There are a lot more than 2 or 3 english accents. The accents in english are what make english such a rich language with real roots in localities and should be recognised as such, not just ignored. Interesting video overall and well put together
Just so you know, Every colony of England has there own English dialect. In the Caribbean alone that's about 10? Not counting African countries or India. Each has different words mixed in. Maybe not officially recognised- idk why , but definitely more than 3 dialects.
I believe most aren't recognized for a number of reasons including: - Variations of English are for the most part mutually intelligible. - Most dialects lack a written form, meaning they are entirely oral variations. This makes them difficult to teach. - Many are spoken by small regions. There usually isn't a significant enough population to drive a project to document and standardize the variations. Then of course there's the holdover mentality of "speaking proper *sips tea" in these regions, which means standardizing isn't seen as important. That's just my take on it, plus a bit of recalling stuff from Communication Studies (I'm from the Caribbean). Might've still gotten some things incorrect, but I believe these to be some of the major reasons.
The difference is that many of the Chinese dialects are not intelligible to each other, and English "dialect" speakers can understand each other. Because of the long history of China, many people don't understand a single word from people 5 km away, but can understand the dialect that is several hundred km away.
I would say that, when you have dialects that are unintelligible to one another, you actually have different languages. Writing systems are more artificial than spoken language, that is to say, writing systems are simply an attempt to record spoken language; the Germanic languages (German, English, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Flemish, etc.) use a phonetic system that has differences because it was tailored to each language. The Chinese languages have an... ideographic? system because the system was developed to enable communication between peoples that spoke different languages (is ideographic the right word?). Mandarin and Cantonese are, as spoken languages, as disparate as the Germanic languages or the Romance languages (in fact, I'd be tempted to argue that Spanish and Italian are more closely related than Mandarin and Cantonese, but no one would ever call Spanish and Italian the same language). On the topic of how many dialects though? Well there's easily over 40 in the UK alone. But most have limited recognition because of standardised spelling not accommodating them, historical classification of anything not "proper" English as "ignorant peasant language", and Western linguists are obsessed with written language to the expense of spoken. (This may or may not still be a thing; it certainly it was 20-40 years ago, we were actively taught that dialect terms were a sign of low intelligence). And then there's the fact that there's more than one "English" language. Scots is written with the same alphabet as English, but is descended from a different branch of Middle English than the English spoken in the rest of the world (diverged ~700 years ago).
I loved how much fun you seemed to be having demonstrating the usage of modal particles. Especially the 你过来嘛！😂 Had very 撒娇 vibes, made me smile. The pure joy in 你过来啦！was amazing, too. Thanks for going over these things! I’ve been trying to avoid appearing stiff and unnatural in my text interactions with my mom, and remembering more modal particles is very helpful.
1:48 Pretty sure you can count a lot more english accents. In the US alone there are many different english accents. And you didn't mention South Africa and Singapore. And I'm sure there are some other regions where we'll find native english speakers that I don't remember on top of my head right now.
And don't forget that some accents are not mutually intelligible either, so you can have multiple English speakers who can't speak with eachother. But they are all unified under the same writing system. - There's plenty of jokes in multiple TV shows and films about these "thick accents", where the main character can't understand them. ... example: TH-cam / Cun-LZvOTdw
1. English has "tone", which can change a sentence from a sentence to a question. 8. English has way more than 2 accents. But "accent" isn't really a term used in linguistics anyway. But I don't mean just American/Canadian/Irish/Scottish/English/Welsh/Indian/Australian accents, but I also more specific ones like Cockney/Esturay/Yorkshire/Brummie/Scouse/Geordie/Midland/WPA/Southern/Mid-Atlantic/NYC/ENE/... and many many more. Some accents are so thick that they are sometimes not mutually intelligible. English is also unified under English spelling, well, there's two ways of writing -our/-or, -ise/-ize and so on, but those are minor differences, so even if an accent is too thick, you can still communicate through text. 9. No, English has numbers 1-12, while 13-19 is 3-9 + "teen"; you can argue "thirteen" and "fifteen" are too different from "threeteen" and "fiveteen", but the rest are just number+teen. Twenty is pretty unique, but 30-90 are just 13-19, but with "ty" instead of "teen". So that makes only 1-13, 15 and 20 be unique words, and the rest derivatives of the rest. 12. English does this only with uncountable nouns. You can't have 5 grass, but you can have 5 blades of grass. But it's true that Chinese does it for all nouns. 22. The English they/them can be used as a third person genderless form. Some people will argue it's a plural not a singular, but the word "you" is also plural and not singular. So if you can say "you are" to a singular person, you can say "they are" about a singular person. But English do still have he/she/it with different pronunciations, not like Chinese or Finnish.
1. Chinese isn't really tonal. When i grew up (until 5yo) speaking Cantonese and Mandarin, nobody told me anything about tones. 8. Everyone speaks with an accent (even if they don't admit it). Ironically, native-English speakers are not so good at Workplace English as Lingua Franca (WELF) due to their (relatively) thick accent and (subconscious) use of regional slang.
@@chamorvenigo How can you say Chinese isn't tonal? Of course it is! The meaning of words changes dramatically depending on the tone you use. Not being taught tones doesn't mean you weren't using them.
This was really insightful! I've been learning Mandarin on my own and am at HSK 4 now, progressing to HSK 5. I think this video is really fascinating and well put-together for anyone--whether or not they have experience with the language. Thanks for sharing! Subscribed.
In my experience, English speakers understand the retroflex sounds pretty well ( ch zh sh r) but have trouble producing the palato-alveolar sounds **correctly** (q j x ). I've been learning (slowly, painfully, and ineffeciently) for years, and I still cannot produce them correctly.
I confirm I've had a lot of trouble with those 3, while the r sound wasn't that hard at all. I still can't clearly tell q from j when listening to a dialog or movie, but I can finally tell q from ch, j from zh and x from sh (i.e. I can hear and produce the aspiration now)
Have you seen Grace Mandarin's videos on pronunciation? th-cam.com/video/n_Cj3aOSI1w/w-d-xo.html Check them out! I think she can do that topic a lot better than me
In outliers I think Gladwell suggests its not due to the simplicity of names of numbers but more due to the way larger numbers are constructed as they require quick headmath to say a number correctly which is the underpinnings of most advanced mathematical concepts
Okay I definitely learned some. Can you delve into some of the other and others for titles and other sentence indicators? Also, handy to know about 他她她祂牠(though I've definitely not seen the animal ta, I can imagine the deity ta is used in literature)
I go to a language specialized high school. My main foreign language is Japanese, the others are English, Latin and as of today, Chinese! I'm very happy I could get into this class. I joined a bit late but I hope I'll catch up. I'm so happy I get to learn Chinese, I'm very excited for my first class. Oh and well that will be graded as well so since Japanese is my first foreign language people have told not to take Chinese since it'll all be too much work, but I didn't listen and took it anyway because I really like it. There's absolutely no way to mix anything up and what's more, I'm used to the characters so there's absolutely no problem here.
I have also studied a little bit of both Mandarin and Japanese, and I found I had zero problems with mixing up anything between the two. The pronunciation and grammar is so entirely different between them that there's just virtually nothing to mix up. As I studied Japanese first, I felt like I had an advantage when I started working on Chinese and got to Hanzi because I did know what a lot of them meant already, so I was able to pick up characters at a very fast pace.
