chinese".) 2) American and British Englishes are dialect groups, not languages. Mandarin is a separate language, no matter its designation in Chinese. Cantonese, Yue, Hakka, and others are different related languages, like Romanian when compared to French. But the various of dialects of Mandarin across China do form a more or less mutually-intelligible language, like various English dialects around the world do. 3) Yes, an authoritarian regime does not want any sense of sub-national sentiment, that's clear. That doesn't mean we have to follow along. 4) Aren't you the same guy who called Scots a language, when I could understand everything you were saying in that video, yet a Mandarin speaker would have no idea what a Hokkien speaker is saying?
Language is not a linguistically-determined concept, for living languages it's largely a political matter, or drawing along the lines of groups independent of speech. And this happens across the board so attempting to assert some linguistic meaning when there is none is stupid as it is readily contradicted. Look at Scandinavia for example. Or what about Malay and Bahasa Indonesia. Essentially what counts here is is states and the territory they control. Their standard 'tongue' and standard schooling, and their orthography / literary language. Those tongues in China so distinct that there is no mutual intelligibility are soon to die off like those tongues in Europe and elsewhere did and are still. It is obvious how and why that happens.
@@skyworm8006 So your argument appears to be "language is not linguistically-determined" (although "linguistically" is the adverbial form related to "language"). Instead, languages are "political". In essence, you are saying that everyone has to agree with a nationalist at best and non-pluralistic-imperialist at worst definition of "language". If so, you can use that definition, but I don't agree with it. Indonesian also has an issue, as it is a dialect group of Malay, and most natives in Indonesia don't have that as their native language. It's another structure to impose a rigid ruling orthodoxy over a pluralistic nation. But "Malay" is also the language of "Malaysia", and so I can understand the reticence to adopt that as the name of the language of a far larger and more populous country. Then again, Americans didn't name American English "the American language", but rather kept "English", so there are examples to the contrary as well, and the Indonesian lingua franca could very well have remained being called Malay. I personally use the term Indonesian when I talk about it (which is rarely), because if I were to use the term "Malay" to mean "Indonesian", I would not be understood well, as that is abnormal usage. However, everyone (with basic knowledge) understands what Mandarin is, and that (along with "Chinese") is a common name in English for the official language of China, so I have no problem referring to it as Mandarin.
classical chinese would be a bit more understandable to a modern chinese speaker than old english is to us (in some way more than others) because modern speakers vaguely know what the characters mean already and they don't have to pronounce them the way they were pronounced thousands of years ago
Wonder why they couldn't make literary chinese the standard chinese? I like the tao and confucian-style one word, one character, one syllable logic. The trick was the pronunciation. They still haven't really standardized that as there are 10+ "dialects" of chinese. 道可道，非恆道 The Dao that can be stated, is not the eternal Dao Nice and concise 😊 * oddly enough, google translate can do literary chinese with regular chinese (simplified or traditional). Dont know if its because it was preloaded with the tao te ching or not.
Absolutely not without learning about it which is what Chinese do. The characters aren't even the same in Classical Chinese, as new ones have been made or they've fallen out of use or completely changed meaning. It's a completely different language, you can't equate the two. Old English prose is fairly understandable if you update the orthography a bit. There are more words in common between Old English and Modern English than Classical Chinese and Modern Chinese. Mind you, Mandarin Chinese does not actually come from the language of Classical Chinese directly and neither does our English come from Late West Saxon Old English but more so from other dialects with little to no texts.
That's only if the characters are transcribed into modern characters. I am certain only a small minority of literate Sinitic language speakers would understand the old characters
@@vampyricon7026 well yes of course but most classical chinese these days is written in modern characters (usually traditional but even within china most people can read those since they're not that much different)
13:10 You can also say 你有一副好嗓子, with 副 as the measure word. By the way, tone change rules apply in this sentence. 一 should be fourth tone, 好 changes to second tone, 嗓 third tone, 子 neutral tone. Of course, Chinese people will still understand you, even if you say it the way you did, since the sound sang2 doesn't exist in Mandarin.
Thank you, very interesting and informative. Solely on a technical point, i found the zooming in and out a little disconcerting. The L/R displacement less so. I'm probably a minority of one, though.
Very good! Dave! You're introducing some very important features of Chinese! Do you find Chinese to be particularly difficult? Or not as difficult as people described? My hunch is that language wise, it may not be super difficult, but characters is for sure a bit challenge. 很不错，再接再厉！(Do you know this specific word, chengyu?)
Thank you! To be honest, Chinese is both easy and difficult. It is not as difficult as people imagine to be able to communicate on a daily level. It then takes a lifetime to be fully proficient due to the many layers of cultural and literary background. Thanks for the 成语 - a new one on me.
@@DaveHuxtableLanguages sounds cool! Btw, I am also expecting a ‘speaking English in Chinese way’. I have seen some of the series, they are very funny and captures the features very precisely. I’d be curious how Chinese English sound to native English speakers
I saw a video years ago on TH-cam (or maybe it was a webpage with video examples ) about this exact topic it talked about how regional Chinese accent affects the speaker’s accent in English. They used langlang as an example of North Eastern 东北 accent and how his accent in English was unique. Which is true, sounds completely different than a Cantonese speaker speaking English. It didn’t come across as racist but it was a very technical treatment of the topic. If you wear a black wig and thick glasses maybe it comes across that way but only to certain people. I found this video amazing, so informative, great production value and your love of the language and culture comes across very clearly. So please do a video on Chinese native speaker’s accent when speaking English. This is very practical too, my kids try to mock my wife’s dongbei accent when she speaks English and they just do a bad Uncle Roger imitation. So any video instruction would be greatly appreciated.
