• porous_grey_matter@lemmy.mlEnglish
      17·
      5 days ago

      Holy fuck this is somehow even worse than I expected, and my expectations were very low. At least that Chinese list has some stuff on it that passes for literature.

    • Formerlyfarman [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      6·
      5 days ago

      But not in a book recommendation engine, otherwise it will recommend slop based on the stuff they forced you to read as a kid or the slop you read when you didn’t know better because everyone was reading it.

      You shouldn’t punt anything you didn’t like in there.

      As a side note, when I was using a similar site it thought I was japanese or russian, because I like old time scyfi, and apparently the only people reading those obscure works also liked things written in japanese or russian. I don’t know how to feel about that.

  • xijinpingist [none/use name]@hexbear.netBannedEnglish
    14·
    5 days ago

    I tried reading Dream of the Red Mansions and three Kingdoms but failed. There are simply too many damn names to keep track of. Dates back to village life when every Chinese knew 150 people by name and knew all their family trees. It’s worse in pinyin because the Q X and Z makes it unreadable.

    • TreadOnMe [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      14·
      5 days ago

      I succeeded in reading the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, only after listening to a podcast on it, and also putting over 400 hours into Total War: Three Kingdoms.

      That said, I could barely tell you any specific thing that happens in it other than an extremely funny sequence early on where a farmer serves his lord (And I think it is either Liu Bea or Cao Cao) his (the farmer’s) wife (maybe just her hand, I can’t remember) for supper because he does not have any other meat, and the Lord eats it, until he finds out that it is the farmer’s wife, in which he then graciously forgives the farmer and thanks him for the meal, which according to the author demonstrates his magnanimous relationship with the common people, and I am like “This sounds like he told the guy to serve him whatever meat he had on pain of death, and then he had to save face from being huge sack of shit.”

      And this guy is supposed to be one of the good lords.

      It’s an absolutely insane story though, with so many cool battle sequences.

      • xijinpingist [none/use name]@hexbear.netBannedEnglish
        41·
        4 days ago

        Those are the least common letters in English and they are jarring to the eye when used often. Pinyin was developed as a romanization system for the phonemes of Mandarin. But it’s a poor system. Xi doesn’t sound like “she,” Pinyin X is a sound English doesn’t have. It’s like “sh” but instead of using the tongue tip you use the tongue blade. Taiwan has Bopomofo but it’s symbols like hiragana. for Romanization it uses the older Wade-Giles system which also looks alien.
        Hsieh-hsieh sounds more like “thank you” than the alien xiexie.

        • SuperZutsuki [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          7·
          4 days ago

          X and Q were used because they’re so uncommon in English, which made them great for representing uncommon sounds. I’ve never seen anyone assert that X in pinyin is equal to /ʃ/, only that it’s the closest sound English has.

          It also makes more sense to have 1 letter per phoneme rather than “hsieh” where you have “hs” for /ɕ/, “i” for /i/, and “eh” for /ɛ/. It’s a very poorly constructed system to have these superfluous Hs all over the place and “eh”, in particular, is extremely anglo-coded. I can’t think of a speaker of any other language using the Latin script that would put that H on the end to signify that sound to the learner, which makes for a very biased system of romanization.

          • xijinpingist [none/use name]@hexbear.netBannedEnglish
            1·
            4 days ago

            Sorry, I don’t IPA.
            Neither does anyone else. That’s why Pinyin was invented. And better yet, Bopomofo which can’t be represented with the Latin letters. Xi jinping is not Whe jinpeeeng.
            Nor is Beijing “bay-zheeng” as so many of its long-term foreign residents pronounce it.

            • SuperZutsuki [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
              4·
              4 days ago

              ???

              Pinyin has no bearing on people refusing to learn proper pronunciation. When you learn Mandarin, you learn what the actual sounds are that the pinyin corresponds to. This response is incoherent.

              • xijinpingist [none/use name]@hexbear.netBannedEnglish
                1·
                4 days ago

                Wait until you find out Beijing mandarin is not “standard” and Beijingers sound like they have marbles in their mouths. Made a very unpleasant acquaintance with one this evening and Culturally they’re jerks as well as linguistically, not less because they’re told from birth that they’re right and everyone else is wrong.

                • SuperZutsuki [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
                  3·
                  4 days ago

                  Sounds like people in Tokyo. “Largest city narcissist syndrome” or something.

                  As for variations on pronunciation, yeah, that’s true across every language. When you teach a new language to people you just have to pick (or create) a variation that will be intelligible to people who speak it natively. You can’t teach the infinite variations of pronunciation, grammar, etc. in a beginner language course. You’d just confuse people.

        • Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]@hexbear.netEnglish
          10·
          4 days ago

          So it’s more that you aren’t used to it and maybe aren’t that interested in language learning to begin with? Pinyin seems like a very good and intuitive system to me, I understand the rationale behind why those specific letters make those specific sounds. But if languages aren’t your forte then that’s fine, it can’t be everybody’s thing.

            • Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]@hexbear.netEnglish
              11·
              4 days ago

              When I’m autistic, which is always.

              Edit: Seriously, I should cut the laconism and just say upfront that you’re ascribing intent to me that’s not there, which I find hurtful and upsetting. I think it’s significantly more passive aggressive and toxic to be accusatory towards an autistic person who phrased an idea poorly than to be an autistic person who occasionally phrases ideas poorly. I’d rather hear “this comes across as passive-aggressive, consider changing your phrasing in these concrete ways” or even “I get that you didn’t intend it, but I found this hurtful because it came across as passive aggressive to me” or even just “please clarify your intent”. Those are far more productive things to say in this situation, because miscommunications happen, even miscommunications that hurt people, but if you don’t go around assuming ill intent from people then I won’t have to go around overthinking my every word because I apparently have to worry about strangers accusing me of being mean on purpose at the drop of a hat.

              I will inevitably fail at saying the right thing every time. When something like this happens, I will remember crying when my least competent old teacher as a kid accused me of lying about not understanding my assignment when I was genuinely confused by it; then I will curse that I evidently have no safe space even online where neuronormativity doesn’t force me to invest more energy into casually existing there than a neurotypical has to invest, because this sort of thing is always just around the corner. Do I need to start talking like a lawyer all the time? Like a Greek philosopher? Does everything I say need to be at least two paragraphs with citations? Should I just start speaking my personal conlang 24/7 in protest, given that people won’t understand me no matter how I talk? Seriously! Ugh.