i’ve never seen so many americans excited about china and the chinese language. good stuff, folks

  • bbnh69420@hexbear.net
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    5 months ago

    If even .01% of the Americans joking about learning Chinese actually dip a toe into the language, culture, and (god forbid) history… mega self own from the us state

  • Hohsia [any]@hexbear.net
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    5 months ago

    Most Americans will just go to instagram/facebook/twitter unfortunately

    The great Satan won this round I’m afraid. Still though, I’m really curious to see some metrics (if those are even available anywhere)

  • Sulvor [he/him, undecided]@hexbear.net
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    5 months ago

    I have a Chinese buddy who studied in America and now lives in Hong Kong. He tried to teach me how to pronounce stuff in Mandarin and oh my god its so hard.

      • Sulvor [he/him, undecided]@hexbear.net
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        5 months ago

        It’s mostly the pronunciations and teaching my tongue, palate, throat, etc. new ways to make sounds. For instance, I can’t roll my Rs either and I know a fair bit of Spanish.

        • Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]@hexbear.net
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          5 months ago

          As I understand it, babies are initially able to produce and hear differences in basically any sound, but will in due time come to hone in on whichever sounds are used in the language they’re being raised with. Listening for only a few sounds and remembering how to produce only a few sounds reduces the cognitive load, basically.

          I’m able to make a pretty broad range of sounds, but I’m not sure how exactly I gained this ability. A part of it was certainly taking the time to learn the International Phonetic Alphabet and actually consciously learning the mechanics of making different sounds, but another part of it I think was just always enjoying making weird mouth noises, beatboxing, mimicking things, or doing silly voices or accents. Growing up with two languages probably also helped, but I’m told I have a “slight foreign accent” in Norwegian, so the exact extent of that help is a bit questionable.

          Anybody, in any case, is able to learn to make new sounds and distinctions. It’s probably easier than you might think, although it also might take some perseverance for some people, and you might never get perfect native-like pronunciation — but why should you want that, anyways? Own your accent, I say.

          I think the problem with learning new sounds is oftentimes just having bad teachers, though. For instance rolled R’s actually are fairly common (non-phonemically) in American English, especially in “what’d” or sometimes other contractions ending in -t’d: /wətəd/ → /wəɾəd/ → /wəɾəɾ‿/ → /wəɾɾ‿/ → /wər‿/ — this coalescence of /ɾəɾ/ to /r/ is considered to be more widespread in African American Vernacular English compared to other forms of American English, though. Like if you’ve seen that viral video “I’ve Never Seen Cops Run This Fast” you probably noticed how the cameraman very prominently says “outta there” as “ou[r]ere” and “speed it up” as “spee[r]up”.

    • glans [it/its]@hexbear.net
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      5 months ago

      My chinese ex trying to teach me to say hello:

      ex: “say ‘ni hao’”

      me: “ni hao”

      ex: “no, more like, ‘ni hao’”

      me: “ni hao”

      ex: “almost, try again: ‘ni hao’”

      me: “ni hao”

      ex: “great! perfect!”

      me: “ni hao”

      ex: “oh no not at all like that”

      and so on

      which iss all to say I really respect people who are able to learn languages as adults. it is difficult!

    • Sulvor [he/him, undecided]@hexbear.net
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      5 months ago

      It’s the internet, if regular people from different groups, especially Americans and Chinese, the former of whom’s government and media has been fomenting a cold war and racist propaganda for decades, can get together and have regular interactions I see that as an absolute win.

      Luxemburg emphasized: “There can be no socialism outside the international solidarity of the proletariat.”

    • spectre [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      5 months ago

      They don’t care, and I’m have a feeling that the app will not put up with nonsense from foreigners. This is not a Meta subsidiary, don’t forget.

      As an example (as others have mentioned on here) that your country (or province, if inside the PRC) is shown on your profile cause of all the trolling from the Taiwanese.

      If they need to ban Americans I’m sure they would, but why do that when you can just moderate them? At least give it a try…

    • blakeus12 [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
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      5 months ago

      some are showing concern but from what i see it’s a lot of excitement and curiosity. many americans are shockingly being polite and using AI to provide translations (possibly the only good thing AI is for)

  • buh [any]@hexbear.net
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    5 months ago

    Found something a bit weird, on profiles it looks like it shows users’ “IP Address”? But also that’s not long enough to be an IP address, and it’s not even made up of numbers? Can someone who knows Chinese clarify what this is?

    • xiaohongshu [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      5 months ago

      All major social media platforms in China were ordered by law to reveal IP location (just the cities) of their users since April 2022 because a lot of anti-Russia comments were made by Taiwanese trolls when the war in Ukraine started.

      Most Chinese people are Russia simps and the social media fights got really ugly flamed by trolls, so they decided to just reveal the IP location of the users instead.

      • coolusername@lemmy.mlBanned from community
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        5 months ago

        i’m in taiwan and it says 中國臺灣
        doesn’t make a difference to me

        it’s just an ip lookup

        • xiaohongshu [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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          5 months ago

          I don’t think many people use VPN at all. You only need it to bypass the firewall to browse certain foreign websites. Only a small fraction of people does that.

          But it is true that it would not be very effective against determined trolls posting from, say, Taiwan, because they can simply use VPN servers located inside China. Without showing the IP location, people will just endlessly accuse one another for being Taiwanese trolls without any proof. Surprisingly the flame wars did tone down substantially after this was introduced.

        • khizuo [ze/zir]@hexbear.netM
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          5 months ago

          If you’re located anywhere outside China it just says the country you’re in, not the city, and even for Chinese people it only shows the city they’re in if they’re located in a major one like Beijing or Shanghai (for a lot of people it just shows the province.) Idk to me it’s not a big deal if Xiaohongshu knows I’m in the Great Satan.

        • bbnh69420@hexbear.net
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          5 months ago

          A lot of the TikTok people are moving with the assumption that their privacy and data are cooked regardless of platform, and are choosing to spite America/us corps. Not the average hexbear poster

          • Tabitha ☢️[she/her]@hexbear.net
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            5 months ago

            I just assume that if I need to get a non-Christian abortion or not be racist, facebook already has an automated firehose for snitching my location and degree of thoughtcrime straight to the Schutzstaffel dispatch, merely waiting for President Musk to activate the autobot matrix of fascism, Chinese companies probably at least have a few hours delay due multilayered pipelines between shell corporations to bypass santactions.

  • macabrett@lemmy.ml
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    5 months ago

    One of the first things I was served upon opening the app was a Frieran meme. China really pointed at me and said “weeb”.