一幅画 (a painting) and 一面镜子 (a mirror) because the implication of each is that one adds luxury/prosperity to your wall and one allows you to face yourself while facing your wall. If you know, you know. Also, maybe we could have chosen a different verb other than "come" for so many examples, because my mind....um, went places. lol
There is WAY more than just 2 English accents/dialects - GA (General American), RP (Received Pronunciation), AusE (Australian English), AAVE (African-American Vernacular English), Indian English,...and many many more. Just the UK has tons of different accents. There are massive differences between accents in Liverpool and, say, Manchester. English in Ireland and Scotland also sounds so different, especially in Scotland - there is even Scots (not Scottish Gaelic, that's a Celtic language), a variety of English different enough to even be considered its own language that derived from English (there are even wikipedia pages written in Scots).
@@ABChinese Thanks! Aaaa I'm gonna cry you replyed me🥺 Honduras is a small country in Central America, it's meaningful for me if you're conscious that there's also people watching you from here
Those are 7 language families in China with their own dialects, not dialects. That'd be like saying "there are 5 Latin dialects, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian, that all have their own dialect" Also there are tons of different English dialects, let alone accents. But the 10 000 always confused me 😂 it does make sense but from a western point of view it's so confusing haha
Wish I would’ve found your channel earlier in my Chinese language learning experience! Just glanced thru your video list and I’m thinking the rest of today is going to be binge watching everything! Thank you for making these, can’t wait to see your videos past and future. I Know I’m going to learn a lot from your channel.
@@知-k3q Not really, they use different characters (rare ones) and grammar than Mandarin. Imagine merging English and German, and then declaring that they are one language because their vocabulary can be found in the same dictionary.
Any external references of the point 150 - 100? A link would be nice, thanks. Chinese language's got a higher density on most of the scenarios, so this remains in doubt for me.
Chinese density is higher when things were said originally in Chinese. But the density decrease when one had to adapt and translate from English language. Because things can't be directly translated. (At least that's what I think. )
Super late reply, but I was browsing my old videos and I finally understood why you were confused about density! So Chinese is more dense... the thing you have to keep in mind is that an English word is 1-4 syllables usually, a Chinese character is 1 syllable ALWAYS, so English usually comes out longer actually:)
@@ABChinese I think about it in terms of encoding. English encodes a word's meaning into the sounds produced by mouth shapes only. Tone has an effect, but it's far more general and the meaning of the individual words (usually) doesn't change regardless of tone. Chinese encodes a word's meaning into both the sounds produced by mouth shapes AND the tone of voice used in producing those sounds. In other words, it encodes more meaning in the same timeframe. I assume this is why it always feels like subtitles go past way too fast when I'm watching Chinese shows.
Man I have to disagree with you. Like Romance languages, I think a lot of these what you consider dialects, are actually their own languages now, biggest example is Shanghainese and Cantonese.
Yeah, "dialect" is a loose term lol. Funny story... I have a Chinese friend who knows Italian, and he can understand Spanish (which he doesn't know) more than other Chinese dialects.
@@ABChinese hahaha I totally understand that, I learned Mandarin and now I'm studying Shanghainese because I think it sounds really nice, Shanghainese sounds like a combination between mandarin, korean and Japanese mixed together 😂
Your presentation is very well done -- covering so many important differences between Chinese and English so vividly. I would, however, like to point out one major difference that you did not mention in your video, which is Mandarin Chinese has much fewer syllabic sounds than English. I believe the number of Mandarin Chinese syllabic sounds is only 420 (not including tones. ) English on the other hand is extremely rich in syllabic sounds for the following three reasons. English has many blended consonant sounds like sp, bl, gr, sk, sl, etc. which Chinee lacks. English also has 13 vowel sounds. But the main difference is that Mandarin Chinese has a very limited set of finals. A Mandarin Chinese syllable can only end only end in a vowel, diphthong, -n, -ng, or an -r (in Northern Mandarin). English on the other hand is full of syllables that can end in sounds like -b, -d, -ch, -sh, -g, -ck, -l, -m, -p, -s, -t, -v, and -z. Again, I commend you on your informative and entertaining video.
In Cantonese, the pronunciation for 的，地，得are different, and Cantonese, Hakka, etc have 6 or 9 tones. So when talking about spoken Chinese is better more specific to which spoken Chinese language.
#19-Modal Particles - Actually English have stressing function: You can COME? = Are you coming? You CAN come? = Do you have the ability to come? YOU can come? = Are you the person coming?
6:22 The character with the meaning “to irritate” is “惹”, not “若” (rùo). The character “若” can only be pronounced as /rě/ when it’s used in “般若” (bōrě), meaning the highest wisdom, translated from Sanskritic Buddhist scriptures.
1:12 A character is not a word, as you say later in the video. 150 characters might be about half the number of words, so actually fewer words are used in Chinese than would be used in English.
I sometimes ask Chinese speakers to say "shalt," which is difficult because the l is more about timing than a real letter. So timing is another aspect in English but not sure of the Chinese counterpart.
Seeing the similarities to Japanese is extremely fascinating. Especially hearing the similarities and changes to the Japanese 音読み reading versus Chinese. Then you have things I could roughly understand but for wrong reasons. For example the five books example that was in the video I could understand in written form just fine but my idea of book is 本. Interestingly Japanese says 5 books a bit different 五冊 I honestly don't know much about Chinese character meanings outside Japan so it would be interesting to know how easy it is to understand Japanese 熟語 for a Chinese speaker.
冊 is also a historically used counter/classifier in chinese for books, but nowadays it is mainly used for textbooks. Japanese 熟語 is generally pretty easy for chinese speakers to understand since most are extremely similar or easily deducible based on the character meanings.
Yes! The Japanese actually didn't have their own language so basically borrowed Chinese and utilized it to make their own "twist" on it! Which makes sense why Japanese could be easy for Chinese to learn :) *edit: Japanese had a spoken language but not their own characters
Point 20 is also what gave start to the myth that words for "yes" and "no " don't exist in Chinese because foreigners misinterpretated the contextual change of negations and statements as the absence of the words "yes" and "no".Actually Chinese has the exact words for "yes" and "no" but they are just used in a different way than in English .
01:00 hilariously long words? As a german i got one: Betäubungsmittelverschreibungsverordnung. Fun fact: This is kinda common in german language since you can slap words together to create new ones. I love that
Thank you for making me laugh! Your expressions for the word "came" and "come" I am glad you demonstrated it with words and characters, and pronouncing them! I wish you can do that all the time! Your follower!😊🤗
Don't tell me English has only three accents... There are Cockney, Geordie, Scouse and many more distinctive accents in England alone, not to mention Welsh, Scottish and Irish accents, all of which are not very mutually understandable. Oh did I mention Singlish, Indian English or South African English?
One only has to look at a classic clip of an exchange between a Londoner and a Scotsman in British parliament to realise that not all English accents are mutually intelligible
Roughly, yes, but it's more of a "negator" word. It negates what follows. I'm about as noob as it gets with Mandarin but my understanding is that while 不 does get used on its own as a response, it's more of contraction of the full sentence. But more importantly, if I ask if you have a sister, you can't use 不 to say no, you have to say 沒有 (méiyǒu, not have). So it's not a universal word for "no".
