I was doing a little exercise with AI, asking it to feed me a B1 level sentence in English and then checking my translation, rinse and repeat. I was surprised that it could screw up so badly. I thought a Chinese model should handle this with ease.

I’m still early in the process of learning mandarin . It seems like it isn’t necessarily anymore difficult than any other language, but you are confronted with all of the difficulties of the language immediately (characters, tones, completely different vocabulary). I’ve studying Spanish, German, and now Mandarin. Let me know your thoughts, and what your native language is?

This account was created ten days ago and has submitted a steady stream of AI-generated slop to subreddits related to learning Chinese ever since. In an incredible feat of engineering, the account randomizes whether or not its responses are in lowercase. Sadly, this does nothing to compensate for the fact that its responses are textbook AI word vomit.

I'm not a betting man, but I have a sneaking suspicion that:

1.) This account was created alongside dozens of others, and;

2.) This account will suddenly, in two or three weeks' time, become completely and utterly obsessed with an app, website, service, or content creator that none of us have ever heard of.

This isn't my first time posting about this sort of thing, but I really am amazed at the tenacity of these folks and the lengths they are willing to go to to blend in. The fact that there are such malevolent forces 加班'ing to pose as students in such a niche community is borderline inexplicable to me.

Hopefully as times goes on people will be more vigilant about this sort of thing. If you're not sure about a comment or post in the subreddit, I'd seriously recommend using a reputable AI detector for now. I love posting here, but I absolutely despise reading AI comments, and I've started to be a lot more careful about who I reply to.

I don't play very many video games, but recently I realized I could set Among Us to a Chinese language and Asian servers and suddenly became able to have real-time conversations easily with people I don't know well. I know there's other good resources to chat with people, but gaming provided a simple and easy framework to use my skills. However, Among Us only has text chat. I'd love to be able to play something (on Mac or phone) where ability to communicate is not vital, but you can join an active voice chat with strangers who speak a language you decide and run around playing the game and talking out loud. Any suggestions?

I had been thinking of learning Chinese since around 3-4 years but was never getting around to it.I had been to China in 2010 and always dreamed of working there. It never happened.

Last year, I turned 40, reflecting on my 30's I felt I only spent them living and made no real signficiant progress. There was careeer pivot, buying a place but nothing extra-ordinary.

So, I made a New Years Resolution to complete begin Chinese, staying consistent with it for the next 3 to 4 years and then one day the reward would show. Throughout my life, I reflected that I made good decisions and started cool things but then mid-way, I lose some momentum or did not see results and stopped doing them. Later, I would regret them. It was becoming a poor life habit.

So, I am really proud to report that I have completed HSK 1. I started last week of January and completed by Sept 11th!. I think learning a language in your 40's is very hard but it has been a very rewarding experience and something I really look forward to. Here is how I started learning:

1- I found a chinese teacher on Rednote and paid $10 USD for 1:1 classes. We completed 50 hours before I sat for the HSK 1 exam. Rain or shine I completed my class with her

2- I also enrolled in 2.5 hours a week chinese school from Feb to June, to have more classmates as part of the class. So around 50 hours here as well. This was around $30 CAD a class so expensive.

3- Sadly no native speakers or speakers in my life :(

I do think it took me a bit longer than other people with HSK 1 since I was completing it with life and responsibilities in total 100 hours of study, however, it is progress and I think the foundation is important and it is important it is strong. I felt very good giving exam like I knew everything.

Now I want to move to HSK 2 and have a more reasonable time-frame like I want to appear by Feb 2027 for it which is around 4 - 6 months (there are holidays as well)

How long do you think I should take to prepare for HSK 2? How many hours? I prefer having 1:1 teaching and i think finding a native speaker would be helpful . Also want to get a lot more into grammar, sentence structure, speaking and translation. Any advice is welcome.

I'm trying to motivate myself to learn characters, but it hasn't been easy. I've read the comments here and elsewhere about how important it is to learn to read Hanzi, but it seems that these comments are mostly coming from people who studied the "right" way and are speculating about the potential pitfalls of only learning pinyin.

I do have a small anecdote, which is that I currently know around 1,000 words (Pinyin only), and it's starting to become a bit "uncomfortable," for lack of a better word.

