i’ve never seen so many americans excited about china and the chinese language. good stuff, folks
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It would be so fucking funny if this backfired so spectacularly that it resulted in the total collapse of the “China bad” narrative in the US.
It would be nice. More probably, it also gets banned before that happens.
Making a top level comment cause lots of people in this thread just spreading blatant misinformation regarding the ability to learn languages as a child versus an adult. No investigation no right to speak.
https://www.nature.com/articles/1301553
Unique childhood plasticity has been demonstrated particularly in the areas of vision, audition, motor, and language abilities
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10149040
The ability to learn certain aspects of language, however, is limited after early childhood. This sensitive period for language learning makes it an important model system for the study of developmental plasticity in children.
Another clarifying example is when people who immigrate to a new country at different ages attempt to learn a second language. When the amount of experience with the new language is held constant, there is an advantage to being younger than 8 years old for acquiring the second language to proficiency.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2920538/
Test performance was linearly related to age of arrival up to puberty; after puberty, performance was low but highly variable and unrelated to age of arrival. This age effect was shown not to be an inadvertent result of differences in amount of experience with English, motivation, self-consciousness, or American identification. The effect also appeared on every grammatical structure tested, although the structures varied markedly in the degree to which they were well mastered by later learners. The results support the conclusion that a critical period for language acquisition extends its effects to second language acquisition.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/427544/
Synaptic density increased during infancy, reaching a maximum at age 1–2 years which was about 50% above the adult mean.
I’m not disputing any of this, however a lot of this is balanced by the fact that babies have to learn how to learn and what language is. You do not.
If you moved to China, and your full time job was learning Chinese, and also your household chores were taken care of so you could focus on learning Chinese, by the end of the year you would be better at Chinese than a 3 or 4 year old born in China. You have a base understanding of how language works and don’t have to relearn the existence of grammar and sentence structure.
If you and your 7 year old child were both put in that environment, the child would probably learn faster than you, I won’t dispute that. But the larger limiting factor is time spent.
Yeah sorry if it felt like I was jumping on you, the only comment that bothered me enough to do this was the .ml user calling Saeculum a liar/making excuses
3 months is enough to learn enough to bully fellow gwailos. Set realistic goals. ;D
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the fact of the matter is that if you spend the same amount of time learning a language the same way as a baby, (ie, through mass input), you’re going to learn faster
This is just not true and disproven by the studies I linked.
This person is really like “Oh you think children are gifted? Well I could be gifted too if I had time.”
One of the first things I was served upon opening the app was a Frieran meme. China really pointed at me and said “weeb”.
Whole lotta folks are gonna find out they have more in common with the FOREIGN ADVERSARY™'s citizens than with their own government
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
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.
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!
“how hard can it be if babies do it” is usually my mantra when I try learning languages
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.
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”.
I summon our resident linguist to explain this in a much better way than I ever could
WHO DARES WAKE ME FROM MY MORTAL SLUMBER‽
Babies have special brain shit going on the helps them learn super fast. My ancient and decaying brain matter is no match.
I don’t know fam, most adults with very directed study/practice can become fully fluent in a language in about a year. Babies take like whaat, 5 or 6 years before they start to become regularly coherent? And their vocabulary still sucks for years after that.
You have the advantage of already knowing way more than babies so you’ve got more to build on.
3-5 years for the first language to a general level of fluency. The impressive part is that they can generally pick up fluency in a second language in a year with minimal instruction, and they can learn multiple at the same time.
Unless it’s the only thing you’re doing, you’re not going to be fluent in a second language as an adult after a year of study.
On a chemical level, children’s brains work differently to adults when they’re learning, it’s not a question of effort.
Nah babies are just able to dedicate most of their waking time to learning language, adults with jobs and responsibilities aren’t.
If we could lock you in a room for a year and all you could do was sleep and practice Chinese, you’d be way better at it at the end of a year than a baby after 1 year.
You are correct, don’t listen to the user telling you this is just a lie/excuse.
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i am worse at many things than babies
im still undefeated pants shitting champion though
for now
Oh i bet the chinese users are stoooookkkeeddd about a bunch of yanks polluting their space
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)
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.”
just saw this comment
I love how comments there can have pictures in them, unlike TikTok. Someone posts dog and they get a dog tax paid stamp in reply
The dog/cat tax paid stamp is killing me
TikTok has been experimenting with that feature lately, only a few people have it right now for testing but you’ll see them sometimes
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…
As the redditors pissed about this love to cite… It’s the Streisand Effect.
Redditors are pissed about this? Oh god I need to see this, I need to taste their tears.
I finally started getting my verification codes. Like, hours later. It’s an improvement.
maybe the servers will recover and it’ll work again
Yeah, I’m going to give it a few days before I try again.
Still haven’t gotten any
Omg I thought it was my carrier or something!
Nah servers are cooked because of all the signups. Like, I’ve heard the app went from like 0-1% English speaking users to now 5-10% in the last 48 hours. It’s a really significant number of Americans joining.
Mark my words, if the Supreme Court finds out about this, they’re overturning the Tiktok ban immediately.
I’ve posted the top one before myself but this rings a bit not entirely true as in the whole story.
They’re not a Chinese propaganda op and may have US spies but undeniably they had waaaay less censorship of Palestine, Gaza, the genocide, anti-zionism than all of Zuckerworld. Same I hear with Luigi stuff. So they might be gathering data but they’re not controlling it as tightly as Zuck-world controls theirs or most western social media.
More importantly I think it’s about destroying competition. The US took out Japan, a capitalist vassal with the Plaza accords, they work like the mafia and it’s unacceptable to have something they don’t fully own and control existing and being successful.
I downloaded the app but the UI is in Chinese
to change it to english to have to click the bottom left option on the home page, then click on the gear which takes you to settings, then the other gear, then the top option and then you can select english
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)
One very funny statistic for now
Is Lemon8 the app for organizing lemon parties
It’s ByteDance’s Instagram clone that they’re trying to get people to use as a lifeboat, despite the fact that if the law is upheld Lemon8 probably disappears too.
It’s ByteDance’s image based app, for people who don’t want to doomscroll short form videos and just doomscroll still images/landscapes/image macros instead.
Shhhhh
like another commentor said, any amount of americans being exposed to chinese culture is a positive.
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?
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.
For me it just says Poland but in Chinese
i’m in taiwan and it says 中國臺灣
doesn’t make a difference to meit’s just an ip lookup
It tells people you’re posting from Taiwan, which will earn you extra mockery when people see that
How well would this even work given how many Chinese people use VPNs
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.
It says Beijing. Probably just the geolocation of the IP address.
Oof, nah, I’ll pass
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.
Ah, no, that’s a lot better. Show me as a cracker, I’ll give that part away myself anyway
hhhhhhh美帝白狗，你会吃白人饭吗？去吃火腿三明治。
If u get mocked on Chinese Social Media then you must’ve done something to deserve it, folks honestly are really nice
The lunch of suffering.
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
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.
that says “Beijing” so I’m assuming it’s saying the IP is from beijing.
I tried to make an account months ago to practice Chinese, but it didn’t work because of the verification texts. Let me know if someone has strats to make it more likely to go thru.
It came through instantly for me, maybe because I’ve done it when yanks were eepy
I just tried every hour or so and eventually got one
i can’t help because the verification doesn’t wori for me, but it’s really cool to see