Uncle Roger is not mainland Chinese accent!! I remember long time ago seeing a video about Chinese accents in English’s nd they gave examples of different celebrities like LangLang who’s northern accent Sounded so different than a Cantonese English accent. Would be good to see an analysis of how regional Chinese accent translates to English language
No, we don’t call it 国语 in Singapore. We call it “中文” or “Chinese” in Singapore. We rarely call it Mandarin either and we almost NEVER say it “普通话” in Singapore
Hi, found your video very interesting and I think I learned something 🧐, however, at about 12:20, you put “beurre” and “pacquette” in the feminine where they are in fact masculine - should be “le/du beurre” and “un pacquet de beurre”
However, although beurre is masculine, you would actually say "une motte de beurre" which is the name of a block of butter, rather than "packet" (or paquet, which applies more to parcels)
At 11:10 why, for the love of cute kittens, was there no indication of the tone in any of the phonetic transcriptions? Every syllable of Chinese has a tone and it functions like a consonant.
the IPA (pronunciation slide) for Wu and especially Cantonese need to be fixed 人人生而自由在尊嚴和權利上一律平等 ȵiŋȵiŋ səŋ ə z̩jɤ tsɛ tsənȵi wu dʑiøli zaŋ ɪlɪ biŋtəŋ jɐnjɐn sɐŋ ji tsijɐʊ tsoi tsynjim wo kynlei sœŋ jɐt lɵt pʰɪŋtɐŋ
@@DaveHuxtableLanguages The local language's pronunciation of the characters is still very different from an accent. It's the difference between Cantopop and reading out the lyrics in the language they're written in, i.e. Mandarin.
WHY is your name in Chinese that thing you said it was? is it the closest sounding thing to your name? It doesn't sound too close and I'm not sure how the first and last name work.
Transliterated names sound pretty ghastly to Chinese ears. I have friends called Ke Laifu (Clive) Li Chade (Richard) and Bu Lani (Briony). Luckily, our first Chinese teacher made more of an effort with me and my name looks like a Chinese person’s. Hu represents my last name and is also a Chinese family name. Dave is often transcribed as Dawei but using ugly characters 大卫. The teacher gave me 达伟, which means ‘achieve greatness’. When I lived in a China in the 80s that was my official name and I used it for my bank account and when booking flights.
@@awaiskhan9329 You’d need to ask a person who was very highly versed in Chinese culture. I can tell you characters that sound like your name, but an authentic Chinese name has a balance of meaning and sound.
Of course, if you listen to the majority of "Chinese speakers", they'd call "Mandarin" "Chinese", since Mandarin speakers make up the majority of Chinese speakers. If everyone was equally chauvinistic about their Sinitic language, you'd end up with the Mandarin speakers winning the name of "Chinese" by sheer numbers (more than half of the speakers of a Sinitic language speak a Mandarinic language). But if you come to Hong Kong, you'll soon find that "Chinese" is Cantonese and Mandarin is "Putonghua" (with the more linguistically-inclined calling it "guanhua" or "beifanghua"). Obviously, the influence of the CCP (and previously the KMT) in quashing linguistic diversity also plays a large part. It is in their interests to play up the unity of Sinitic and to downplay the sheer variety that exists. For comparison, the last common ancestor of the extant Sinitic languages was spoken at about the same time as Latin, and no one in their right mind considers any of Sardinian, Romanian, French, or Portuguese "Latin", whereas the equivalent in Sinitic sees one of those groups (as innovative as French) essentially claiming that historical linguistics proceeds in a straight line starting from Latin and ending in the speech of Paris, which is true Latin, while all others are mere "dialects" to be eliminated.
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We've been calling it Mandarin for a long time, and I don't see any good reason to stop doing that. In fact, I prefer calling it that instead of "Chinese".
Many native Chinese people (from mainland China) call it Chinese when speaking English. only refer to it as Mandarin when speaking specifically about the different dialects. Seems silly to bring in your political biases in to the conversation when speaking about languages.
@@brospore7897 My preference for calling the language Mandarin has to do strictly with linguistic considerations. Dave was the one who brought up the CCP and UN, so I mentioned that I couldn't care less what a political institution calls something. I'm doing the EXACT OPPOSITE of bringing in a political bias. I'm completely disregarding political considerations on the topic. When speaking English, Chinese people call it both Chinese and Mandarin, with about as much frequency as Westerners do, as far as I can tell. But my point was about my personal preference, not what people normally do. Both names are used, and I think that's fine.
@@DaveHuxtableLanguagesunderstood, love your channel though. I was looking for Frenglish (French accent English), but then got curious about this Chinese video. You are quite a genius about language.
If that were true tones would no longer exist. Context helps when buying fruit, but accurate tones are essential when giving a business presentation or a formal talk.
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If, according to yourself, "standard Chinese is just one of those Mandarin dialects", it follows that "standard Chinese" is Mandarin.
Besides, there are other Chinese languages than Mandarin, some of which even attract learners abroad, such as Cantonese (itself a dialect of a language different from Mandarin).
And all these other languages are just as Chinese as Mandarin. Therefore, it is not only incorrect to refer to Mandarin as "Chinese" (as a noun rather than adjective), as if there existed a single Chinese language. It is also disrespectful and damaging to all non-Mandarin dialects. In this, it doesn't matter how most Chinese people tend to call the various languages and dialects in their own languages and current historical/sociocultural/political setting. Same way we don't care whether most Italians refer to their regional languages as dialects, when they are in fact languages, as far as philology and linguistics are concerned. The way most Italians have come to refer to their various languages, in their own languages, should never make us refer to such languages as a dialects.
Plus, in the case of what we call Italian vs other Italian languages, it so happens that Italian was developed mostly based on Tuscan, but not exclusively. Italians, as a nation, gave themselves an initially artificial standard to serve their nation unification and building project.