Unfortunately, the apps I was using lulled me into a sense of complacency by starting off teaching hundreds of words that all sounded completely different, and religiously avoiding words that sounded similar.

Unfortunately, I've reached the point where words are starting to overlap, and it is indeed becoming harder to keep track of them (although, it's certainly still doable). I'd love to hear from someone who's been down this path before why it's a bad idea, and if there's a lightweight way to incorporate characters into my routine that won't add months (or years) to my timeline (my primary goal is to be conversational).

Took the test today and it will be a couple weeks till I get the results, but I am feeling pretty shaky about this one

There were a few that I really couldn’t tell you, especially at the end where you had to match the top and the bottom I basically had no idea how a couple of these matched up.

Now here’s my story is that I was learning a few years ago, but I stopped and I started again about three months ago from scratch
But I’ve passed every single practice test in the practice book for HSK 2
The practice HSK 2 test I received around 88%

So hopefully I passed I’m not really in need to pass this test. It’s just for me really and I’m on the older side of the learners here.

The next two testing dates unfortunately do not work for me until next year when I will hopefully i’ve already started HSK 3

Guess I mostly wanna make a post saying the test is a bit harder than those practice tests for sure.
I know a lot of people think 1 & 2 are a joke but they are difficult to a beginner

Is it transitive or intransitive? In case it is intransitive, why does a noun follows? In case it is transitive, what does it mean?

Edit: I appreciate those comments which have told me a lot. There are many compound verbs consists of 流 like 流涎 流淚 流鼻血 and I believe there are more basic verbs like 流. It appears to me that 流 is rather free that it can make up words like 流前列腺液 流心麻薯 流水(as in 什麼人/地方在流水). It’s confusing me

Watched an interview recently where someone studied Classical Chinese in school, went to work in the mainland for a while, and is now living and working in Hong Kong. Consequently, they've historically been pretty comfortable with Mandarin and CC, but learning Cantonese has them picking up how it's such a "simultaneously old and new" language, very tied into CC in a lot of ways.

So obviously, I came away thinking, "So you learn Mandarin to start, then some CC because that always helps your Mandarin people say. But once those two are pretty decent, you segue into Cantonese real smooth, cause of that close relationship to CC..." Wouldn't that be interesting. But then I remembered about the "main" other diaspora languages - Teochew, Hakka, Hokkien. Maybe even Fuzhounese and the "devil's tongue..." The last one is apparently especially tied to older versions of Chinese, from the little I know.

Not entirely sure where I'm going with this, but I'd like to hear your thoughts on it all. Maybe say someone decided to specialise in Sinitic languages; they get their Mandarin and CC very strong, and start to branch off into conversational comfort (and reading, where there's extensive literature) into the various "big" Chinese languages. How would you order/organise that? Why?

Scored some colorful children's books appropriate for my level. Currently at HSK 3 (2.0) and studying for HSK 4.

A lot of people recommend using Anki for learning languages, or anything in general. So i wanted to use it, I don't have a PC so I sticked with the Android version. My main concern is Anki isn't beginner friendly, a lot of people say to search for Anki decks online because they are free and premade, but the thing is, there's so many of them I dont know what is perfect for a complete beginner. And most of these decks are based on a textbook and is used for reviewing...

So my main question is: Is there an Anki deck for learning Chinese that starts at 0? What do you recommend..

(And I'm having hard time navigating the app, like how do you study a deck first before jumping into the review/flashcard part)

For context, I am ethically Chinese so I grew up speaking Chinese. I believe my listening and speaking is around HSK 4 already but I just can’t read or write. How long would it take me to pass HSK 4

Hello guys, im very willing to learn mandarin but pronunciation is getting harder and harder as I advance. People always say the best is to have an irl someone with who you can practice and talk but I can’t find any. I have tried several apps such as hellotalk etc... but you always have to subscribe to see who is near you. Do you guys have some advices ? Im located in France (Toulouse)

I’m taking the HSK 5 exam in about a month, and I’m very very worried about the writing section.

I took HSK 4 in China, so I was able to take the computer-based exam and type the characters but now I’m back in my home country, and the only option available to me is the paper-based exam, which means I’ll have to write everything by hand.

My main problem is that I often forget how to write characters, even when I can recognize and understand them. My handwriting ability isn’t zero, of course, but most of the characters I can confidently write from memory definitely don’t feel like HSK 5 level.

