Indian Social Media Influencers In China - Vlogging As A Means To Combat 'Ve Log'ing (Othering)

I'd like to ring in the New Year on a positive and hopeful note.

It's no secret to those who know me that I would like to see India and China come closer together. Politically, I would like the two countries to be trusted allies and to face a hostile world together (No prizes for guessing which antagonistic power bloc I'm referring to). On a people-to-people basis, I would particularly like for Indians to shed their negative attitudes and prejudices towards the Chinese, and to recognise them as people like themselves.

I'm therefore gratified to see popular Youtube channels by Indian vloggers living in China and married to Chinese people. They're not celebrities, just ordinary people, and that's what makes their stories so interesting and relatable. The detailed documentation of their daily lives gives their audiences an intimate look into life in China, and the featured interactions with family members and friends provide an interesting picture of contemporary Chinese society.

I've selected two in particular. One is a guy from Himachal Pradesh called Ravi Bhardwaj, who seems to be a professional Yoga teacher. The other is a lady from Rajasthan called Ruchi (surname and profession unknown). Both have been living in China for a few years, and are married to Chinese people. Each couple has a young child.

Top: A scene from "Ruchi in China". Bottom: A scene from "Indian in China".

Ravi Bhardwaj mainly speaks in Hindi. His channel is rather unimaginatively called "Indian in China".

Here's a sample videoclip from his channnel:

Ruchi's channel is called "Ruchi in China" (a slight improvement over "Indian in China"). She speaks in a mixture of Hindi and English.

This is a sample videoclip from her channel:

The word "vlog" in this context reminded me of the Hindi वे लोग ve log ("those people"). Indians tend to know little about the Chinese, and their (negative) attitudes towards Chinese people are overly influenced by political events such as the simmering border dispute between the two countries and the prevalent narrative on the Indian side that portrays the Chinese as treacherous and untrustworthy.

Having lived in Australia for almost a quarter century now, and having made many good Chinese friends, I can see that the Indian view of the Chinese is baseless and highly distorted. The "othering" of the Chinese people can potentially be counteracted by channels like these, where Indian viewers can be introduced to ordinary Chinese people through the eyes of other Indians like themselves.

It's entirely possible, by the way, that these channels are not completely independent individual initiatives but receive some degree of support from the Chinese government. The amount of travelling these people do suggests that there is a hidden source of funding and direction. However, I don't see that as a disqualification. Cultural outreach is fair play, and it's in a good cause to boot. The stream of images, voices and situations that Indian viewers get exposed to is far preferable to the information vacuum in which a one-sided mainstream media narrative has been playing out all these years. I believe that India today is sleepwalking into a defence and foreign policy nightmare thanks in large part to media brainwashing about China that sabotages trust before it can even take root. If at least some Indians begin to shake off that conditioning and start to explore their neighbouring country for themselves, it could lead to a more peaceful and cooperative tomorrow.

And so, as New Year's Eve approaches, I raise a toast to these vloggers and say 干杯! gānbēi! ("Cheers!"). The bridges they're helping to build are no less important than the steel-and-concrete ones of the BRI.

An Apt Near-Homophone - 1 (Wolf Warrior Actor 吴京 Wú Jīng And The Word For Armed Police 武警 Wǔ Jǐng)

I stumbled upon a sentence that referred to the armed police, and found that the word was 武警 Wǔ Jǐng.

Something about it sounded very familiar, so I looked up the name of the main lead and director of the Wolf Warrior movies.

Sure enough, it was a close homophone, only differing in tone - 吴京 Wú Jīng.

How about that? A guy who plays a commando has a name that sounds like "armed police". [It would have been even better if 吴京 Wú Jīng had played the role of Captain Xing Kelei in You Are My Hero, since that character was a SWAT police officer.]

I'm sure I'll come across many more such examples, so I'm making this post the first of a series.

The Thrill Of Being Able To Read Chinese "In The Wild"

One of my major pastimes nowadays is watching videos on China's High Speed Rail. I've lost "track" of the number of videos I've watched. I find them hypnotically soothing. Call me a nerd, but infrastructure development is a topic that gives me enormous joy.

This one on the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed rail link is one of my favourites. It's from Russia Today, and unlike the mostly fault-finding slant of typical Western media reporting on China, the tone of this documentary is refreshingly positive.

This video on the building of the Nairobi-Mombasa rail link in Kenya is another great one. China is making a real difference to the developing world, notwithstanding the smear campaigns on "debt trap diplomacy" (which have been debunked, by the way.)

Another of the videos I watched recently showed how rail tracks are actually laid. Previously, the process was manual, and could only lay 500 m of track every day even with scores of workers. Nowadays, with the process semi-automated, 2 km of tracks can be laid a day with only 20 technicians.

As the camera panned over the scene, I saw some Chinese characters come into view on the screen and almost subconsciously read them aloud - 安全第一 ānquán dì yī ("Safety first").

Such a thrill! I wasn't expecting to be able to make sense of anything, since most of the text I had seen until that point had a large number of unfamiliar characters. This just crept up on me, and I was myself taken aback that I could make sense of it at once.

[You may recall from a previous post that the character 安 ān means "safe", and the ideograph has the glyph 女 nǚ ("woman") under a roof. "Woman under roof" means "safe" in Chinese. That's cute and sad at the same time. The character 一 yī is probably the simplest Chinese character to learn, and means "one". 第一 dì yī means "first".]