1:48 those aren’t different “dialects” they’re different languages and language families. If you can’t understand them, then it’s a different language. That’s like saying Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and English are all just a dialect of German. Which is clearly ridiculous. This is a common political tactic that many governments/powers throughout history have used to either try and unify or differentiate people for their own advantage. China is a big place with lots of different languages, people groups, cultures, and histories. I know this is more of an argument in semantics, but it’s a very important one. When looking at these from a purely linguistic viewpoint, they are clearly different languages. Oh, and there’s far more into English accents (American Standard, New England, Southern, British, Scottish, Singaporean, Indian, Australian, New Zealand, etc. but that’s a rant for another time)
Its not necessarily true that all the chinese "dialects" are unified by a common system of chinese characters. I mean, the characters alone, yes, maybe (considering that language had developed systematically enough), but practically speaking for example, it would be very difficult to almost unintelligeble for a mandarin speaker to read a sentence written in southern min, hokkien. Thats basically just reading standard mandarin and translating it in your head before reading it out loud in your regional language. All these chinese "dialects" have their own grammar rules, and have alot of vocabulary not seen in mandarin.
@@somethingsmells6694 i get what you mean. written form = chinese dialect. vernacular form = a spoken language that happened to have existed in a particular region of present day China
@@somethingsmells6694 ill tell you what, in my hokkien background. it isnt easy to say, these characters belong to these pronunciations. there will always be debates on what characters have what meaning and what pronunciations. At this point, i sort of almost gave up on striving to find the "correct" characters of words that i speak. instead opting for pe̍h-ōe-jī as my primary script in writing my language. At least im able to accurately mark the tones of each word, with no more dispute as to which characters to be used.
I wonder if English dialects are more homogenous than Chinese? I’ve listened to English all over the internet and I can understand all of it. But Chinese dialects? I can’t understand most of them😅
@@ABChinese I guess mandarin and Cantonese are two different languages. Cos the definition of dialect is that they’re mutually intelligible. The U.K. alone has tones of dialects And accent. Just you move 20 miles in either direction the accent changes. This is quite interesting as the U.K. is a very small place nonetheless they’ve retained these different dialects even over such a close proximity .
@@ABChinese th-cam.com/video/pit0OkNp7s8/w-d-xo.html see if you can understand that! Its the way people speak in the far SW of Ireland. And by the way there are dozens of accents in Ireland.
8. Talk about Dialects, there aren't dialect. There are total different languages due to their different in pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary. And most importantly is there can't intelligible to each other.
At 5:20, I think you mistakenly used the Korean words for 'older' brother and sister, as opposed to 'younger'. Excellent video nonetheless for a student of Mandarin like me! 🙂
Thanks for pointing that out! It was intentional though, because 小哥哥/小姐姐 is used much in the same way as "oppa/noona" as a way to address younger adults by other teens/young adults, sometimes in a flirtatious way;)
@@ABChinese interesting, I didnt know Mandarin had its own version of the oppa/noona. So for grown adults, how would a woman call an older man who is closed to her but not a sibling? And how would a man call an older woman who is closed to him ?
@@lunerouge_han For most Asian countries, we don't mind addressing someone who has no family ties with us as our family member. For instance, we'd call an old man as 大爷(grandpa, dad's elder brother) or 叔(uncle, dad's younger brother); old woman as 大妈or阿姨(aunt) . For someone who is just a little bit older and close to us, no matter what your gender is, we would say first name+哥 (Big brother) and first name+姐(elder sister), like I address my neighbours as 乐天哥哥 (big brother letian), and 佳敏姐姐(Big sister jiamin). For someone we don't know his or her name, and he/she is obviously a young person, we just address 小哥哥(for man) and 小姐姐(for woman).
Besides 哥 (pronunciation: ge), there is another way to say big brother, which is 兄(siung). For me, addressing siung is rather formal and respectful, it is rarely heard in normal mandarin (normally be heard in southern dialects). I'll call someone who is not really close to me, and he is 10+ younger than my dad, 10+ years elder than me as siung, normally add on his last name in front. Exp: 林兄 (lim siung ; lim is his last name, siung is brother)
English has way more dialects than two. I get that the overall point was that Chinese is actually a language family, but to be clear, English in the US alone varies A LOT. It's a country almost the size of Europe. It's generally said that there are two types of English that are taught, but they don't truly encompass the dialectal variety of either of the two commonly taught dialects (American English and British English). And that's not even counting Australia, and the many places where English is spoken natively or taught with a native language in many places once colonized.
I'm Chinese and I don't really count them as all being "one language" but many languges that is grouped into what is Chinese. I feel that it would be like counting French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian as one language cause they are all "dialects of Latin".
@@Timothee_Chalamet_CMBYN Well yeah, that's why I called it a language family. Like, comparing the Chinese languages as dialects is a little disingenuous of him, because really, they're different languages which have dialects in and of themselves, I'm sure.
@@RingsOfSolace Technically, linguists say that the language family is the Sino-Tibetan language family. This language family includes the Chinese languages, also called Sinitic languages, as one branch. The Sino-Tibetan language family also includes the Tibeto-Burman languages, which include Burmese and the Tibetic languages. (Edited because I mistakenly wrote "Tibetan", as if Tibetan were a single language.)
7. Question is: Do Chinese people still write up-down / right-left, like the japanes do in novels? 11. Ah, it's your fault that I struggle with japanese numbers. The 万 character (of course read "man" or "ban") still makes me stumble every single time because I'm so used to thousender-increments.
Not really... it's only somewhat commonly used as headers or titles. You'll see a music video use vertical text once in a while... it's an aesthetic, I guess. -haha I still stumble between English and Chinese numbers
Publications are often still printed in the traditional presentation (vertically) in places outside of mainland China, such as Taiwan and Hong Kong where they still use traditional characters. But nowadays a lot of publications are published online and those texts are presented horizontally from right to left exclusively.
I don't think you understand the word dialect. English has 1000s of dialects all over the world. Cantonese on the other hand is not a dialect of Mandarin, but a different language. It's not unusual for countries to have more than one language, in fact the UK has a few different languages.
Love this video but there’s VASTLY more than 2 English accents. I don’t doubt that Chinese has many, many accents/dialects as well but like, English has a ton too.
It is not entirely correct to say that English only has three accents. It has many, many more and these days they must all be counted because people nowadays refuse the idea of a single "correct" accent. To make an example, years ago only received pronunciation was considered correct in British English. Both Britons and foreigners had to try to replicate it as that was the only acceptable way of speaking in a formal context. Today people say that every accent in ok and - heavens - there are hundreds of them. Dialectal variation is somewhat limited but accents are not.
The R sound in Chinese is hard for English speakers to pronounce? It never occurred to me as remotely difficult. I would say the ones that tend to be difficult for people are JQX.
j q and x are kinda similar to sounds we already have so it’s not hard to get used to. the R in chinese is really strange to me and I still don’t quite know how to pronounce it lol
@@lililiwen Actually, ZH/CH/SH is close to out J/CH/SH. They are the same sounds but with the tongue curled back. Chinese J/Q/X are quite different from any sound in English. The Chinese R can represent a few sounds, and we have them in English.
The thing with the R sound for me is it seems to be halfway between a rolled R and L. I find it incredibly difficult to pronounce. There's a reason people joke about Chinese saying "flied lice" or otherwise getting R and L mixed up.