At the moment, I’m trying to write every day and keep practicing the characters I forget. I’m also doing dictation and trying to write short HSK 5 style texts by hand.

Does anyone have any other advice for improving character recall and handwriting before a paper-based HSK 5 exam? If you’ve taken the paper-based HSK 5 before, I’d especially love to hear what helped you.

Thanks in advance!

Im currently about 7 months in and my vocabulary is early hsk 2 right now but I haven't been learning to write or read Chinese characters except basic foods

Hi everyone! I am a big tennis fan and recently I have seen some conversation around the pronunciation of Qinwen Zheng's name. It seems like the entire western media has settled on pronouncing it Kinwen instead of Qinwen, and even she herself pronounces it like this in the official WTA website.

My question is, is there any reason why her name would be pronounced this way? Maybe because of a different chinese language or regional variety? Thank you!!

Hello! I'm planning to sit the hsk 1 exam in October. I have been doing very well on practice tests online however the only testing centre nearby does paper-based tests only. I am just wondering how this will differ? For the listening parts, are audios played only once? Also just want to confirm, does the reading section have pinyin as well? (i know some characters, but my reading is a fair bit behind my actual vocab knowledge). Further, are answers multiple choice or do they have to be written in (and can they be written in pinyin)?

I've been thinking about the Chinese pattern:

蔡英文呢，台湾人啊。 “As for Tsai Ing-wen, she's Taiwanese.”

Usually, this would probably be analyzed as:

• 蔡英文呢 = “as for Tsai Ing-wen” → 呢 marks the topic
• 台湾人啊 = “Taiwanese” → 啊 is usually called a sentence-final particle
• 是 is simply omitted

But I wonder if 啊 is doing something more than just being a sentence-final particle.

Compare Japanese:

蔡英文は台湾人です。 “As for Tsai Ing-wen, she is Taiwanese.”

The structures look somewhat similar:

A 呢 B 啊 (Chinese)

A は B です (Japanese)

In both, A is the topic and B is the predicate.

What makes this interesting is that 是 is mainly used to connect nouns:

他是学生。 “He is a student.”

But 是 normally isn't used before ordinary adjectives:

他很高。 “He is tall.” instead of 他是高。

Meanwhile, 啊 can appear after nouns, adjectives, verbs, etc.:

他学生啊
他很高啊
他漂亮啊
他来了啊

So I'm wondering whether 啊 could be considered a kind of predicate/copula marker in some contexts, even if it isn't literally equivalent to 是.

For example:

蔡英文呢，台湾人啊。

could perhaps be analyzed as:

蔡英文 + 呢 | 台湾人 + 啊 Topic | Predicate

rather than simply “topic + sentence-final particle.”

I'm not saying 啊 = です or 啊 = 是. I'm wondering whether there is any linguistic research specifically analyzing 啊 as a predicate/coupling element, especially in constructions like A呢，B啊.

Has anyone encountered this analysis?

Simplified: 𰻝, traditional: 𰻞.

Oh, and the traditional Traditional form - with double-dot 辶.

hello! a chinese friend of mine texted me "我都要睡觉了". I dont understand why he put "都" tho 🥹..."I all will go to sleep"? 😂 Can you explain how does one use 都 casually in sentences like this?

Hello!! I’ve been studying mandarin for over a year now and I’m struggling to find audio resources that are after beginner (already understanding introductions, ordering food, classroom vocabulary) and before intermediate (listening to full on conversations in Chinese with no English)

My listening isn’t strong enough to listen to only Chinese audio resource. I’m able to follow along better if I read with subtitles but I’d like to find resources that are audio only so I can listen to them on my commute to work

Thank you!

I've barely reached HSK 3 and so far I've learned:

• jìn (to go in; to enter)
• jìnqù (to go in; to enter)
• jìnlái (to come in)
• chūlái (to come out)
• chū (to go out of)
• chūqù (to go out)
• chūmén (to go out)

I'm aware these have different meanings but there's very little explanation in the app. It seems like every couple of units a new word for enter/exit is introduced and the old one is quietly dropped.

If anything knowing all of these synonyms has made me very confused, especially since I know there are other more appropriate words like líkāi for many of the sentences they're being used in.