OCD Rant - 1 (下 Xià And 上 Shàng)

Chinese is a remarkably logical and consistent language, perhaps the best-behaved of all the languages I've studied.

Yet there are a few quirks here and there that irritate me, and I'll document those as I go along.

The first one is about 下 xià (down) and 上 shàng (up).

下 xià is nice and logical. There's a frame of reference - a horizontal baseline and a vertical "wall", and then there's a downward stroke that unambiguously denotes "down".

So far, so good. Let's now see what the Chinese character for "up" is.

It's 上 shàng.

OK, it's got the horizontal baseline, and it's at the bottom. Very good. It also has the vertical "wall". Excellent. Now for the upward stroke, right?

Oh no, how disappointing! It's a horizontal stroke, not an upward stroke. Now this is going to irritate me throughout my life whenever I transact in Chinese. Part of my mind is going to keep striking at that horizontal stroke from below in a vain attempt to get it to point upwards.

And the tone could have been upwards too (sháng).

This is what I think it should have been:

I don't think I'm being unreasonable in my expectation. You know what the Chinese word for table-tennis is, right? It's 乒乓 pīngpāng ("ping-pong"). Notice how the two characters are almost exactly the same, but the stroke below is leftwards for pīng and rightwards for pāng?

Why not do that for "up" and "down" then?

Grrr!

Why BUPA Needn't Have Been Afraid Of Biting The Wax Tadpole

We've all heard the apocryphal story of how, when Coca-Cola first went to China, the Chinese characters they used to spell the brand name turned out to mean "Bite the wax tadpole". Thereafter, the company changed the Chinese rendering of their brand name somewhat (to 可口可乐 kě kǒu kě lè), which means "let the mouth rejoice", or literally "can mouth can happy".

Recently, while watching a Chinese movie, I heard one of the characters say, "I'm not afraid", and this gave me a terrific idea.

[Aside: That movie ("A Beautiful Life") was a tear-jerker, by the way. Don't watch it. I made the mistake of thinking it was a rom-com and was blindsided by the unending series of bad things that happen to good people. I like movies where bad things happen to bad people. Note to self - never watch movies with unusually cheery titles.

On second thoughts, the movie wasn't actually that bad. Maybe you might like it. But keep a tissue box handy.]

What the character said in Mandarin was, "我不怕 wǒ bù pà", literally "I not afraid".

I immediately thought of the insurance company BUPA (originally an acronym for British United Provident Association).

Why, BUPA could just go to China without changing anything about their brand name. Isn't "Not afraid" a terrific name for an insurance company?

Afraid of risk? Buy a policy from the Not Afraid insurance company and you don't need to be afraid anymore.

But as my research showed, BUPA in China is known by a different set of characters - 保柏 bǎo bǎi. 保 bǎo means "insurance", which is not bad, but 柏 bǎi means "cedar" or "cypress", which doesn't mean anything related to insurance.

Don't you think my idea (the second row of text) is better?

I wonder why they didn't just go with that.

[Whenever I start learning a foreign language, the wordplay puns popping up in my head give me lots of ideas for creative ad copy, such as my idea for a Bessemer ad in German: "Gut. Besser. Bessemer." (Good. Better. Bessemer.) Ad agencies should hire me as a creative consultant.]

High-Speed Rail - China's Secret Weapon In The Economic Race

Much has been written about China's economic miracle. Lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty into the middle class in a single generation is a feat unprecedented in human history. The recent claim of having eliminated extreme poverty, if valid, is another remarkable milestone.

China continues to grow, and its current efforts to address the inequalities created by its past decades of uneven growth are worth watching. If successful, it would be a model worth emulating by the rest of the world, especially since the failures of both Communism and Capitalism have by now become obvious. "Socialism with Chinese characteristics" may be the economic model of the future.

It's a well known fact that over the past forty years since Deng Xiaoping's economic liberalisation, the provinces on China's eastern seaboard have developed at a much faster pace than the interior. The inequalities in wealth between urban and rural regions, and between coastal and interior provinces, have become a source of potential social conflict, one which the Chinese government is anxious to address. The Belt and Road Initiative is a means to provide better connectivity to interior provinces and thereby spur their development over the next thirty to forty year period. As this wonderfully insightful article by the Lowy Institute describes, there are several drivers, both internal and geo-economic, for the BRI, and if that initiative succeeds, it would have solved more than one problem at the same time.

As one who has studied China with great interest over the past few years, I believe that a crucial element of the country's development strategy is a certain technology, one that has hitherto never been deployed on such a scale anywhere in the world.

That technology is high-speed rail (HSR), and the Chinese government is betting on the multiplier effect that it will have on its economy.

Upon some analysis, I believe this expectation is justified. I created this simple chart to explain why.

There has traditionally been a speed-economy trade-off in the transport sector. Airplanes can get people and goods from place to place faster than any other mode of transport, but air travel is not cheap. At the other end of the scale, trains (and other modes of bulk surface transport) are affordable, but take much longer to connect places together.

Economists often draw a line to indicate the trade-offs inherent in a given portfolio of choices. In investment finance, such a line is called an "efficient frontier". In this chart of the transport sector, the efficient frontier could be thought of as representing a certain generation of technology.