Man, wouldn't you consider the "dialects" to be separate languages? Some of them seem to be as far apart as French and Romanian. Even though they use the same basic characters, Cantonese characters are quite different. You could decipher Cantonese knowing Mandarin, but it would be like deciphering Spanish using French
English actually have more dialects since Britain dialect isn't a single dialect but a group of dialect spoken in Britain Islands with numerous different dialects, but still they are mutually intelligible.
is vocal fry fashionable now? i'm out of the loop... i think the third tone is generally difficult because it's taught incorrectly with emphasis on the fall and rise rather than just staying deep unless you're really emphasizing that syllable. most Americans I encounter in China also have a really hard time with the umlauted u.
My favourite result of western influence is 「妳」 A sex-specific second person pronoun character is so esoteric, I love it. I've even taken to making new (wrong) characters like a humorous version of 妳 with the 心 radical below, like 您 (i.e. ⿱妳心 instead of ⿱你心). I wrote it to a penpal and she found it hilarious. Maybe I should put it in a font (render the IDS to a character).
There are two main differences between Chinese and English: 1. Chinese pronunciation is more than English. 2There are more Chinese “alphabet” than English 1 English has 20 vowels and 28 consonants, which makes the theoretical number of English sounds is 20*28=560，The actual pronunciation is about 400 Chinese has 24 vowels and 23 consonants. The number of sounds is 23*24=552. But because Chinese has four tones, so the number of Chinese theoretical pronunciation is 552 * 4 = 2208，The actual pronunciation is about 1500 When human beings speak, in order to avoid ambiguity, they must give different sounds to different things. There are too few English sounds, resulting in English words being longer than Chinese words. Chinese words generally have only two or three syllables, and English words have so many longer than 3 syllables... This makes speaking Chinese faster than speaking English. The faster you speak, the faster you think.. So the Chinese are smarter (maybe)😂 Because there are many Chinese sounds, which makes the syllables of Chinese compound words less, so the word formation is simpler and more scientific。 for example: television-----电视（electricity view） computer-----电脑（electricity brain） telephone-----电话（electricity talk） fridge------------电冰箱（electricity ice box） lamp-------------电灯（electricity lamp） Basically, most Chinese words are compound words, and it is easy to guess the meaning, while many English words are separate words, which need to be learned alone... Why doesn't English use combination words like Chinese? I think it may be because there are English sounds are few, and the syllables of words are long. If you use combination words, the syllables will be even longer.. So English made a non compound word to make the pronunciation shorter, but it also led to an increase in the number of words. That's why the Oxford dictionary has a million words.. The number of English words is huge, but people's learning ability is limited, which leads to ,People don't understand the knowledge of other industries. because they don't understand many words in other industries... The problem of Chinese is not so serious, because nouns in many industries are also compound words, which is easy to guess the meaning. This makes the knowledge exchange in the Chinese world easier than in the English world 2 English has only 26 letters, but Chinese has to learn thousands of Chinese characters.. It seems that English is much easier than Chinese? Nah, you learn 26 letters, but you can't understand English newspapers. I heard that if you want to understand English newspapers, you have to remember tens of thousands of different English words.. This memory is no less than 3000 Chinese characters.. You only need to memorize 3000 Chinese characters to read Chinese newspapers. Of course, there are more than 3000 words combined with Chinese characters. But as I said earlier, most of them are compound words. It's easy to guess the meaning.so It's much easier to remember tens of thousands of compound words than tens of thousands of totally different English words😂
one to ten in Chinese is 一二三四五六七八九十 Trigonal-------三边形（3 side form） quadrilateral---四边形 （4 side form） pentagon-----五边形（5 side form） pentagon------六边形（6 side form） Heptagonal---七边形（7 side form） Octagonal-----八边形 （8 side form） ........ Monday------周一（week 1） Tuesday-----周二（week 2） Wednesday--周三（week 3） Thursday----周四（week 4） Friday----------周五（week 5） Saturday------周六（week 6） Saturday------周日（week day.....why it's not week 7 ? because week 7 means you have to work .no vacation that day） see？ Chinese is so easy to learn than English.... English just too many words to remember.....Maybe native speakers of English don't feel much, because they have spoken English since childhood. But for non-native English speakers.. English is really too difficult to learn...
Fun fact: When a language groups something by ten thousands instead of one thousand, those groups are called "Myriads" in English.
Interesting!
Nerd
I didn't know that 谢谢你
Fun fact:that's a greek word
@@RiBeel7fun fact, facto is a roman word
There are a lot more than 2 or 3 english accents. The accents in english are what make english such a rich language with real roots in localities and should be recognised as such, not just ignored. Interesting video overall and well put together
There are a lot more than 3 English accents _in England!_
And actually a lot of the Chinese "dialects" are technically their own language, example( Shanghainese and Cantonese )
@Last First Kinda want elaboration on this lol 👀 can't tell if it's sarcasm
@Last First Bruh. I'm not particularly into british accents but bruh.
And some accents are so different that the aren't mutually intelligible
Just so you know, Every colony of England has there own English dialect. In the Caribbean alone that's about 10? Not counting African countries or India. Each has different words mixed in. Maybe not officially recognised- idk why , but definitely more than 3 dialects.
I believe most aren't recognized for a number of reasons including:
- Variations of English are for the most part mutually intelligible.
- Most dialects lack a written form, meaning they are entirely oral variations. This makes them difficult to teach.
- Many are spoken by small regions. There usually isn't a significant enough population to drive a project to document and standardize the variations.
Then of course there's the holdover mentality of "speaking proper *sips tea" in these regions, which means standardizing isn't seen as important.
That's just my take on it, plus a bit of recalling stuff from Communication Studies (I'm from the Caribbean). Might've still gotten some things incorrect, but I believe these to be some of the major reasons.
The difference is that many of the Chinese dialects are not intelligible to each other, and English "dialect" speakers can understand each other. Because of the long history of China, many people don't understand a single word from people 5 km away, but can understand the dialect that is several hundred km away.
Isn’t it just oral variations not actual dialects
their*
Compare with Chinese, English dialects are accents not dialects.
I would say that, when you have dialects that are unintelligible to one another, you actually have different languages. Writing systems are more artificial than spoken language, that is to say, writing systems are simply an attempt to record spoken language; the Germanic languages (German, English, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Flemish, etc.) use a phonetic system that has differences because it was tailored to each language. The Chinese languages have an... ideographic? system because the system was developed to enable communication between peoples that spoke different languages (is ideographic the right word?).
Mandarin and Cantonese are, as spoken languages, as disparate as the Germanic languages or the Romance languages (in fact, I'd be tempted to argue that Spanish and Italian are more closely related than Mandarin and Cantonese, but no one would ever call Spanish and Italian the same language).
On the topic of how many dialects though? Well there's easily over 40 in the UK alone. But most have limited recognition because of standardised spelling not accommodating them, historical classification of anything not "proper" English as "ignorant peasant language", and Western linguists are obsessed with written language to the expense of spoken. (This may or may not still be a thing; it certainly it was 20-40 years ago, we were actively taught that dialect terms were a sign of low intelligence).
And then there's the fact that there's more than one "English" language. Scots is written with the same alphabet as English, but is descended from a different branch of Middle English than the English spoken in the rest of the world (diverged ~700 years ago).
Plus Scots has a lot of Scots Gaelic and Old Norse vocab influence.
I loved how much fun you seemed to be having demonstrating the usage of modal particles.
Especially the 你过来嘛！😂 Had very 撒娇 vibes, made me smile. The pure joy in 你过来啦！was amazing, too.
Thanks for going over these things! I’ve been trying to avoid appearing stiff and unnatural in my text interactions with my mom, and remembering more modal particles is very helpful.