In China, they didn't pug together such a standard. They just picked one language, in one of its dialectal forms, which happened to be basically the same of imperial China of old, spoken by its rulers from Beijing, a Mandarin dialect.
That is for sure A Chinese language, but not THE Chinese language. It is a language among others that was made to prevail, rather than some new standard agreed by all that came to prevail. This is surely disputable and less clearcut that stated here, especially if we pick Italy to compare it with China. But we could take other examples, such as Spain and Spanish, which are less disputable. Spanish started to be called Spanish only as Castile was overpowering every other peninsular nation and starting to appropriate the name of Spain, in an imperialistic (not consensual, unlike Italy) nation-building project.
Until the late 16th snd early 17th centuries, "Spanish" was an adjective that simply referred to Spain, understood as English for Hispania in Latin, i.e. the Iberian Peninsula. In all European languages, Spain, Espagne, etc., referred to the Iberian Peninsula, not to any particular nation within it. Castilians viewed Catalans or Portuguese as other "Spanish" nations, and so did Catalans and Portuguese. Not unlike the English, Welsh, Scotish, etc. being all regarded as British (before the Kingdom of Great Britain). All people in Great Britain were and remain British. They can remain British to the extent that the English never appropriated the name. Had they appropriated the name and sought to impose their language calling it British, denying other British nations and languages, this would have met resistance, been rejected, and made it impossible today to call the Welsh and Scottish by the name of British without being a genocidal imperialist.
But this is exactly what happens in "Spain". This is why Catalans, for instance, have historically tended to keep referring to Castilian as such, and not as Spanish. Only over the last 10 years, as a majority of Catalans finally gave up on the idea of Spain as a possible future country embracing its national diversity, did they start using more and more "Spanish" to refer to Castilian, as they assumed Spain to definitely be a foreign nation rather than the historical geographical notion of Hispania, i.e. the Iberian Peninsula.
Ironically, Iberia was the Greek name given to the whole peninsula after the Greeks discovered, traded, and even settled a little bit the eastern fringe of the peninsula, where the Ebre/Ebro river ends and the "Iberians" lived. Those tribes, which spoke and wrote Iberian, were ethnically different from other ethnic groups to the south, west, and north of the peninsula named "Iberia" by the Greek. Tartessians, Celts and Basques were not Iberian. The Iberians, ethnically speaking, overlapped with today's Catalans.
Getting back to China, there has always been and still is an imperialistic nation-building project, with the Han and Mandarin at its core. Today's regime in China, for instance, under Jimping, started to impose Mandarin and ignore Cantonese in Hong Kong, while cracking down on democrats, as part of that imperialistic nation-building project. Same way they invaded and annexed Tibet, and have been claiming, to justify that, that Tibetans have "always been" Chinese. They weren't and still aren't. People from Hong Kong are indeed Chinese, but "Chinese" (i.e. Mandarin) is not their language.
As foreigners, we should try to be as accurate as possible and never contribute to imperialistic campaigns that deny other people's identity, language, and rights in general.
I wrote a lengthy comment on why it is inaccurate to call Mandarin by the name (i.e. noun, not adjective) of Chinese. My comment, which took time to write, seems to have been censored. Therefore, I'll be shorter this time, and here is the bottom line.
When you claim that "standard Chinese is just one of those Mandarin dialects" you acknowledge that "standard Chinese" is indeed Mandarin. Other languages might be just as Chinese (and this is an adjective, referring to a region, polity or broad ethnolinguistic group) and some, like Cantonese, even attact foreign learners. It doesn't seem accurate to privilege one particular language over all others, assigning to it the noun "Chinese", especially when it has its own specific and well established name. In other languages we shouldn't care how the Chinese tend to call their own languages. I gave the example of Italic languages, which we shouldn't call dialects in spite of Italians themselves usually referring to them as such, in their own everyday speech. We shouldn't. Much less, in the case of China, when there is a political regime that happens to be ethnonationalistic, imperialistic, dictatorial, and even genocidal, which revolves around the same traditional Chinese imperial tenets of the Han ethnicity and Mandarin language. Which is something that people of, say, Hong Kong, Cantonese speakers, are enduring since Jinping took over: their language being curtailed, while Mandarin is being privileged, as a very traditional trick in imperialistic nation-building. We should never contribute to that. To refer to the Mandarin language as Chinese language is a perfect way to blurr things and thus contribute to PRC's imperialistic ethnonationalism.
I'm a Chinese English teacher in China. Fascinating sketch about tones in Chinese, in China we have a very famous joke about the tone, and it's about a woman from Sichuan who's lost her 鞋子 shoes, but in putonghua it's pronounced as 孩子 children. But because all the tones in Chinese are fixed, I find it more difficult for Chinese English learners to utilize tones as tools for expressions in English.
Cool background with the characters! Well made video!!! peace.
I'm glad the shopkeeper got to play a nice game of Fruit Ninja
The best part of his day!
Very informative this channel deserves a lot more attention
Thank you. Please share widely.
This is the first time I’ve actually been able to understand the numeric classifiers, great explanation! (as someone who has never studied Chinese, but has heard of the classifiers)
Yooo WYL I love your videos man
Great - I love to hear when I’ve explained something well.
Wow. Thank you!
"Unless you're an etymologist or an entomologist" BLEASE why is every other line in this video so funny 😂
Glad you appreciate my humour.
@@DaveHuxtableLanguages Erm... Is that "language NOT like me" (in CC) also some subtle word play lost on me? (3:50) In which case, "pls explain" : )
Addendum - while at it, at 6:32 CC reads _"This is the sun, the moon, a mountain, a horse, and an elephant"_ while the spoken part recites only _"This is the sun, a mountain_ [which sounds like "mounted"], _and an elephant"_
10:08 - _Its grammar and vocabulary, AND mostly similar..._ ??