What high-speed rail does is shift the efficient frontier outwards. High-speed rail is emphatically not on the old efficient frontier defined by the existing options of surface and air transport. High-speed rail is much faster than conventional surface transport, and much cheaper than air transport. While it's not quite the best of both worlds (i.e., as fast as air transport and as cheap as conventional rail), it is still a sufficient advancement to represent the next generation in transportation technology, one whose enhanced efficiency can rejuvenate slowing economic growth.

[Even this can change in the near future. The first-generation HSR 和谐号 héxié hào (Harmony) was capable of 350 kmph (operating speed 280 kmph). The second generation 复兴号 fùxīng hào (Rejuvenation) touched 420 kmph (operating speed 350 kmph). Future generations of HSR will probably start to approach aircraft speeds, and at far lower costs. High-speed rail would then be clearly superior to air travel with no trade-off at all.]

I believe that thanks to the aggressive rollout of high-speed railway lines throughout the country (a planned doubling of track length by 2035), the Chinese economy, far from slowing down, is going to continue to grow at a high rate for many years into the future. The less developed interior provinces, specifically Xinjiang, Tibet, Gansu, Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, Qinghai, Sichuan and Yunnan, which have hitherto not had high-speed rail connectivity, will see a boost to their economic growth.

If I were a student of economics wishing to do a doctorate in the area of developmental economics, I cannot think of a more exciting topic than the study of how high-speed rail acts as an economic multiplier to spur growth, and additionally, as a means to balance that growth by pulling far-flung regions into a tighter economic sphere.

High-speed rail is China's secret weapon that can enable it to leapfrog the West in prosperity within 10 to 15 years. The technology has the potential to (1) sustain China's breakneck pace of growth and avoid the "middle-income trap", (2) alleviate the imbalance in regional development and solve the problem of widening inequality that other countries are struggling with, and (3) make China a much more efficient and competitive economic engine, entrenching it in every other's nation's economy.

谢谢, 多邻国! Xiè Xie, Duō Lín Guó! (Thank You, Duolingo!)

I started learning Mandarin through Duolingo on 21 June 2021. Almost exactly 5 months later, on 20 November 2021, I completed all 88 lessons in the course, and 6 levels in each lesson.

Thank you, Duolingo! It's been an incredible learning experience, and I'm immensely grateful.

What next?

Well, I'm going to keep practising the lessons on Duolingo. The spaced repetition algorithm used by the app is a scientifically proven way to get a language into one's long-term memory, so this would be a great safety net to ensure I don't forget what I've learnt.

Of course, I have a few other resources that I will now pay more attention to, to continue to progress with my language learning. Du Chinese is an obvious one. I haven't been spending enough time on Du Chinese for a while, since Duolingo has been taking up about 2 hours of my time every day. With that effort easing up, I can devote more time to Du Chinese and to other online resources that I find on the web. I will post about any interesting ones I find as I go along.

One other interesting thing I've done is download the full set of words that Duolingo covers in its course. Some good souls have made this publicly available as a spreadsheet here.

Being an IT person with some database skills, I loaded this word list into a PostgreSQL database on my computer. The following steps may be useful to anyone who wants to slice and dice the data in ways that a simple spreadsheet cannot do.

create table t_temp
(
hanzi varchar(100) not null,
pinyin varchar(100) not null,
toneless_roman varchar(100),
meaning text
);

The PostgreSQL command to load a CSV-formatted spreadsheet with four columns into the above table looks like this (assuming one has saved the spreadsheet into a CSV file with semicolons as delimiters instead of commas).

\COPY t_temp from t_temp.csv CSV HEADER DELIMITER ';';

Once the data is loaded, here's the neat thing you can do. Use the column 'toneless_roman' to hold the romanised pronunciation of each word - without the diacritical marks that represent the tones. I'll show you why in a moment.

begin transaction;

update t_temp set toneless_roman = pinyin;

update t_temp set toneless_roman = replace( toneless_roman, 'ā', 'a' );
update t_temp set toneless_roman = replace( toneless_roman, 'á', 'a' );
update t_temp set toneless_roman = replace( toneless_roman, 'ǎ', 'a' );
update t_temp set toneless_roman = replace( toneless_roman, 'à', 'a' );

update t_temp set toneless_roman = replace( toneless_roman, 'ē', 'e' );
update t_temp set toneless_roman = replace( toneless_roman, 'é', 'e' );
update t_temp set toneless_roman = replace( toneless_roman, 'ě', 'e' );
update t_temp set toneless_roman = replace( toneless_roman, 'è', 'e' );

update t_temp set toneless_roman = replace( toneless_roman, 'ī', 'i' );
update t_temp set toneless_roman = replace( toneless_roman, 'í', 'i' );
update t_temp set toneless_roman = replace( toneless_roman, 'ǐ', 'i' );
update t_temp set toneless_roman = replace( toneless_roman, 'ì', 'i' );

update t_temp set toneless_roman = replace( toneless_roman, 'ō', 'o' );
update t_temp set toneless_roman = replace( toneless_roman, 'ó', 'o' );
update t_temp set toneless_roman = replace( toneless_roman, 'ǒ', 'o' );
update t_temp set toneless_roman = replace( toneless_roman, 'ò', 'o' );

update t_temp set toneless_roman = replace( toneless_roman, 'ū', 'u' );
update t_temp set toneless_roman = replace( toneless_roman, 'ú', 'u' );
update t_temp set toneless_roman = replace( toneless_roman, 'ǔ', 'u' );
update t_temp set toneless_roman = replace( toneless_roman, 'ù', 'u' );

commit;

Now you can run neat queries like this, which shows you all words that are pronounced "shi", whether the exact tonal pronunciation is shī, shí, shǐ or shì.

