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Iván wrote:Chinese. I found this channel and got interested in the language. I will probably need another life to learn Chinese, though.
Linguaphile wrote:
Interesting video! Navajo is cool (and I really want that breakfast burrito now. Haven't had náneeskaadi in ages.)
I started to write a rant about ...
linguoboy wrote:Iván wrote:Chinese. I found this channel and got interested in the language. I will probably need another life to learn Chinese, though.
"In my day if you studied German, you never graduated. You just spent your life knowing German. Nowadays I think that happens with Chinese."--Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
Yasna wrote:linguoboy wrote:Iván wrote:Chinese. I found this channel and got interested in the language. I will probably need another life to learn Chinese, though.
"In my day if you studied German, you never graduated. You just spent your life knowing German. Nowadays I think that happens with Chinese."--Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
This passage struck me as odd, so I tracked down the original Italian.
"Ai miei tempi chi sapeva il tedesco non si laureava più. Passava la vita a sapere il tedesco. Credo che oggi succeda col cinese."
It looks like "sapere" is being translated first as "to study" and then as "to know". Is that a sensible translation decision? I don't know enough Italian to judge it further.
linguoboy wrote:Have you considered the possibility that I simply got one word wrong when quoting from memory a book I read three decades ago?
linguoboy wrote:Yasna wrote:linguoboy wrote:Iván wrote:Chinese. I found this channel and got interested in the language. I will probably need another life to learn Chinese, though.
"In my day if you studied German, you never graduated. You just spent your life knowing German. Nowadays I think that happens with Chinese."--Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
This passage struck me as odd, so I tracked down the original Italian.
"Ai miei tempi chi sapeva il tedesco non si laureava più. Passava la vita a sapere il tedesco. Credo che oggi succeda col cinese."
It looks like "sapere" is being translated first as "to study" and then as "to know". Is that a sensible translation decision? I don't know enough Italian to judge it further.
Have you considered the possibility that I simply got one word wrong when quoting from memory a book I read three decades ago?
OldBoring wrote:Xiaoma's Mandarin is just average, I mean better than most learners, but still not "shocking".
OldBoring wrote:Many Chinese learners give themselves a Chinese name, which is not related to their English name.
Like Vijay is 王建国 (Wang Jianguo), and Francesco doesn't have anything to do with Yangfan.
linguoboy wrote:The very first day of class at the Chinese Mutual Aid Association consisted of the teacher (a native speaker from Nantong) assigning each of us Chinese names, even though several of those students never attended class again. I think only two of us had already chosen names previously.
Linguaphile wrote:linguoboy wrote:The very first day of class at the Chinese Mutual Aid Association consisted of the teacher (a native speaker from Nantong) assigning each of us Chinese names, even though several of those students never attended class again. I think only two of us had already chosen names previously.
My first French and German teachers did that on the first day as well. (Not Chinese names, of course, but French and German names respectively.)
linguoboy wrote:Linguaphile wrote:linguoboy wrote:The very first day of class at the Chinese Mutual Aid Association consisted of the teacher (a native speaker from Nantong) assigning each of us Chinese names, even though several of those students never attended class again. I think only two of us had already chosen names previously.
My first French and German teachers did that on the first day as well. (Not Chinese names, of course, but French and German names respectively.)
I've heard of elementary school teachers doing this but none of my language teachers on the secondary or tertiary level had ever bothered before. (I arrived at my college Korean class with a Sinitic name already picked out; my teacher taught me the Sino-Korean pronunciation and then chose a surname for me, which I used for the rest of that class. The other non-Koreans in the class--there were only two--simply went by their Western names.)
Dormouse559 wrote:linguoboy wrote:Linguaphile wrote:linguoboy wrote:The very first day of class at the Chinese Mutual Aid Association consisted of the teacher (a native speaker from Nantong) assigning each of us Chinese names, even though several of those students never attended class again. I think only two of us had already chosen names previously.
My first French and German teachers did that on the first day as well. (Not Chinese names, of course, but French and German names respectively.)
I've heard of elementary school teachers doing this but none of my language teachers on the secondary or tertiary level had ever bothered before. (I arrived at my college Korean class with a Sinitic name already picked out; my teacher taught me the Sino-Korean pronunciation and then chose a surname for me, which I used for the rest of that class. The other non-Koreans in the class--there were only two--simply went by their Western names.)
My high school French teacher helped us choose French names. I was Fernand There are some students from those classes who I only remember with their French names.
Well, at the time, I knew their real names, but many of us only interacted in French class, so their French names are what have stuck a decade later.Linguaphile wrote:Yes, exactly; that issue with not knowing classmates' real names is one of the reasons I've never really like the practice of assigning "foreign language" names to students. Most of the high school language teachers at my school did this.
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