10:56 - rather peculiar example, if you ask me... See, many years ago I heard an anecdote about some "translation issues" - can't remember details now, but AFAIR (and "as far" is the operator here), so anyway reportedly one of American presidents visiting Communist China started to talk about "human rights" and the interpreter stopped talking. "What's wrong with you, can't you translate it?" "Sir, there's no such concept in Chinese - you can 'say' this phrase but that would be meaningless, like 'dry water" or 'flying pigs'".
Again, I don't know how it actually works in Chinese, but "there" the primary source of law is the Emperor (or its modern incarnation, aka The Gensek), i.e. his wish becomes a law. And "the people" are NOT "be-all and end-all", but "quite the contrary". And it certainly isn't "what the Chinese state can do for you?" because your happiness (or the lack of thereof) is the least concern of The Ruler - it's the "well being of The State" which is of the utmost importance. The Emperor fulfils the Will of Heaven (from where his mandate comes), and "da peepl" (aka "the fertiliser of/for the history") are there to fulfil all and every Emperor's wish and whim. I mean, this is what they are for, aren't they? (According to principles of Chinese Civilisation, that is... but I digress here).
I came here to say exactly that
@@nigelogilvie9450 Thank you!
@@MrKotBonifacy Thanks for pointing out the typos in the transcription, which I have now corrected.
As for my choice of text for the dialects, I had to go with what I could find. China is a permanent member of the UN Security Council and Chinese is one of the organization’s six official languages. The idea that there are certain concepts for which Chinese lacks words is a pervasive myth.
Alright... now Japanese. I'm American and studied abroad in Japan in high school for a year. My high school at home didn't have Japanese, so I took Chinese. Mandarin was much easier to pick up than Japanese, also knowing characters and knowing counter words definitely helped. Also the point on collecting characters was hilarious.
Strange how there wasn't any Japanese offered
Really glad you mentioned dialects in this vid. Most people simply assume Chinese is a single language and neglect a range of variances, which arguably are closer to and better in preserving features of classical Chinese before the Mongols took over in the 1200s.
So many people think it's either Mandarin or Cantonese.
My family are Hakka speakers, and although I'm not fluent, my basic knowledge of the language helps a lot with learning Japanese kanbun as well as other chinese dialects, since Hakka preserves many of the Tang dynasty pronunciations. In fact, we still call ourselves T'ong ngin (Tang ren / Tang people).
Fascinating!
@@freemanol From which it can be inferred that China Town's Chinese name, Tang Ren Jie (literally Tong People's Street(s)), probably derives from Hakka.
@@rosslol1184 I'm not sure if it's exclusively a hakka thing, the Hokkien and Teochew might also call themselves the same in their dialect, but i have never heard a Mandarin speaker use the term, that's for sure.
Somehow that "Four Handles"... or was it "Fork Candles"? - can't seem to remember now, so anyway that "here you are, four candles!" - "nah, fork'andles! 'Andles fo' forks!" sketch just came to my mind... ;-)
My inspiration for the layout of the shop was another sketch of theirs about Blackberries.
@@DaveHuxtableLanguages Yeah, I know "that one" too, but it's far less known and popular - and that "you should have said so" has this clear ring of _"Hose! Say "hose", say that..."_ line from "Four Candles". Also, that "Blackberry shop" sketch doesn't have even half of the ingenuity and pun of the original, and these references to "a dongle" are, well...
Speaking of "crude" (and while at it) - this is what Ronnie Barker has said regarding the ending of this "probably the best sketch of theirs" - and probably you know it anyway, but "just in case" lemme share thistotally useless bit oof Two Ronnies trivia:
_"Ladies and Gentlemen, I've a confession to make._
_When I wrote that sketch, I was never happy with the ending to the sketch. 'Billhooks' - I didn't like it: bit too obscure, bit too coarse - but I couldn't think of another end, so we did it. Then latter, just before we did the sketch at the London Palladium, the perfect tag came to me. I was so pleased, it was so simple: instead of the young man being called on, a big, slovenly girl in an overall came on, took the list from Ronnie, see, looked at me, looked at it and said: 'right, sir, what kind of knockers you're looking for?'"_
The word we have in English for the equivalent of "measure word" in Chinese is "collective noun". Found this out after asking an AI, then via a post on my high school English teacher's FB page.
11:56 BING CHILLING 🗣️🗣️🗣️
😎
😂😂
Like ice cream? Like.
You might have noticed that those from Beijing, and North East (Dong Bei) or; East North to the Chinese, have a very distinct accent, they tend to round their "r" sounds, instead of saying, "yi dian dian", they will say "yi dianr dianr. When I started to learn Chinese, the phrase book which I purchased encouraged talking in a Beijing accent. My wife is from Taiwan, and I spoke Chinese using the Beijing accent with her Taiwanese friends, and they encouraged me to talk with a more "standardised" Guoyu, or Putonghua accent. Their reasoning was that many regional Chinese did not like "Dong Bei", or Beijing people, or the accent.
I have mainly lived in the south, so never used much ‘erhua’. When I moved to Beijing I found I needed it to ease communication. My standard description for taxi drivers of where I lived was 朝陽公園南門的對面, which I had to say as Chaoyang gongyuanr nanmenr de duimianr to be readily understood.
They do say "yi dianr", but NOT "yi dianr dianr". Erhuayin is not used with reduplication.
I'm Chinese too and I also agree with your wife. I can't stand northern accents especially Dongbei/Beijing. They talk so loud and they sound like pirates
@@hayabusa1329 yes, although Chinese is not my first language, I can distinguish when a Dongbei ren is talking. The accent sounds quite harsh and loud compared to other regions.