And this query is even more useful, because it can show you all words that contain any variant of "shi".

I'm going to be spending a lot of time mulling over the words I've learnt through Duolingo, and quite a bit of that rumination is going to involve SQL queries on these four columns to discover the semantic connections between words. In spite of its tremendous usefulness, Duolingo only provides the main meaning of each word, not its etymology or the literal meanings of compound words. I've posted earlier about some of the fascinating meanings I've discovered, and I'm sure my SQL database will help me discover many more.

Best of all, my database will continue to grow even beyond the vocabulary provided by Duolingo, and I hope to use this as a learning aid indefinitely.

I will post about all the insights I gain from my explorations in this blog, of course.

But for now, 非常感谢，多邻国 fēicháng gǎnxiè, duō lín guó ("Thank you very much, Duolingo").

The Simplicity Of Chinese Grammar - 8 (Figuring Out Where The "Brackets" Go)

A sentence I recently came across on Duolingo confused me for a while, until I realised there was a very simple and basic rule that I should have used to interpret it. It's like knowing where the brackets go when evaluating a mathematical expression.

But before I talk about the sentence, let me provide an advance hint about the grammatical rule I should have used.

There are two ways a question can be posed in Chinese. One is with the toneless 吗 ma particle at the end of an assertive statement, the other is by immediately following the verb by its negative.

Example:

1. 你 是 中国人 吗？nǐ shì zhōngguórén ma? ("Are you Chinese?", literally "You are Chinese person (question particle)")

2. 你 是不是 中国人？ nǐ shìbùshì zhōngguórén? ("Are you Chinese?", literally "You are-not-are Chinese person")

Another example:

1. 你 有 钱 吗？nǐ yǒu qián ma? ("Do you have money?", literally "You have money (question particle)")

2. 你 有没有 钱？nǐ yǒuméiyǒu qián? ("Do you have money?", literally "You have-not-have money")

Remember these two styles of asking a question as I tell you about the sentence I came across on Duolingo.

有没有风险的投资吗？yǒu méiyǒu fēngxiǎn de tóuzī ma?

风险 fēngxiǎn means "risk", and 投资 tóuzī means "investment".

Duolingo's translation was "Is there a risk-free investment?"

I was puzzled. To my mind, this seemed to be asking the very opposite question, "Is there or is there not a risky investment?"

After a long time scratching my head, I realised that I was placing the "brackets" wrongly around the words in this sentence.

This is what I was doing, and I was wrong.

(有没有) (风险 的 投资) 吗？(yǒuméiyǒu) (fēngxiǎn de tóuzī) ma? ("Is there a risky investment?", literally "(Have-not-have) (a risky investment) (question particle)")

But the presence of the 吗 ma at the end should have alerted me to the rule that this was the first style of question, not the second. If languages could use brackets like mathematics, that would be a good way to show which words need to be grouped together. This was how I should have used the "brackets" on this sentence:

有 [ (没有 风险 的) 投资 ] 吗？yǒu [ (méiyǒu fēngxiǎn de) tóuzī ] ma? ("Is there an investment not having risk?", literally "Have a [ (not-have-risk) investment ] (question particle)")

In other words, the correct way to parse this sentence is not "Have you or have you not a risky investment?" but "Have you an investment not having risk?". The "have not" refers to the investment having a risk, not to the broker having such an investment.

What at first seemed to be a confusing sentence turned out to make perfect sense. I had simply forgotten a very basic rule I had learnt early on.

But what if I had in fact wanted to ask if there was a risky investment?

Why, then I should simply drop the 吗 ma from the end of the sentence! Then the 有没有 yǒuméiyǒu ("Have-not-have") would go together.

2. 有没有 风险 的 投资？yǒuméiyǒu fēngxiǎn de tóuzī?

In other words, this would be (有没有) (风险 的 投资)？(yǒuméiyǒu) (fēngxiǎn de tóuzī)? ("Is there a risky investment?", literally "Have-not-have risky investment")

Or I could use the simpler first style, keeping the 吗 ma and dropping the negative-verb 没有 méiyǒu.

1. 有 风险 的 投资 吗？yǒu fēngxiǎn de tóuzī ma? ("Is there a risky investment?", literally "Have risky investment (question particle)")

The Simplicity Of Chinese Grammar - 7 (Reliably Stable Building Blocks)

I should have posted on this topic a long time ago, but better late than never.

It's fashionable to say that learning Chinese is hard, but I have found it easy right from the start. And that's because its grammar is both simple and logical.

Just take these two simple sentences in English, for example.

1. I love her

2. She loves me

They look very simple to a native speaker of English, but look at these two sentences again from the perspective of a student who knows no English at all.

Notice that when the pronoun changes from being the subject to being the object, it changes form to an unrecognisable extent.

"I" becomes "me". "She" becomes "her".

Notice also that the verb changes slightly.

When the subject is in the singular, the verb is "loves". When the subject is in the plural, the verb becomes "love". And there's an exception too! The subject "I" is singular, but the verb needs to treat it as plural, hence "I love" rather than "I loves".

So many rules and exceptions! They're really hard to remember for a new student of the language.

Now look at the corresponding statements in Mandarin.