The video is amazing! Thank you. I haven't checked yet if you've made a second one but I hope I'll find it
1:48 Pretty sure you can count a lot more english accents. In the US alone there are many different english accents.
And you didn't mention South Africa and Singapore. And I'm sure there are some other regions where we'll find native english speakers that I don't remember on top of my head right now.
And don't forget that some accents are not mutually intelligible either, so you can have multiple English speakers who can't speak with eachother. But they are all unified under the same writing system. - There's plenty of jokes in multiple TV shows and films about these "thick accents", where the main character can't understand them. ... example: TH-cam / Cun-LZvOTdw
aren't they different languages as well? not just dialects
1. English has "tone", which can change a sentence from a sentence to a question.
8. English has way more than 2 accents. But "accent" isn't really a term used in linguistics anyway. But I don't mean just American/Canadian/Irish/Scottish/English/Welsh/Indian/Australian accents, but I also more specific ones like Cockney/Esturay/Yorkshire/Brummie/Scouse/Geordie/Midland/WPA/Southern/Mid-Atlantic/NYC/ENE/... and many many more. Some accents are so thick that they are sometimes not mutually intelligible. English is also unified under English spelling, well, there's two ways of writing -our/-or, -ise/-ize and so on, but those are minor differences, so even if an accent is too thick, you can still communicate through text.
9. No, English has numbers 1-12, while 13-19 is 3-9 + "teen"; you can argue "thirteen" and "fifteen" are too different from "threeteen" and "fiveteen", but the rest are just number+teen. Twenty is pretty unique, but 30-90 are just 13-19, but with "ty" instead of "teen". So that makes only 1-13, 15 and 20 be unique words, and the rest derivatives of the rest.
12. English does this only with uncountable nouns. You can't have 5 grass, but you can have 5 blades of grass. But it's true that Chinese does it for all nouns.
22. The English they/them can be used as a third person genderless form. Some people will argue it's a plural not a singular, but the word "you" is also plural and not singular. So if you can say "you are" to a singular person, you can say "they are" about a singular person. But English do still have he/she/it with different pronunciations, not like Chinese or Finnish.
I don't think all nouns in chinese needs a "classifier" though, such as 5 days, 3 people. But yeah, that's not very common.
1. Chinese isn't really tonal. When i grew up (until 5yo) speaking Cantonese and Mandarin, nobody told me anything about tones.
8. Everyone speaks with an accent (even if they don't admit it). Ironically, native-English speakers are not so good at Workplace English as Lingua Franca (WELF) due to their (relatively) thick accent and (subconscious) use of regional slang.
@@chamorvenigo How can you say Chinese isn't tonal? Of course it is! The meaning of words changes dramatically depending on the tone you use. Not being taught tones doesn't mean you weren't using them.
This was really insightful! I've been learning Mandarin on my own and am at HSK 4 now, progressing to HSK 5. I think this video is really fascinating and well put-together for anyone--whether or not they have experience with the language. Thanks for sharing! Subscribed.
In my experience, English speakers understand the retroflex sounds pretty well ( ch zh sh r) but have trouble producing the palato-alveolar sounds **correctly** (q j x ). I've been learning (slowly, painfully, and ineffeciently) for years, and I still cannot produce them correctly.
Don’t forget “c” sounding words, my Australian friend finds it almost impossible to get it right
I confirm I've had a lot of trouble with those 3, while the r sound wasn't that hard at all. I still can't clearly tell q from j when listening to a dialog or movie, but I can finally tell q from ch, j from zh and x from sh (i.e. I can hear and produce the aspiration now)
nice video, learning bit by bit everyday.
May i request a video about tones and how to pronounce them correctly.
Have you seen Grace Mandarin's videos on pronunciation? th-cam.com/video/n_Cj3aOSI1w/w-d-xo.html
Check them out! I think she can do that topic a lot better than me
Check the Yoyo Chinese YT channel, they have a playlist with 4 videos reading lots of example words for practicing tones with tone pairs
In my university Chinese classes, we had a new section on the difference between 的，得，地 about once a semester lol
Thanks for the video!
6:24 it should be '惹'. Apparently 若 also has the pronunciation of re3 but it's only used in the word 般若, which means wisdom in buddhism.
U can make a video about differences between Taiwanese Mandarin and Mainland Mandarin( accent, pronunciation , slang, characters and etc.)
做得真好！希望可以看到更多类似的视频！
That was a good video. Definitely like to see some more quick hits like this. I learned 3 new things in 7 minutes.
In outliers I think Gladwell suggests its not due to the simplicity of names of numbers but more due to the way larger numbers are constructed as they require quick headmath to say a number correctly which is the underpinnings of most advanced mathematical concepts
Love the video btw, very informative, not the usual content of learning about Chinese languages. Thanks! And you are very clear and bright.
4:57 done so to this day in Hungary, Austria and parts of Southern Germany ... although in Austria and Southern Germany not that consequently
Okay I definitely learned some. Can you delve into some of the other and others for titles and other sentence indicators? Also, handy to know about 他她她祂牠(though I've definitely not seen the animal ta, I can imagine the deity ta is used in literature)
Noted. One vote for punctuation marks!
awesome video! big up bro!
A fellow iu fan omg?? Anyway this was very informative and also super helpful for me as an ESL tutor with Chinese students! Thank you!
I go to a language specialized high school. My main foreign language is Japanese, the others are English, Latin and as of today, Chinese! I'm very happy I could get into this class. I joined a bit late but I hope I'll catch up. I'm so happy I get to learn Chinese, I'm very excited for my first class. Oh and well that will be graded as well so since Japanese is my first foreign language people have told not to take Chinese since it'll all be too much work, but I didn't listen and took it anyway because I really like it. There's absolutely no way to mix anything up and what's more, I'm used to the characters so there's absolutely no problem here.
I have also studied a little bit of both Mandarin and Japanese, and I found I had zero problems with mixing up anything between the two. The pronunciation and grammar is so entirely different between them that there's just virtually nothing to mix up. As I studied Japanese first, I felt like I had an advantage when I started working on Chinese and got to Hanzi because I did know what a lot of them meant already, so I was able to pick up characters at a very fast pace.
Hey this is really great and educational! I also love your new hairdo!
一幅画 (a painting) and 一面镜子 (a mirror) because the implication of each is that one adds luxury/prosperity to your wall and one allows you to face yourself while facing your wall.
If you know, you know.
Also, maybe we could have chosen a different verb other than "come" for so many examples, because my mind....um, went places. lol
Thank you for the many interesting snippets!
There is WAY more than just 2 English accents/dialects - GA (General American), RP (Received Pronunciation), AusE (Australian English), AAVE (African-American Vernacular English), Indian English,...and many many more. Just the UK has tons of different accents. There are massive differences between accents in Liverpool and, say, Manchester. English in Ireland and Scotland also sounds so different, especially in Scotland - there is even Scots (not Scottish Gaelic, that's a Celtic language), a variety of English different enough to even be considered its own language that derived from English (there are even wikipedia pages written in Scots).
Subscribed!😍
Great video!! I love your channel's content thanks!!!!!
Greetings from Honduras 🇭🇳
This is the first time I come so early ☺️
Thank you! BTW I usually post this time on Fridays, so you can come early next time too haha;)
@@ABChinese Thanks! Aaaa I'm gonna cry you replyed me🥺 Honduras is a small country in Central America, it's meaningful for me if you're conscious that there's also people watching you from here
Ahh I wish I could reply to you in Spanish... but I forgot all the Spanish I learned in high school😭
Those are 7 language families in China with their own dialects, not dialects. That'd be like saying "there are 5 Latin dialects, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian, that all have their own dialect"
Also there are tons of different English dialects, let alone accents.