@@hayabusa1329 Do they speak more loudly? I haven't noticed that.
Your videos are always hilarious; your French-accent pronunciation of Chinese is the best haha. Your Irish sounds fantastic btw, far better than most Irish people, Lol
Thank you! The Irish wasn’t me though - that was the Rosetta Stone app speaking.
@@DaveHuxtableLanguages I've heard you speaking Irish before :)
5:47 my nan doesn't live THAT far south...
🤣
Congrats on the sponsor! Although I'm sure Rosetta Stone would benefit from some lessons from you!
Your chinese language is so good! Even better than local Hong Konger who mother tongue are Cantonese
Thank you!
To a Hongkonger, he doesn't speak Chinese, but "Putonghua".
It reminds me of how the romans said "utraque lingua" (the two tongues), to say greek and latin.
I didn't know that. So no other languages counted.
A good intro to the language
Glad you thought so.
We don't pronounce the word as 'pronounciation' but as 'pronunciation'. That may be Irish accent taught by Rosetta.
2:42 It should be mu4 biao1, with a falling tone on the the 目 😉
You’re right!
In the English translation of Liu Cixin's novel 'The Three-Body Problem', some of the characters meet an American who speaks 'perfect Modern Standard Mandarin'. Is this the version of Chinese that is usually taught to non-native speakers?
Yes, I imagine the original says 普通话 putonghua. Sadly, the person playing the young Mike Evans in the Netflix show speaks far from perfectly.
Hi, as a Chinese, I think this description is exaggerating, because lots of Chinese do not speak the so-called perfect modern standard Mandarin, especially those from Southern part of the country. Only the newsreaders of CCTV( Chinese national broadcast）speak it, otherwise people may find you phony or showy. Most of us either have slight or heavy regional accents.
Wow, New video ! Big fan here. Greetings from Mexico !
哇 你是第一个区分了官话和普通话的人诶 我周围的人可能也就默认官话是国语 但四川话 西北话可能也是官话 但不是普通话 你很棒🎉
谢谢你的议论！
Granted I'm Taiwanese, not Chinese, but I don't think the word the Chinese people use to refer to Mandarin is the same as Chinese. The language is referred to as Common Speech (Putonghua). Before the communist party took over, it was referred to as the National Language (Guoyu), which is Wasei-kango a term they borrowed from the Japanese. Even earlier than that during the Qing dynasty it was just called the Beijing Speech (Beijinghua) or the Official Speech (Guanhua), which is pretty much what Mandarin means, despite it being a Hindi term that the Malay borrowed, that the Dutch borrowed, that the Portuguese borrowed and finally borrowed into English to refer to Chinese officials and the Official Speech. Since it was a Hindi term, it ultimately shares an etymology with other Indo-European words like mantra, mind, automatic, comment, dement, mantis, mental, mention, mentor, money, monitor, and so on, from the PIE root *men-, to think.
The Mandarin that the Portuguese encountered in the 16th century is a completely different language than Mandarin today. Mandarin today slowly developed in Beijing's inner city where the Manchu elites lived through out the Qing dynasty, and didn't take over the whole of Beijing until early 19th century. Prior to that, Mandarin spoken by the Ming dynasty and through out most of the Qing dynasty was closer to Nanjingese, also called Nanjing Mandarin.
I’ve not spent much time in Taiwan. Do people not say 中文 or 漢語 there?
@@DaveHuxtableLanguages People mainly say Guoyu, however those of us who oppose the KMT's illegal occupation of Taiwan would refer to it as what it is, Beijinghue, or Pak-kiann-uē as we say in Taigi. People never say Hanyu, and saying 中文 makes one sound a bit dated and usually only used when talking to non-Taiwanese. Even then, people would prefer calling it 華語.
@@paiwanhan Fascinating. My comments are only valid for the mainland then.
Where did the word Peking come from and is it the same as Beijing but in some other "dialect" or even a bastardization by the europeans?
@@Kaede-Sasaki When Robert Morrison wrote his Chinese dictionary in 1815, what he recorded in the city of Beijing was still closer to the Nanjing Mandarin. Nanjing Mandarin retained more phonology from Middle Chinese, and thus Peking would have been an accurate spelling of Mandarin at the time. See the Taigi spelling of Beijing, Pak-kiann for comparison. Taigi retained even more MC and even OC phonology.
Wonder why they couldn't make literary chinese the standard chinese? I like the tao and confucian-style one word, one character, one syllable logic.
The trick was the pronunciation. They still haven't really standardized that as there are 10+ "dialects" of chinese.
道可道，非恆道
The Dao that can be stated, is not the eternal Dao
Nice and concise 😊
* oddly enough, google translate can do literary chinese with regular chinese (simplified or traditional). Dont know if its because it was preloaded with the tao te ching or not.
hi, i enjoy your videos cos you are so lively, especially the one on California vowel shift. Anyway, i do have a correction for you in the current video. I am from Singapore and we do NOT call our version of Chinese - guoyu. Although we do have a Chinese majority in Singapore, the national languages are English, Chinese (not guoyu), Malay and Tamil.
Your Chinese pronunciation is great!
Thank you!
Awesome video. I studied Chinese for many years, but not having lived in China, except for a couple of months, has hindered my learning process. Let me pick on a couple minor points, as an obsessive language learner that I am. The gender for the french word 'beurre' is masculine. And you can definitely say 'una leche' in Spanish, in a familiar context. At a bar, you can order 'a beer' after all, right? Anyway, it was still a brilliant introduction to the concept of measure words. Thanks for the video.