1. 我 爱 她 wǒ ài tā ("I love her", literally "I love she")

2. 她 爱 我 tā ài wǒ ("She loves me", literally "She love I")

There is no change in the pronoun regardless of the case in which it is used. And there is no change in the form of the verb regardless of the number or gender of the subject. Check it out:

a. 他 爱 我 tā ài wǒ ("He loves me", literally "He love I"). There's no change to the verb when the gender of the subject changes.

b. 他们 爱 我 tāmen ài wǒ ("They love me", literally "They love I"). There's no change to the verb when the number of the subject changes.

How can one not find this a simple language to learn??

As one of my latest Duolingo lessons averred,

我 觉得 中文 的 语法 不 太 难 wǒ juédé zhōngwén de yǔfǎ bù tài nán ("I think Chinese grammar is not too difficult")

I had no difficulty agreeing with that statement.

Those Pesky Exceptions!

Exceptions to the rules of spelling, pronunciation and grammar are the bane of every language learner. English is particularly horrendous in having no relationship between how words are spelt and pronounced. Thankfully, English is more sensible than many other languages in the way it approaches gender. Hindi and French have two irrational genders. German has three, and randomly allocates genders to nouns without regard to biology. "Das Mädchen" (the girl) belongs to the neuter gender!

So far, I have found a refreshing consistency in pronunciation and grammar in Mandarin, but I have lately come across a few exceptions.

1. 得 is pronounced either dé or déi, depending on context.

a. 你 在说 得 太快 nǐ zài shuō dé tài kuài ("You're speaking too fast")

b. 我 得 买 票 wǒ déi mǎi piào ("I have to buy a ticket")

In fact, it's not just the pronunciation that changes. It's the meaning too.

2. 长 is pronounced either cháng or zhǎng, depending on context

This isn't actually too bad. When used as an adjective ("long"), 长 is pronounced cháng. When used as a verb ("to grow"), it's pronounced zhǎng.

a. 这条 裙子 太长 了 zhè tiáo qúnzi tài cháng le ("This skirt is too long")

b. 孩子 长 得 真快！háizi zhǎng dé zhēn kuài! ("Children grow up so fast!")

3. 了 can be pronounced either le or liǎo, depending on context

This is a bit more annoying, since a reader tends to read 了 as le most of the time, and would have to read ahead to the next character to understand that it's actually pronounced liǎo.

a. 我 忘记 了! wǒ wàngjì le! ("I forgot!")

b. 你 不 了解 我！nǐ bù liǎojiě wǒ! ("You don't understand me!")

4. 行 can be pronounced either xíng or háng, depending on context

This one is really annoying, because it's one of those exceptions one absolutely has to commit to memory.

a. 自行车 zìxíngchē (bicycle)

b. 银行 yínháng (bank)

5. 和 is pronounced either hé or huo, depending on context

a. 和 hé (with)

b. 暖和 nuǎnhuo (warm)

A Wasted Ideographical Opportunity

Over the last few months, I have seen several amazing examples of Chinese ideographs that perfectly captured an idea with just a few strokes.

But last week, I came across a character that seemed to me to be entirely misapplied. It would have been just perfect to describe something else. I suspect the original person who thought of the ideograph did intend to use it correctly, but later unimaginative scholars couldn't see the obvious picture it was evoking, and applied it wrongly to another concept.

The character is 笔 bǐ, and against all my instincts, it means "pen".

To me, the character screams "scorpion". Just look at it!

How can something that so obviously looks like a scorpion (two pincers/pedipalps, six legs, and a tail) be used to mean something completely unrelated? It makes no sense to me.

I'm actually a bit upset at the waste. 我 很 难过 wǒ hěn nánguò.

I console myself with a mnemonic. The pronunciation of the character 笔 ("bǐ") happens to be the first syllable of the Hindi word बिच्छू bichchhu, which means scorpion. And it also sounds like "Bic", which is a brand of pen.

China dropped the ball there, and India picked it up for half a point.

The Mandarin Equivalent Of There, Their And They're

So to add to the confusion of homophones in Mandarin, one of the most common sounds has three different characters with different meanings.

The best explanation I could find on the net was from the TutorMing site.

I'm going to repeat the salient points here, but with some changes in terminology that I hope will make things a bit easier to understand.

There are three characters that are pronounced "de" (no tone, but with one exception I will come to later). They are 的, 得 and 地.

Broadly speaking,

A. 的 de qualifies nouns

B. 得 de qualifies verbs

C. 地 de qualifies adjectives

There may be more than one way to qualify a noun, a verb, or an adjective, so let's look at that next.

A1. 的 de as a possessive qualifier for nouns (See my previous post on this):

我 的 书 wǒ de shū ("my book")

A2. 的 de as an attributive qualifier for nouns:

a. 红色 的 书 hóngsè de shū ("red book", literally "red colour-ed book")

b. 英文 说 的 人 yīngwén shuō de rén ("English-speaking people", literally "English speak-ing people")

B1. 得 de as an adverbial qualifier for verbs:

a. 他 说 中文 得 很好 tā shuō zhōngwén de hěn hǎo ("He speaks Chinese (de) very well")

This adverbial qualifier can also be attached to comparisons:

b. 冬天 里 北京 比 上海 冷 得 多 dōngtiān lǐ běijīng bǐ shànghǎi lěng de duō ("In winter, Beijing is much colder than Shanghai", literally "In winter, Beijing compared to Shanghai cold (de) much").