But the 10 000 always confused me 😂 it does make sense but from a western point of view it's so confusing haha
Wish I would’ve found your channel earlier in my Chinese language learning experience! Just glanced thru your video list and I’m thinking the rest of today is going to be binge watching everything! Thank you for making these, can’t wait to see your videos past and future. I Know I’m going to learn a lot from your channel.
I loved your explanation of modal particles! Do you have a video just about that by any chance? ☺️
P. S. The "R" sound is so impossible for me to pronounce its very embarrassing!
No, not yet.... but I'll keep it in mind for the future!
thx for the video bro!
Anytime :P
If it's not mutually intelligible can it really be called a dialect XD
The CCP says they're dialects, therefore they're dialects.
@@AlchemistKoen Actually, it's the same vocabulary, but the pronunciation is out of tune! The southern dialect is even older ~
@@知-k3q Not really, they use different characters (rare ones) and grammar than Mandarin. Imagine merging English and German, and then declaring that they are one language because their vocabulary can be found in the same dictionary.
Even some dialect are from different language family with different writing system, it still can be dialect.
Cool video! 感谢这么详细的科普！
哪里详细啊😂我还怕有人会纠缠我哪里说的不够周全呢哈哈哈
@@ABChinese 如果有人真的要说就说吧！但是您的总结超级无敌好！～
Any external references of the point 150 - 100? A link would be nice, thanks. Chinese language's got a higher density on most of the scenarios, so this remains in doubt for me.
Here you go: www.tianhengconsulting.com/translation/word_count.htm
It varies a bit, but I do translation too and I use 1.5:1
Chinese density is higher when things were said originally in Chinese. But the density decrease when one had to adapt and translate from English language. Because things can't be directly translated. (At least that's what I think. )
Super late reply, but I was browsing my old videos and I finally understood why you were confused about density! So Chinese is more dense... the thing you have to keep in mind is that an English word is 1-4 syllables usually, a Chinese character is 1 syllable ALWAYS, so English usually comes out longer actually:)
@@ABChinese I think about it in terms of encoding. English encodes a word's meaning into the sounds produced by mouth shapes only. Tone has an effect, but it's far more general and the meaning of the individual words (usually) doesn't change regardless of tone. Chinese encodes a word's meaning into both the sounds produced by mouth shapes AND the tone of voice used in producing those sounds. In other words, it encodes more meaning in the same timeframe. I assume this is why it always feels like subtitles go past way too fast when I'm watching Chinese shows.
Spanish also have this «», nowadays a lot of people uses “”, but not in academical writing
LOVED this video
What about a different tone for a meaning for an expression that isn’t necessary parallel?
Thanks for this video! You confirmed several of my experiences in my Chinese learning journey...and that meant so much!😭❤
Man I have to disagree with you.
Like Romance languages, I think a lot of these what you consider dialects, are actually their own languages now, biggest example is Shanghainese and Cantonese.
Yeah, "dialect" is a loose term lol. Funny story... I have a Chinese friend who knows Italian, and he can understand Spanish (which he doesn't know) more than other Chinese dialects.
@@ABChinese hahaha I totally understand that, I learned Mandarin and now I'm studying Shanghainese because I think it sounds really nice, Shanghainese sounds like a combination between mandarin, korean and Japanese mixed together 😂
Спасибо за видео. Вы заслуживаете больше подписчиков! 谢谢您！love from russia
As a Hongkonger, I think this video is a great summary of (mandarin) Chinese!
Just discovered you….I hope you have made many more videos
0:34 如果用精確一點的話
注音要用直式哦
I think the character you meant to show at 6:23 was 惹？
Freakin dang it! Yeahhhh, thanks for catching that
Thank you, that was incredibly helpful.
Your presentation is very well done -- covering so many important differences between Chinese and English so vividly. I would, however, like to point out one major difference that you did not mention in your video, which is Mandarin Chinese has much fewer syllabic sounds than English. I believe the number of Mandarin Chinese syllabic sounds is only 420 (not including tones. )
English on the other hand is extremely rich in syllabic sounds for the following three reasons. English has many blended consonant sounds like sp, bl, gr, sk, sl, etc. which Chinee lacks. English also has 13 vowel sounds. But the main difference is that Mandarin Chinese has a very limited set of finals. A Mandarin Chinese syllable can only end only end in a vowel, diphthong, -n, -ng, or an -r (in Northern Mandarin). English on the other hand is full of syllables that can end in sounds like -b, -d, -ch, -sh, -g, -ck, -l, -m, -p, -s, -t, -v, and -z. Again, I commend you on your informative and entertaining video.
In Cantonese, the pronunciation for 的，地，得are different, and Cantonese, Hakka, etc have 6 or 9 tones. So when talking about spoken Chinese is better more specific to which spoken Chinese language.
#19-Modal Particles - Actually English have stressing function:
You can COME? = Are you coming?
You CAN come? = Do you have the ability to come?
YOU can come? = Are you the person coming?
6:22 The character with the meaning “to irritate” is “惹”, not “若” (rùo).
The character “若” can only be pronounced as /rě/ when it’s used in “般若” (bōrě), meaning the highest wisdom, translated from Sanskritic Buddhist scriptures.
1:12 A character is not a word, as you say later in the video. 150 characters might be about half the number of words, so actually fewer words are used in Chinese than would be used in English.
can you make a tutorial on how to write Chinese characters that look nice?
I sometimes ask Chinese speakers to say "shalt," which is difficult because the l is more about timing than a real letter. So timing is another aspect in English but not sure of the Chinese counterpart.
How about a non speed version too so we can follow easier , )
Seeing the similarities to Japanese is extremely fascinating. Especially hearing the similarities and changes to the Japanese 音読み reading versus Chinese. Then you have things I could roughly understand but for wrong reasons. For example the five books example that was in the video I could understand in written form just fine but my idea of book is 本. Interestingly Japanese says 5 books a bit different 五冊 I honestly don't know much about Chinese character meanings outside Japan so it would be interesting to know how easy it is to understand Japanese 熟語 for a Chinese speaker.
冊 is also a historically used counter/classifier in chinese for books, but nowadays it is mainly used for textbooks. Japanese 熟語 is generally pretty easy for chinese speakers to understand since most are extremely similar or easily deducible based on the character meanings.
Yes! The Japanese actually didn't have their own language so basically borrowed Chinese and utilized it to make their own "twist" on it! Which makes sense why Japanese could be easy for Chinese to learn :)
*edit: Japanese had a spoken language but not their own characters
@@hikaritakashi Well They did have their own language but no writing system. That much I know.
@@hikaritakashi It's not really easy. It's easier but not that easy.
Yes, writing system! You're right!
Point 20 is also what gave start to the myth that words for "yes" and "no " don't exist in Chinese because foreigners misinterpretated the contextual change of negations and statements as the absence of the words "yes" and "no".Actually Chinese has the exact words for "yes" and "no" but they are just used in a different way than in English .
是 - yes
否 or 非 -no
My Name is angel. I am an Indian. My age is 11 and I learn japanese chinese and German
Wow that’s a lot to learn! I know mostly simplified Chinese but I can manage reading basic traditional characters
Oh !
helpful thanks !
