Thanks Rick, you are the second person to voice such concerns and so I will give this some serious thought before I invest more time and effort.

Sure. Just best records

Lol at listening to ads

We managed to talk a table into a round of crazy pineapple a few months ago. That was fun.

******* is a thing, you know? it's free too.

Ad blocking software works on YouTube and Pandora, and is free to download. Just saying.

Edit: Slow ponied. At least I knew that ********* is censored, though

wtf. "a.d.b.l.o.c.k." (less the ....) is literally auto blocked out with ****. thats ****ed up Mason.

all of 3 sounds like a major **** show.

yeah when i was in Beijing I met another expat who spent two years in Shandong Province, not in the middle of nowhere but somewhere central, in a big city, a place that supposedly speaks Mandarin natively etc etc and it was only when he came to Beijing did he finally understand he wasn't learning mandarin at all but some local dialect where not even the numbers were the same so he basically had to start over from scratch - that's another thing to consider, hokkien in one region could fundamentally be a totally different hokkien from another

big thing though is if you do it, commit to communicating with another male who is educated to avoid sounding super effeminate and subservient, the translation of the language is very imprecise and for all intents and purposes the intonation of "yes master" and "ok" can both be translated as "ok" and there is a large segment of the population who still actively use the "yes master" variant so you want to be sure you're learning from someone who wouldn't speak like that

biggest thing in Mandarin is you're always hearing 好嘞 hao lei used as an affirmativen (like you order food and they say that to indicate they got the order etc etc) as well as 好了 hao le, the difference is minimal, both are variants of "good" in fact if you were to translate them the dictionary would likely just tell you they both mean good

but one is for general use and the other is specifically used by lower class people when talking to upper class people. Hence, as a foreigner in China, you'll hear hao lei several times a day and just start saying it yourself treating it no differently from hao le until one day your colleague pulls you aside after a meeting and says, "Adam, please never mock yourself publicly like that again because you represent our company" and then you learn all this nuance that you were previously oblivious to

another thing to consider, zuckerburg has supposedly been practicing and learning chinese for years, has in-laws who don't speak english, has a wife who is fluent, yet when he speaks chinese he's barely intelligible and all chinese discussion of his speeches literally has nothing to do with his content but "how cute he's trying to speak our language" literally, if you search zuckerburg speech in Chinese you'll find thousands of articles discussing his attempt at speaking chinese and nothing on the content of what he said at all - it's a novelty act, a clown show...

all comments are super patronizing too "oh wow I could understand him, that's so incredible and badass of him"

this is embarassing and painful for me to watch it's so absurd


it's like watching the special olympics but one of the contestants isn't special, he's just lazy and fat and people let him compete anyway because it's so cute to watch - just listen to the crowd, they are laughing at him not with him, total minstrel show, he should be ashamed of himself for not picking up on that - i can also barely understand him and he speaks absurdly slow and uses the strangest sentence structures possible

/derail

[philosoraptor] Can you derail a chat thread? [/philosoraptor]

there is a joke in here somewhere

Man I hope so!

Jam bands, Jelly bands, and Preserves bands?

M U N G I N G

Zuck, zucking up learning Chinese, is not a reason why a non famous person shouldn't (couldn't) learn... DUCY?

idk sounds like too much work. I also like the fact I can browse other apps and it will still olay in the background in a minimized window. I don't think it does that on regular.

My favorite record of the last decade



Probably could have used a bit of editing but the highs are so so good

My favorite AF song



Title track reminds me of being a kid



Underrated gem





I'll anxiously await Zollie's entry to tell me how wrong I am and then I can tell him to STFU obv

came out in 09 - I think it fcukkin rox mang - clearly throwback to the whole 70's vibe but its wat i dig

skwid aint 1 dimenshunal tho. Dig this performance. Please...its sick!!

Not really my jam but sick little bass work in this song.

Sounds similar to another band that I just can't place...

Yeah well played bluegrass can be so fun. She crushes pretty hard.

I have seen Alison Krauss and Union Station a couple of times and when they are on stage it's just a blast.

what i meant is that he is arguably smarter than anyone here ITT, regularly discussed how getting fluent was his top priority in life and has years of constant study before that Q&A occured

he has Chinese family and billion dollar incentives to learn the language, yet he just got good enough to make a mockery of himself

this is normal, in fact, there are so few non-native Chinese speakers who attained real fluency that they are literally celebrities with their own tv shows etc

i'm not being a hater or jealous or anything, just pointing out that it's going to be a whole lot of time involved just to make yourself appear like a village idiot

this is what it is, I spent years there, often working in Chinese language environments as the token white guy and yet people still preferred to talk to me in English even when their level of English was borderline functional just because trying to mentally keep pace with a non-native speaker is quite a chore for them

learning any form of Chinese is -EV for a native english speaker, it's not like learning spanish at all

GendofdoublesecretprobationderailG

great music guys, arcade fire has been a big part of my life, for some reason when I'm really depressed I love to blast this one on full volume - often with head banging... yeah I'm sometimes that crazy guy on the sidewalk

had zero clue about that rick - that is truly fascinating stuff mang

What surprised me was the low class to upper class word for good. You'd think in a communist country with a cultural revolution that would've gotten cut out...

Not a derail at all, Rick.