I'm a Hong Konger and I personally prefer saying "Chinese" to mean a family languages instead of "the Chinese language". Just because Chinese people do it, it doesn't mean it's a good argument to do the same thing in English. I definitely prefer saying "Mandarin" because I want to go against Mandarin-centrism and draw attention to the vast linguistic diversity.
aɪ səspɛktɪd hɪz ɑɹɡjəmɪnt wəz wik. ɪt's ðə seɪm θiŋ wɪθ kʰæstɪliɪn biiŋ kʰɑld spænɪʃ hwɛn ðɛɹ ɑɹ əðɚ spænɪʃ leɪŋɡwɪʤɪz. ¿du ju kʰɑl mændɚɪn 普通话 oɹ du ju kʰɑl ɪt 1 əv ði əðɚ neɪmz?
@@brauljo I say 普通話 or 官話 if referring to the standard variety, and 官話 if I'm specifying other nonstandard varieties of Mandarin.
Exactly. Chinese is just a group of languages and dialects not a single language.
@@brauljowhy did you transcribe your comment in broad ipa
hong konger? so British
I understand your reasons for calling it "Chinese", but I find "Mandarin" (or Hakka, Cantonese, etc.) a more practical label.
Since the various Chinese languages are not generally mutually intelligible, saying "I speak Chinese" when you speak only Mandarin is kind of like saying "I speak Romance" when you only speak French-sure, you can probably understand written Latin to about the same extent as your Portuguese friends, but you're not gonna be able to communicate very effectively with your spoken languages.
A big part of why people in (mainland) China are less inclined to make the distinction is political: Chinese unity is an important pillar of society under the CCP.
Politics plays a big part in the words we use to talk about language. I’m just going with what the majority of native speakers say. No one in France has ever asked me if I spoke Romance. Nor have they called their own speech standard Île-de-France Langue d’Oïl.
@@DaveHuxtableLanguages No doubt no doubt. Definitely nothing wrong with calling them all "Chinese" as you do, and you're right the analogy to Romance only really works from the non-socio- side of linguistics.
In my own speech, I like to distinguish between different language varieties as much as possible-no matter which language I'm talking about-just for the chance it might get me into a fun conversation about linguistics!
I have to admit, there's a little icing on the cake with the Chinese languages: the rebel in me relishes the idea that I'm defying the orthodoxy of China's oppressors in some tiny way (that they'd never notice or care about 😂)
Worse! It's like saying "I speak Latin" when only speaking French!
普通话 does not mean "common language."
It's not 普通 （common）+ 话 （language）
It's 普 (widespread), as in 普遍
+ 通 （mutually understandable），as in 共通
I am a Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese user, when we read the standard written texts, we can automatically read and translate them in Cantonese, changing just a few words and verbs with those more often used in Cantonese. Because there’s no common standard for Cantonese texts, reading them is really challenging, especially those published in Hong Kong, they prefer to casually combine characters with similar pronunciations and radicals to write Cantonese characters. However, these characters mostly have original characters still used in standard written language, which are more commonly understood by most people. Additionally texts written in standard language are often written in shortest way possible, with more information, I’d rather write in standard language.
Many thanks for sharing this fascinating insight.
How are you defining "vowel"?
There are a number of reasons to call Mandarin "Mandarin" rather than "Chinese".
1) English is not Chinese, so how they refer to things in Chinese doesn't need to affect English speakers. (And I recognize that English speakers can also call Mandarin "Chinese".)
2) American and British Englishes are dialect groups, not languages. Mandarin is a separate language, no matter its designation in Chinese. Cantonese, Yue, Hakka, and others are different related languages, like Romanian when compared to French. But the various of dialects of Mandarin across China do form a more or less mutually-intelligible language, like various English dialects around the world do.
3) Yes, an authoritarian regime does not want any sense of sub-national sentiment, that's clear. That doesn't mean we have to follow along.
4) Aren't you the same guy who called Scots a language, when I could understand everything you were saying in that video, yet a Mandarin speaker would have no idea what a Hokkien speaker is saying?
Language is not a linguistically-determined concept, for living languages it's largely a political matter, or drawing along the lines of groups independent of speech. And this happens across the board so attempting to assert some linguistic meaning when there is none is stupid as it is readily contradicted. Look at Scandinavia for example. Or what about Malay and Bahasa Indonesia. Essentially what counts here is is states and the territory they control. Their standard 'tongue' and standard schooling, and their orthography / literary language. Those tongues in China so distinct that there is no mutual intelligibility are soon to die off like those tongues in Europe and elsewhere did and are still. It is obvious how and why that happens.
@@skyworm8006 So your argument appears to be "language is not linguistically-determined" (although "linguistically" is the adverbial form related to "language"). Instead, languages are "political". In essence, you are saying that everyone has to agree with a nationalist at best and non-pluralistic-imperialist at worst definition of "language". If so, you can use that definition, but I don't agree with it.
Indonesian also has an issue, as it is a dialect group of Malay, and most natives in Indonesia don't have that as their native language. It's another structure to impose a rigid ruling orthodoxy over a pluralistic nation. But "Malay" is also the language of "Malaysia", and so I can understand the reticence to adopt that as the name of the language of a far larger and more populous country. Then again, Americans didn't name American English "the American language", but rather kept "English", so there are examples to the contrary as well, and the Indonesian lingua franca could very well have remained being called Malay. I personally use the term Indonesian when I talk about it (which is rarely), because if I were to use the term "Malay" to mean "Indonesian", I would not be understood well, as that is abnormal usage. However, everyone (with basic knowledge) understands what Mandarin is, and that (along with "Chinese") is a common name in English for the official language of China, so I have no problem referring to it as Mandarin.
one of my new fav edutainment vids on Chinese)
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p.s. would you care to learn Tatar?
classical chinese would be a bit more understandable to a modern chinese speaker than old english is to us (in some way more than others) because modern speakers vaguely know what the characters mean already and they don't have to pronounce them the way they were pronounced thousands of years ago
Wonder why they couldn't make literary chinese the standard chinese? I like the tao and confucian-style one word, one character, one syllable logic.