Amazing video .carry on brother
讲的非常棒！！
01:00 hilariously long words?
As a german i got one: Betäubungsmittelverschreibungsverordnung.
Fun fact: This is kinda common in german language since you can slap words together to create new ones. I love that
Thank you for making me laugh!
Your expressions for the word "came" and "come"
I am glad you demonstrated it with words and characters, and pronouncing them! I wish you can do that all the time!
Your follower!😊🤗
Don't tell me English has only three accents... There are Cockney, Geordie, Scouse and many more distinctive accents in England alone, not to mention Welsh, Scottish and Irish accents, all of which are not very mutually understandable. Oh did I mention Singlish, Indian English or South African English?
Which Chinese you know traditional or simplified
One only has to look at a classic clip of an exchange between a Londoner and a Scotsman in British parliament to realise that not all English accents are mutually intelligible
6:06 wait, doesn’t “bù (不)” mean “no”?
Roughly, yes, but it's more of a "negator" word. It negates what follows. I'm about as noob as it gets with Mandarin but my understanding is that while 不 does get used on its own as a response, it's more of contraction of the full sentence. But more importantly, if I ask if you have a sister, you can't use 不 to say no, you have to say 沒有 (méiyǒu, not have). So it's not a universal word for "no".
I suggest you check out the Cambridge Encyclopedia of English. It's a fun, useful read. The idea that English has 2 or 3 accents is beyond absurd.
True, English too has many dialects, however for the most part they're all intelligible.
Except Australian, nobody understands Australians 🤣 jkjk
1:57 ahh I knew you were going to miss Ping 平话 spoken in Guangxi😂
1:48 those aren’t different “dialects” they’re different languages and language families. If you can’t understand them, then it’s a different language. That’s like saying Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and English are all just a dialect of German. Which is clearly ridiculous.
This is a common political tactic that many governments/powers throughout history have used to either try and unify or differentiate people for their own advantage. China is a big place with lots of different languages, people groups, cultures, and histories. I know this is more of an argument in semantics, but it’s a very important one. When looking at these from a purely linguistic viewpoint, they are clearly different languages.
Oh, and there’s far more into English accents (American Standard, New England, Southern, British, Scottish, Singaporean, Indian, Australian, New Zealand, etc. but that’s a rant for another time)
Its not necessarily true that all the chinese "dialects" are unified by a common system of chinese characters. I mean, the characters alone, yes, maybe (considering that language had developed systematically enough), but practically speaking for example, it would be very difficult to almost unintelligeble for a mandarin speaker to read a sentence written in southern min, hokkien. Thats basically just reading standard mandarin and translating it in your head before reading it out loud in your regional language. All these chinese "dialects" have their own grammar rules, and have alot of vocabulary not seen in mandarin.
@@somethingsmells6694 i get what you mean. written form = chinese dialect.
vernacular form = a spoken language that happened to have existed in a particular region of present day China
@@somethingsmells6694 ill tell you what, in my hokkien background. it isnt easy to say, these characters belong to these pronunciations. there will always be debates on what characters have what meaning and what pronunciations. At this point, i sort of almost gave up on striving to find the "correct" characters of words that i speak. instead opting for pe̍h-ōe-jī as my primary script in writing my language. At least im able to accurately mark the tones of each word, with no more dispute as to which characters to be used.
@@somethingsmells6694 by the way, no one actually talks in 文言文. that wouldnt be able to represent the regional language's vernacular anymore
So what are those words for yes and no? Now I’m hooked xD
Just FYI, there are probably 300 different dialects of English in the UK alone, some of them completely unintelligible to outsiders.
I wonder if English dialects are more homogenous than Chinese? I’ve listened to English all over the internet and I can understand all of it. But Chinese dialects? I can’t understand most of them😅
@@ABChinese listen to irish accent of english
@@ABChinese I guess mandarin and Cantonese are two different languages. Cos the definition of dialect is that they’re mutually intelligible. The U.K. alone has tones of dialects And accent. Just you move 20 miles in either direction the accent changes. This is quite interesting as the U.K. is a very small place nonetheless they’ve retained these different dialects even over such a close proximity .
@@ABChinese th-cam.com/video/pit0OkNp7s8/w-d-xo.html see if you can understand that! Its the way people speak in the far SW of Ireland. And by the way there are dozens of accents in Ireland.
@@eoinobeirne9928 Wow! That's wild... I only picked up maybe 1/4 of what he's saying haha
小哥哥太优秀了！总结真好！！
8. Talk about Dialects, there aren't dialect. There are total different languages due to their different in pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary. And most importantly is there can't intelligible to each other.
The dialect count for English is also in the dozens, but they're largely mutually intelligible
Oh, I like ta. I'mma steal that...
❤🥰😍 very help info. ❤🥰
At 5:20, I think you mistakenly used the Korean words for 'older' brother and sister, as opposed to 'younger'. Excellent video nonetheless for a student of Mandarin like me! 🙂
Thanks for pointing that out! It was intentional though, because 小哥哥/小姐姐 is used much in the same way as "oppa/noona" as a way to address younger adults by other teens/young adults, sometimes in a flirtatious way;)
@@ABChinese interesting, I didnt know Mandarin had its own version of the oppa/noona. So for grown adults, how would a woman call an older man who is closed to her but not a sibling? And how would a man call an older woman who is closed to him ?
@@lunerouge_han For most Asian countries, we don't mind addressing someone who has no family ties with us as our family member. For instance, we'd call an old man as 大爷(grandpa, dad's elder brother) or 叔(uncle, dad's younger brother); old woman as 大妈or阿姨(aunt) .
For someone who is just a little bit older and close to us, no matter what your gender is, we would say first name+哥 (Big brother) and first name+姐(elder sister), like I address my neighbours as 乐天哥哥 (big brother letian), and 佳敏姐姐(Big sister jiamin).
For someone we don't know his or her name, and he/she is obviously a young person, we just address 小哥哥(for man) and 小姐姐(for woman).
Besides 哥 (pronunciation: ge), there is another way to say big brother, which is 兄(siung). For me, addressing siung is rather formal and respectful, it is rarely heard in normal mandarin (normally be heard in southern dialects).
I'll call someone who is not really close to me, and he is 10+ younger than my dad, 10+ years elder than me as siung, normally add on his last name in front. Exp: 林兄 (lim siung ; lim is his last name, siung is brother)
@@juventasthomas5641 thank you for all the clarifications !
English has way more dialects than two. I get that the overall point was that Chinese is actually a language family, but to be clear, English in the US alone varies A LOT. It's a country almost the size of Europe.
It's generally said that there are two types of English that are taught, but they don't truly encompass the dialectal variety of either of the two commonly taught dialects (American English and British English). And that's not even counting Australia, and the many places where English is spoken natively or taught with a native language in many places once colonized.
I'm Chinese and I don't really count them as all being "one language" but many languges that is grouped into what is Chinese. I feel that it would be like counting French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian as one language cause they are all "dialects of Latin".
@@Timothee_Chalamet_CMBYN Well yeah, that's why I called it a language family. Like, comparing the Chinese languages as dialects is a little disingenuous of him, because really, they're different languages which have dialects in and of themselves, I'm sure.
@@RingsOfSolace Technically, linguists say that the language family is the Sino-Tibetan language family. This language family includes the Chinese languages, also called Sinitic languages, as one branch.