B2. 得 déi as a "must" qualifier for verbs:

我们 得 买 票 wǒmen déi mǎi piào ("We must buy tickets"). Here, 得 is actually pronounced déi, not de

C. 地 de as an adverbial qualifier for adjectives:

她 高兴 地 笑 了 tā gāoxìng de xiào le ("She smiled happily", literally, "She happy (de) smiled")

As an exercise for myself, I thought up three ways to say the same thing, using each of the three "de"s:

1. 我 能 说 流利 的 中文 wǒ néng shuō liúlì de zhōngwén ("I can speak fluent Chinese")

2. 我 能 说 中文 得 流利 wǒ néng shuō zhōngwén dé liúlì ("I can speak Chinese fluently")

3. 我 能 流利 地 说 中文 wǒ néng liúlì de shuō zhōngwén ("I can speak Chinese fluently")

Seeing Double-le

Duolingo lately introduced me to the use of the toneless particle 了 le twice in a single sentence.

Of course, I had come across sentences with two occurences of 了 le before, such as

我 吃 了 太多 饺子 了 wǒ chī le tài duō jiǎozi le ("I have eaten too many dumplings")

But the second use of 了 le when combined with 太 tài means "too much of" something, so that doesn't really count. E.g., 太 贵 了！ tài guì le! ("Too expensive!")

The kind of double-le sentence Duolingo meant was something like this:

我 这里 工作 了 十年 了 wǒ zhèlǐ gōngzuò le shí nián le ("I have worked here for 10 years")

Notice that the second part of the sentence 十年 了 shí nián le ("for 10 years") changes the implied tense of the first.

If we had just said,

我 去年 这里 工作 了 wǒ qùnián zhèlǐ gōngzuò le ("I worked here last year")

that would have been the simple past tense. Adding 十年 了 shí nián le ("for 10 years") changes the implied tense of the verb from "I worked" to "I have worked".

Here's a slightly more complex example.

我 等 你 等 了 一个 小时 了 wǒ děng nǐ děng le yīgè xiǎoshí le ("I have been waiting for you for an hour")

The first 了 le qualifies the verb 等 děng ("wait"), while the second 了 le qualifies the time 一个 小时 yīgè xiǎoshí ("one hour"), changing the implied tense from "I waited" to "I have been waiting".

[Aside:

Notice also that the verb 等 děng ("wait") is repeated, which seems to happen with transitive verbs. I had written about this before. To qualify the verb, you first use it along with its object, then repeat the verb alone without the object and suffix it with a 了 le.

我 等 你 等 了 一个 小时 了 wǒ děng nǐ děng le yīgè xiǎoshí le (literally, "I wait you wait (le) one hour (le)")

I suspect that transitive verbs and their objects have a very strong "electrostatic" bond in Chinese, which often renders them as a single word. You never just say 吃 chī ("eat"); you always say 吃饭 chīfàn ("eat rice") or use some other food object as part of the compond verb. Free-floating transitive verbs are like ions. They're never found alone, because their charge strongly attracts and binds them to objects with the opposite charge. You have to explicitly "ionise apart" the two components to be able to qualify the verb alone.

我 跑步 跑 得 很 快 wǒ pǎobù pǎo dé hěn kuài ("I run fast", literally "I run steps run (adverb indicator) (connector) fast"). The two words in 跑步 pǎobù (literally "run steps") always go together and masquerade as a single instransitive verb "to run" -- until you need to qualify it in some way. Then the actual verb 跑 pǎo has to be repeated separately for that purpose.

End aside]

Emojis Were Invented By The Chinese!

I just discovered something mind-blowing. Emojis (or rather emoticons, since these are strictly speaking just text) were invented by the Chinese centuries ago!

Just take a look at the characters for smile/laugh (笑 xiào) and for cry (哭 kū).

Two Sides To The Story (面 miàn and 边 biān)

I noticed something interesting about the way directions and sides are named in Mandarin.

Some of them have the suffix 面 miàn and some have the suffix 边 biān.

Examples of 面 miàn:

前面 qiánmiàn ("in front")

后面 hòumiàn ("behind")

里面 lǐmiàn ("inside")

外面 wàimiàn ("outside")

Examples of 边 biān:

旁边 pángbiān ("beside")

左边 zuǒbiān ("on the left")

右边 yòubiān ("on the right")

上边 shàngbiān ("on top")

下边 xiàbiān ("below")

北边 běibiān ("to the north")

南边 nánbiān ("to the south")

东边 dōngbiān ("to the east")

西边 xībiān ("to the west")

So why are certain directions or sides suffixed with 面 miàn and others suffixed with 边 biān?

A good explanation I found was on chinese.stackexchange.com. To reproduce it here (colouring mine):

To understand the differences properly, you need to know what is 面 and what is 边. 面 is a face whereas 边 is an edge. An edge is like a line guiding you [about] the direction. A face is what is facing you giving you a sense of position.

前/后面 is used to describe the position of something within your visual range. Whereas, 前/后边 is more appropriately used to describe something beyond visual range when giving directions.

镜子前面 (in front of the mirror) vs 车站前边 (beyond that bus stop in front)

外/里面 is used to describe location of an object in relation to another object. 外/里边 is used strictly for giving directions.

书包里面 (inside the school bag) vs 巷子里边 (in that alley)

左/右面 is used mainly to point to the left or right face of an object. 左/右边 is used to describe left or right side directions.

墙的左面 (on the left face of that wall) vs 车道左边 (left side of the roadway)

In summary, when you are giving directions, use 边; when you are describing positions, use 面.

