sounds like good goals, as someone who speaks fluent Chinese though, unless you already speak Mandarin fluently and/or your new girl Haka then that's literaly going to be the biggest waste of time you could possibly do
non-native speakers sound utterly ridiculous and unintelligible and the amount of people who speak Hokkien shrinks by the year so it's utility is ever decreasing
seriously, imagine combining the worst elements of Bruno and Borat's accents... but it's worse than that, because those guys still speak fluently and intelligibly, add in that nobody can understand half of the words you say and it'll become an utter shat show
there are major male/female styles of speech in the Chinese dialects as well as distinctive differences based on your social class. The son of a taxi driver from Beijing will sound nothing like the son of a government official from Beijing even if they lived in the same apartment building. They'll use different accents and very different word choices as well.
So most non native speakers, they pick up off who they interact with more. Which is almost always women and people who deal in customer service. So you'll almost always sound like their equivalent of white trash plus over the top effeminate and have utterly no idea. You'll think it's cool you're communicating in another language and have no idea you're a laughingstock.
Not saying that can't be overcome, but it adds in a difficulty factor and few, if anyone will tell you because they are just impressed you can speak at all.
I am fluent in mandarin, yet I'll speak in English and rely upon translators in anything formal because I'll lose all credibility once I speak their language. It's not at all rational but if you keep it in English you maintain dignity despite that they'll be the ones speaking in a second language, if you learn their language, then suddenly all bets are off.
As for coding stuff... it sounds like you're doing a late career switch. All I can say is that you should build, build, build. If you have something functional to show off, even a website or a script you used to data mine for fantasy football research then it'll go a very long way because then they can see tangible accomplishments.
good luck and feel free to pm me about learning Chinese... which I'll try to help you with if you still refuse to take my advice and give up on trying to learn it
realistically, it'll take you 1 years of constant study and practice before you could handle someone being able to understand 80% of what you say when you tell them about the weather and another year before they understand it more or less - but you could practice daily for years and still sound like a blathering idiot each time you talk - that's the real ceiling to the language and few not born speaking it can "blend in" so to speak, this isn't like an Indian English accent, this is as i described full on worst of borat and bruno combined
then you gotta factor in that the people you are learning from may not even be speaking standard hokkien... for example, most chinese still need to learn Chinese, it's a highly fragmented language - during the civil war in the 40s, when an army crossed a river or mountain pass, the first thing they'd do was find a translator who spoke the same dialect because most of China was unable to communicate with each other verbally until they started teaching a common dialect of mandarin under Mao
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.
idk I haven't had youtube regular in maybe 3 or 4yrs. For me the main thing is
that everything I watch is ad free. I was over a friend's house once and pulled up something on their computer and I thought it was unwatchable with the amount of ads they put in each video now.
I think they also have some other content like movies and tv shows.
I mainly use it to watch stand up comedy, battle rap, Funk Flex freestyles, Joe Rogan's podcast, and look up different tutorials on things.
Its around that time of the year and since I have know so many inspiring people in this thread im curious if you fellas would share with me your 2020 new years resolutions.
I'll go first:
1) I hope to be AT LEAST interviewing for some type of position relating to programming/technology before the years end.
2) I've managed to get the boozahol under control and am maintaining a relatively stable weight of 208-210. I think instead of setting a weight loss goal I am going to set a strength goal. Tbh im not sure what type of process-oriented goal I should set. I am open to your guise fawts.
3) Start divorce proceedings || Mrs.Deadfish gets it together.
3a) Marry my girlfriend 3b) Breakup with my girlfriend
4) Learn basic Hokkien.
5) harvest at least one deer. (this season kinda sucked for me)
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.
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
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
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.
Zuck, zucking up learning Chinese, is not a reason why a non famous person shouldn't (couldn't) learn... DUCY?
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...