The Sino-Tibetan language family also includes the Tibeto-Burman languages, which include Burmese and the Tibetic languages. (Edited because I mistakenly wrote "Tibetan", as if Tibetan were a single language.)
7. Question is: Do Chinese people still write up-down / right-left, like the japanes do in novels?
11. Ah, it's your fault that I struggle with japanese numbers. The 万 character (of course read "man" or "ban") still makes me stumble every single time because I'm so used to thousender-increments.
Not really... it's only somewhat commonly used as headers or titles. You'll see a music video use vertical text once in a while... it's an aesthetic, I guess.
-haha I still stumble between English and Chinese numbers
Publications are often still printed in the traditional presentation (vertically) in places outside of mainland China, such as Taiwan and Hong Kong where they still use traditional characters. But nowadays a lot of publications are published online and those texts are presented horizontally from right to left exclusively.
Sorry, for HongKong / XiangGang as it's even tougher now to compete with mainlanders in probably all parts of life
also Cantonese is not the language family, it is YUE
Charming.
I don't think you understand the word dialect. English has 1000s of dialects all over the world. Cantonese on the other hand is not a dialect of Mandarin, but a different language. It's not unusual for countries to have more than one language, in fact the UK has a few different languages.
谢谢，老师!!
Love this video but there’s VASTLY more than 2 English accents. I don’t doubt that Chinese has many, many accents/dialects as well but like, English has a ton too.
It is not entirely correct to say that English only has three accents.
It has many, many more and these days they must all be counted because people nowadays refuse the idea of a single "correct" accent.
To make an example, years ago only received pronunciation was considered correct in British English. Both Britons and foreigners had to try to replicate it as that was the only acceptable way of speaking in a formal context.
Today people say that every accent in ok and - heavens - there are hundreds of them.
Dialectal variation is somewhat limited but accents are not.
Chinese like to use 'en' to express yes, no or ? it is very difficult for others to tell the difference and exactly what we mean.
The R sound in Chinese is hard for English speakers to pronounce? It never occurred to me as remotely difficult. I would say the ones that tend to be difficult for people are JQX.
j q and x are kinda similar to sounds we already have so it’s not hard to get used to. the R in chinese is really strange to me and I still don’t quite know how to pronounce it lol
@@lililiwen Actually, ZH/CH/SH is close to out J/CH/SH. They are the same sounds but with the tongue curled back. Chinese J/Q/X are quite different from any sound in English. The Chinese R can represent a few sounds, and we have them in English.
The thing with the R sound for me is it seems to be halfway between a rolled R and L. I find it incredibly difficult to pronounce. There's a reason people joke about Chinese saying "flied lice" or otherwise getting R and L mixed up.
@@clonkex Those jokes come from speakers of Cantonese (and also Japanese), not Mandarin.
Man, wouldn't you consider the "dialects" to be separate languages? Some of them seem to be as far apart as French and Romanian. Even though they use the same basic characters, Cantonese characters are quite different. You could decipher Cantonese knowing Mandarin, but it would be like deciphering Spanish using French
English actually have more dialects since Britain dialect isn't a single dialect but a group of dialect spoken in Britain Islands with numerous different dialects, but still they are mutually intelligible.
惹rě, means "to irritate "
若ruò, means "if"
for Americans the third should not be so difficult, because the fashionable way to speak, so called vocal fry, is very close to the third tone
is vocal fry fashionable now? i'm out of the loop... i think the third tone is generally difficult because it's taught incorrectly with emphasis on the fall and rise rather than just staying deep unless you're really emphasizing that syllable. most Americans I encounter in China also have a really hard time with the umlauted u.
There are a LOT more dialects than just American, British and Australian. There are at least 160.
My favourite result of western influence is 「妳」
A sex-specific second person pronoun character is so esoteric, I love it. I've even taken to making new (wrong) characters like a humorous version of 妳 with the 心 radical below, like 您 (i.e. ⿱妳心 instead of ⿱你心). I wrote it to a penpal and she found it hilarious. Maybe I should put it in a font (render the IDS to a character).
你好中国，我来自印度尼西亚
There are two main differences between Chinese and English: 1. Chinese pronunciation is more than English. 2There are more Chinese “alphabet” than English
1 English has 20 vowels and 28 consonants, which makes the theoretical number of English sounds is 20*28=560，The actual pronunciation is about 400
Chinese has 24 vowels and 23 consonants. The number of sounds is 23*24=552. But because Chinese has four tones, so the number of Chinese theoretical pronunciation is 552 * 4 = 2208，The actual pronunciation is about 1500
When human beings speak, in order to avoid ambiguity, they must give different sounds to different things. There are too few English sounds, resulting in English words being longer than Chinese words. Chinese words generally have only two or three syllables, and English words have so many longer than 3 syllables...
This makes speaking Chinese faster than speaking English. The faster you speak, the faster you think.. So the Chinese are smarter (maybe)😂
Because there are many Chinese sounds, which makes the syllables of Chinese compound words less, so the word formation is simpler and more scientific。 for example:
television-----电视（electricity view）
computer-----电脑（electricity brain）
telephone-----电话（electricity talk）
fridge------------电冰箱（electricity ice box）
lamp-------------电灯（electricity lamp）
Basically, most Chinese words are compound words, and it is easy to guess the meaning, while many English words are separate words, which need to be learned alone... Why doesn't English use combination words like Chinese? I think it may be because there are English sounds are few, and the syllables of words are long. If you use combination words, the syllables will be even longer.. So English made a non compound word to make the pronunciation shorter, but it also led to an increase in the number of words. That's why the Oxford dictionary has a million words..
The number of English words is huge, but people's learning ability is limited, which leads to ,People don't understand the knowledge of other industries. because they don't understand many words in other industries... The problem of Chinese is not so serious, because nouns in many industries are also compound words, which is easy to guess the meaning. This makes the knowledge exchange in the Chinese world easier than in the English world
2 English has only 26 letters, but Chinese has to learn thousands of Chinese characters.. It seems that English is much easier than Chinese?
Nah, you learn 26 letters, but you can't understand English newspapers. I heard that if you want to understand English newspapers, you have to remember tens of thousands of different English words.. This memory is no less than 3000 Chinese characters.. You only need to memorize 3000 Chinese characters to read Chinese newspapers. Of course, there are more than 3000 words combined with Chinese characters. But as I said earlier, most of them are compound words. It's easy to guess the meaning.so It's much easier to remember tens of thousands of compound words than tens of thousands of totally different English words😂
one to ten in Chinese is 一二三四五六七八九十
Trigonal-------三边形（3 side form）
quadrilateral---四边形 （4 side form）
pentagon-----五边形（5 side form）
pentagon------六边形（6 side form）
Heptagonal---七边形（7 side form）
Octagonal-----八边形 （8 side form）
........
Monday------周一（week 1）
Tuesday-----周二（week 2）
Wednesday--周三（week 3）
Thursday----周四（week 4）
Friday----------周五（week 5）
Saturday------周六（week 6）
Saturday------周日（week day.....why it's not week 7 ? because week 7 means you have to work .no vacation that day）
see？ Chinese is so easy to learn than English.... English just too many words to remember.....Maybe native speakers of English don't feel much, because they have spoken English since childhood. But for non-native English speakers.. English is really too difficult to learn...
6:23 若 should be 惹
Maybe he means 般若…
Not only Chinese r sound is difficult but z c x are also hard to pronounce.
z c s, zh ch sh, j q x
those are quite hard for me