I also found other explanations to the effect that the two terms were interchangeable, and it was more a case of regional preference (North China versus South China, or Mainland China versus Taiwan).

I'm not sure which explanation to believe, so I'm going to be conservative and stick to whatever Duolingo taught me, which is the initial list I provided.

My Latest Duolingo Milestones

I just crossed Checkpoint 3 on Duolingo (62 out of 88 lessons)...

... and coincidentally completed a 100 day unbroken streak.

Zǒng, The Cute Alien Monster

Learning a language with a non-Roman script provides an added layer of stimulation. I wouldn't exactly call it intellectual stimulation, since it's more often a case of juvenile amusement.

Here's one of the recent characters I came across:

总 zǒng ("total").

When used in a word like 总是 zǒng shì, it means "always". Duolingo's example was topical.

为什么 你 总是 看 手机 wèishéme nǐ zǒngshì kàn shǒujī ("Why do you always look at your phone?")

My mind was elsewhere. The character instantly conjured up a picture of a cute alien monster with antennae and a tail.

I don't know how good my Chinese is going to be, but I'm enjoying the ride and smelling the roses along the way. The méiguīs from planet Zonguo do smell xiāng.

"Four Eyes" Takes On A Whole New Meaning In Mandarin

When Duolingo introduced the word 眼镜 yǎnjìng ("glasses"), I was surprised and confused. Hadn't I learnt this word before, and didn't it mean "eyes"?

I went back and looked up the vocabulary list that I maintain. Sure enough, the word for eyes was the same - almost.

眼睛 yǎnjīng was the word for "eyes" that I had learnt before. It differed from 眼镜 yǎnjìng ("glasses") only in the second character, and when pronounced, in the tone of the second syllable.

If you use the first (high) tone, it means "eyes". If you use the fourth (falling) tone, it means "glasses".

It drives home to me afresh why tones are so important in Mandarin. Can you imagine the bemused looks on people's faces if you tell them, "I seem to have misplaced my eyes. Have you seen them anywhere?"

你 看见 我 的 眼睛 了 吗？nǐ kànjiàn wǒ de yǎnjīng le ma? ("Have you seen my eyes?")

你 看见 我 的 眼镜 了 吗？nǐ kànjiàn wǒ de yǎnjìng le ma? ("Have you seen my glasses?")

"Ya" Gotta Be Kidding!

This is too much of a coincidence. Look at the shape of the characters in Mandarin and Russian that are both pronounced "Ya".

The Mandarin 牙 yá means "tooth", while the Russian я "ya" means "I". I'd give my "I-tooth" to know how these two similar-looking characters came to share the same pronunciation.

You reckon the long Siberian border between Russia and China had something to do with it?

Learning Chinese Idioms Through TV Serials - 1 ("You Are My Hero")

[Spoiler alert: Some elements of the story may be given away by this post.]

Many Chinese serials are available on the Rakuten Viki website as well as on Youku. Which site is better? Well, I've found that they each have their advantages and disadvantages.

The topic of this post is Chinese idioms that I have been learning by watching TV serials.

These samples are from the utterly adorable serial called 你 是 我 的 城市 营垒 nǐ shì wǒ de chéngshì yínglěi (literally "You Are My City Fortress"), with the English title of "You Are My Hero".

1. Episode 2: The heroine Mi Ka wants to help her friend Xiaoman get treatment abroad for her cancer, but the cost is becoming a serious constraint. She despairs, and her other friend Ruan Qingxia cheers her up with a well-known Chinese saying.

"When we get to the mountain, there'll be a way through" is Viki's translation.

Youku's translation is a rhyme ("In the end, things will mend"), but it also helpfully provides the original Chinese saying in Hanzi:

车 到 山 前 必 有 路 chē dào shān qián bì yǒu lù ("When the car arrives in front of the mountain, there must be a road")

2. Episode 21: The hero's friend Lu Fang gives him the idea of taking his girlfriend to a hill resort for her birthday, but when he then requests the hero to invite along a girl he (Lu Fang) likes so he can court her, he is refused. He then calls out the hero for his ingratitude.

"Don't hit the monk after you finish reciting scriptures" is Viki's translation, along with a helpful explanation of the idiom.

Youku has a looser English translation of what the character actually said ("You are kicking down the ladder (after using it)"), since the Chinese subtitles show that the character is referring to a monk (尚 shàng) and scriptures (经 jīng). [I have my doubts about the accuracy of Viki's English translation too, since 你 念 完 经 不要 和尚 啊 你 nǐ niàn wán jīng bùyào héshàng a nǐ seems to translate to "Don't be a monk after you have chanted".]

3. Episode 24: The girl shown (Xu Yanshan) submits a prizewinning thesis at her department, but also sabotages the thesis of her colleague Mi Ka, and is caught out doing so. Her superior then chastises her for needlessly impacting her own career with this unethical act when she was going to win the competition anyway.

Viki's translation offers another Chinese idiom "To add feet when drawing a snake" ("To do something superfluous that ruins something good").

As before, Youku has a looser translation of what was actually said, but its Chinese subtitles show that Viki's English translation was accurate. 只可惜 你 做了 画 蛇 添 足 的 事情 zhǐ kěxí nǐ zuòle huà shé tiān zú de shìqíng, literally "Unfortunately you did the business of drawing a snake to add feet")

[The phrase 只可惜 zhǐ kěxí ("Unfortunately") literally means "only needs pity". The phrase 画蛇添足 huà shé tiān zú "draw snake add feet" is also a synonym for "superfluous", I understand.]