The trick was the pronunciation. They still haven't really standardized that as there are 10+ "dialects" of chinese.
道可道，非恆道
The Dao that can be stated, is not the eternal Dao
Nice and concise 😊
* oddly enough, google translate can do literary chinese with regular chinese (simplified or traditional). Dont know if its because it was preloaded with the tao te ching or not.
Absolutely not without learning about it which is what Chinese do. The characters aren't even the same in Classical Chinese, as new ones have been made or they've fallen out of use or completely changed meaning. It's a completely different language, you can't equate the two. Old English prose is fairly understandable if you update the orthography a bit. There are more words in common between Old English and Modern English than Classical Chinese and Modern Chinese.
Mind you, Mandarin Chinese does not actually come from the language of Classical Chinese directly and neither does our English come from Late West Saxon Old English but more so from other dialects with little to no texts.
That's only if the characters are transcribed into modern characters. I am certain only a small minority of literate Sinitic language speakers would understand the old characters
@@vampyricon7026 well yes of course but most classical chinese these days is written in modern characters (usually traditional but even within china most people can read those since they're not that much different)
13:10 You can also say 你有一副好嗓子, with 副 as the measure word.
By the way, tone change rules apply in this sentence.
一 should be fourth tone, 好 changes to second tone, 嗓 third tone, 子 neutral tone.
Of course, Chinese people will still understand you, even if you say it the way you did, since the sound sang2 doesn't exist in Mandarin.
But isn’t 子 inherently 3rd tone, still causing tone sandhi before it even when pronounced neutral?
@@DaveHuxtableLanguages No, there is no tone change before a neutral tone.
@@xuexizhongwen xuexizhongwen is right. Take a name like 果果。 it is pronounced guo3guo5(neutral), not guo2guo5
Thank you, very interesting and informative.
Solely on a technical point, i found the zooming in and out a little disconcerting. The L/R displacement less so. I'm probably a minority of one, though.
Glad to hear you liked it. And thanks for the feedback about the camera movements. Always good to know.
In Singapore, we call it 华语 （not 国语）
Thanks for pointing that out. I discovered that when it was too late to make the edit.
Brilliant video!
Glad you liked it!
Very good! Dave! You're introducing some very important features of Chinese! Do you find Chinese to be particularly difficult? Or not as difficult as people described? My hunch is that language wise, it may not be super difficult, but characters is for sure a bit challenge.
很不错，再接再厉！(Do you know this specific word, chengyu?)
Thank you! To be honest, Chinese is both easy and difficult. It is not as difficult as people imagine to be able to communicate on a daily level. It then takes a lifetime to be fully proficient due to the many layers of cultural and literary background. Thanks for the 成语 - a new one on me.
@@DaveHuxtableLanguages sounds cool! Btw, I am also expecting a ‘speaking English in Chinese way’. I have seen some of the series, they are very funny and captures the features very precisely. I’d be curious how Chinese English sound to native English speakers
@@zhh2805 I’d be worried that might come across as racist though.
@@DaveHuxtableLanguages lol I won’t view those as racist. But for sure, we need to be careful
I saw a video years ago on TH-cam (or maybe it was a webpage with video examples ) about this exact topic it talked about how regional Chinese accent affects the speaker’s accent in English. They used langlang as an example of North Eastern 东北 accent and how his accent in English was unique. Which is true, sounds completely different than a Cantonese speaker speaking English. It didn’t come across as racist but it was a very technical treatment of the topic.
If you wear a black wig and thick glasses maybe it comes across that way but only to certain people. I found this video amazing, so informative, great production value and your love of the language and culture comes across very clearly. So please do a video on Chinese native speaker’s accent when speaking English.
This is very practical too, my kids try to mock my wife’s dongbei accent when she speaks English and they just do a bad Uncle Roger imitation. So any video instruction would be greatly appreciated.
Amazing!
Thanks!
Next video: how to sound chinese when speaking English.
I like those accent videos 😊
Just watch Uncle Roger. Ar yaaa.
Uncle Roger is not mainland Chinese accent!! I remember long time ago seeing a video about Chinese accents in English’s nd they gave examples of different celebrities like LangLang who’s northern accent
Sounded so different than a Cantonese English accent. Would be good to see an analysis of how regional Chinese accent translates to English language
No, we don’t call it 国语 in Singapore. We call it “中文” or “Chinese” in Singapore. We rarely call it Mandarin either and we almost NEVER say it “普通话” in Singapore
Someone told me it was called 华语 in Singapore.
@@DaveHuxtableLanguages It's both. I'm from Malaysia, just north of Singapore, and we also call it 中文 or 华语.
2:40 it's actually 目标 mùbiaō
Yes, someone else pointed that out. Can’t believe I’ve been getting that doubly wrong.
Hi, found your video very interesting and I think I learned something 🧐, however, at about 12:20, you put “beurre” and “pacquette” in the feminine where they are in fact masculine - should be “le/du beurre” and “un pacquet de beurre”
However, although beurre is masculine, you would actually say "une motte de beurre" which is the name of a block of butter, rather than "packet" (or paquet, which applies more to parcels)
yup
that’s because “motte” is feminine.
reading again I noticed “pacquet/ette” isn’t spelt with a c; not sure “paquette” is a word at all
Oh no! Thanks for pointing that out.
@@pelican2637 It's definitely "paquet" only, unless you want to invent a cute/diminutive/girly version of it.