4. Episode 26: When the two male leads are at a restaurant, talking about a friend, the friend suddenly arrives.

"Speak of 曹操 Cáo Cāo (pronounced Tsáo Tsāo) and Cáo Cāo arrives", says the second lead. Viki's translation duly explains the classical allusion. [Note to self: read "The Romance of the Three Kingdoms" sometime.]

Again, Youku provides a looser translation, "Speak of the devil", but the Chinese subtitles again show the accuracy of Viki's English translation. 说曹操 曹操到 shuō cáocāo cáocāo dào, literally "Say Cáo Cāo, Cáo Cāo arrives".

5. Episode 21: During a bit of banter, the female lead calls the male lead "shameless".

Viki just provides a smooth English translation - "You're shameless".

Youku's translation is more literal ("Shameless"), and also provides the Chinese characters for the word "shameless".

不 要 脸 bù yào liǎn literally means "not want face", i.e., someone who doesn't mind losing face is by definition shameless.

6. Episode 35: After some relationship advice from the male and female leads, the second male lead appears to have absorbed the lesson well.

Viki provides the idiomatic expression "The student has surpassed the master", but also explains the literal meaning "Blue is made out of indigo but is more vivid than indigo".

Youku's translation stops with the idiomatic translation ("He does better than his master"), but also provides the original saying in Chinese.

青 出 于 蓝，胜 于 蓝 qīng chū yú lán, shèng yú lán literally means "Indigo gives rise to blue, superior blue".

7. Episode 27: This isn't strictly an idiom. It's a pun that I managed to pick up on, thanks to the Chinese subtitles provided by Youku.

Viki translates this as "I'm your cute younger brother."

Youku says, "I'm your lovely brother", but the Chinese subtitles explain this a lot better.

我 是 你 可要 的 弟弟 wǒ shì nǐ kěyào de dìdì loosely translates to "I'm your beloved/desirable/wanted younger brother" because 可要 kěyào (literally "can want" or "can be wanted") means wanted or desirable.

But this is also a pun, because the elder sister's name in the serial is Ke Yao! [I guess the Chinese name "Ke Yao" for a girl is like the common Indian name "Priya", which also means beloved.]

Moral of the story: Watch serials on Rakuten Viki for more faithful English translations that educate you on Chinese idioms and literary allusions; watch them on Youku for the Chinese subtitles that are faithful to the script. Together, the two sites can provide better insights into the language than either can alone.

The Simplicity Of Chinese Grammar - 6 (The Structure Of Comparisons)

Consider these sentences in English:

1. The hotel is close to the airport.

2. My hands are bigger than yours.

3. Her eyes are like her mother's.

4. Your Chinese is as good as his.

In each of these cases, there are two entities being compared in some sense, and the comparison term is in-between.

This is quite simple, but in abstract terms, the structure of the corresponding Chinese sentences is more uniform.

Instead of placing the entirety of the comparison term between the two entities being compared, what's placed between them is the type of comparison. The outcome or result of the comparison follows the second entity.

Let's look at the same four sentences in Mandarin.

1. 酒店 离 机场 很 近 jiǔdiàn lí jīchǎng hěn jìn ("The hotel is close to the airport", literally "Hotel from airport (connector) close")

2. 我 的 手 比 你 的 大 wǒ de shǒu bǐ nǐ de dà ("My hands are bigger than yours", literally "My hands inequality comparator yours big")

3. 她 的 眼睛 像 她 妈妈 的 一样 tā de yǎnjīng xiàng tā māmā de yīyàng ("Her eyes are like her mother's", literally, "Her eyes similarity indicator her mother's same")

4. 你 的 中文 像 他 的 一样 好 nǐ de zhōngwén xiàng tā de yīyàng hǎo ("Your Chinese is as good as his", literally, "Your Chinese similarity indicator his same good")

On the surface, the Chinese sentence structure might seem more complex than the corresponding English one, because it's broken into two parts where a single term might suffice. However, in abstract terms, it has a more uniform approach regardless of the type of comparison being made. You first state how you intend to compare the two entities, and then you follow up with the outcome of the comparison. It's the same whether (1) you're talking about the distance between two places, (2) contrasting two entities, or (3) expressing how two entities are similar.

What The Du Chinese Logo Means

When I first signed up to the Du Chinese website, I didn't pay much attention to either the name of the site or the logo. I guess I must have stumbled upon it based on some favourable review, and signed up after skimming through its content.

[No regrets at all, by the way. It's a fantastic resource, and it has nicely complemented Duolingo in enriching my knowledge of the language. Just two of the texts at the elementary level, "Did you do it for nothing?" and the humorous story "The Nose" packed so many useful words and phrases that it greatly accelerated my learning and made future Duolingo lessons easier. You can change the speed at which the text is read. I always run it at half speed, both to understand the text better and to learn the correct tones.]

Just recently, I thought again about the name of the site, and what should have been obvious to me from the beginning finally struck me. 读 dú ("read") is such an obvious name for a site devoted to helping learners read Chinese texts.

And then I looked at the logo again. Sure enough, it was the Chinese character 读 dú, with the top part stylised to make it look like an open book.

我 终于 明白 了 wǒ zhōngyú míngbái le ("I finally understand")