@@Kapouille bien sûr que c’est “paquet” 😁
At 11:10 why, for the love of cute kittens, was there no indication of the tone in any of the phonetic transcriptions? Every syllable of Chinese has a tone and it functions like a consonant.
I did all those transcriptions impressionistically and didn’t have time to track the intonation.
the IPA (pronunciation slide) for Wu and especially Cantonese need to be fixed
人人生而自由在尊嚴和權利上一律平等
ȵiŋȵiŋ səŋ ə z̩jɤ tsɛ tsənȵi wu dʑiøli zaŋ ɪlɪ biŋtəŋ
jɐnjɐn sɐŋ ji tsijɐʊ tsoi tsynjim wo kynlei sœŋ jɐt lɵt pʰɪŋtɐŋ
Hi. Many thanks for pointing that out. Sadly, there’s no way to change a video once it’s live.
老胡， 你好牛逼， 居然还知道54和vernacular。
誒，我以前沒看過你的視頻，到現在才發現你的頻道，但很喜歡這個視頻！我一定會subscribe φ(゜▽゜*)♪
感谢你的评论！ 我很高兴你喜欢我的平道.
@@DaveHuxtableLanguages是「頻」道不是「平」同音字但意思不同。但你懂得的已經很多，非常厲害
A bachelor could also be measured by 条。 一条光棍。
Beurre is actually masculine. "Le beurre", not "la beurre". Great video tho
11:14 It seems not Guangxi dialect. It's Mandarin in a broad Guangxi accent.
Precisely. The point is that speakers of different dialects use their own pronunciation of the characters when reading 白话文 aloud.
@@DaveHuxtableLanguages The local language's pronunciation of the characters is still very different from an accent. It's the difference between Cantopop and reading out the lyrics in the language they're written in, i.e. Mandarin.
WHY is your name in Chinese that thing you said it was? is it the closest sounding thing to your name? It doesn't sound too close and I'm not sure how the first and last name work.
Transliterated names sound pretty ghastly to Chinese ears. I have friends called Ke Laifu (Clive) Li Chade (Richard) and Bu Lani (Briony). Luckily, our first Chinese teacher made more of an effort with me and my name looks like a Chinese person’s. Hu represents my last name and is also a Chinese family name. Dave is often transcribed as Dawei but using ugly characters 大卫. The teacher gave me 达伟, which means ‘achieve greatness’. When I lived in a China in the 80s that was my official name and I used it for my bank account and when booking flights.
@@DaveHuxtableLanguages Interesting, thanks
@@DaveHuxtableLanguages
How do I write Owais and Hina (hena) in Chinese?
@@awaiskhan9329 You’d need to ask a person who was very highly versed in Chinese culture. I can tell you characters that sound like your name, but an authentic Chinese name has a balance of meaning and sound.
Of course, if you listen to the majority of "Chinese speakers", they'd call "Mandarin" "Chinese", since Mandarin speakers make up the majority of Chinese speakers. If everyone was equally chauvinistic about their Sinitic language, you'd end up with the Mandarin speakers winning the name of "Chinese" by sheer numbers (more than half of the speakers of a Sinitic language speak a Mandarinic language). But if you come to Hong Kong, you'll soon find that "Chinese" is Cantonese and Mandarin is "Putonghua" (with the more linguistically-inclined calling it "guanhua" or "beifanghua").
Obviously, the influence of the CCP (and previously the KMT) in quashing linguistic diversity also plays a large part. It is in their interests to play up the unity of Sinitic and to downplay the sheer variety that exists. For comparison, the last common ancestor of the extant Sinitic languages was spoken at about the same time as Latin, and no one in their right mind considers any of Sardinian, Romanian, French, or Portuguese "Latin", whereas the equivalent in Sinitic sees one of those groups (as innovative as French) essentially claiming that historical linguistics proceeds in a straight line starting from Latin and ending in the speech of Paris, which is true Latin, while all others are mere "dialects" to be eliminated.
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At 7:02 he says that their are words with the same sound but a different tone. That's absurd, because a tone is a type of sound.
Well it isn’t absurd, since a great part of the writing system is based on the fact that similar syllables can have different tones.
We've been calling it Mandarin for a long time, and I don't see any good reason to stop doing that. In fact, I prefer calling it that instead of "Chinese".
You can do what you like. The UN calls it Chinese though, as does the Chinese government.
@@DaveHuxtableLanguages I am not a fan of the CCP or the UN… Anyway, both names are commonly used. It’s just a matter of preference.
@@DaveHuxtableLanguagesSome might consider that a reason to not call it "Chinese"
Many native Chinese people (from mainland China) call it Chinese when speaking English. only refer to it as Mandarin when speaking specifically about the different dialects.
Seems silly to bring in your political biases in to the conversation when speaking about languages.
@@brospore7897 My preference for calling the language Mandarin has to do strictly with linguistic considerations. Dave was the one who brought up the CCP and UN, so I mentioned that I couldn't care less what a political institution calls something. I'm doing the EXACT OPPOSITE of bringing in a political bias. I'm completely disregarding political considerations on the topic.
When speaking English, Chinese people call it both Chinese and Mandarin, with about as much frequency as Westerners do, as far as I can tell. But my point was about my personal preference, not what people normally do. Both names are used, and I think that's fine.
Bro too much ad
@@paulozhang9346 got to pay the bills.
@@DaveHuxtableLanguagesunderstood, love your channel though.
I was looking for Frenglish (French accent English), but then got curious about this Chinese video.
You are quite a genius about language.
what nonsense... context always wins. tones dont matter!
If that were true tones would no longer exist. Context helps when buying fruit, but accurate tones are essential when giving a business presentation or a formal talk.