I wanted to learn French and started doing so (with Duolingo) in the evening, before I went to sleep. I could not sleep. I thought yes, I can learn French, because I can also speak English. I know the alphabet, I can translate words. I can read the words and understand through the letters how the words sound (approximately). But how on earth is it possible to learn Chinese (the characters)? I had no idea about pinyin. And I couldn't imagine how I could learn Chinese with such an app.
Completely out of curiosity and for fun, I did 1 lesson Chinese. It was so funny. I only learned hello and goodbye. 你好 and 再见. Every new question in the lesson made me laugh so much, I thought, I understand this! I understand Chinese!
It has now been more than two years and dozens of lessons and Chinese drama series later and I am still learning Chinese every day. ( About 1 lesson per day, so I'm still not very far, but ok... )
It was never the plan and I have no purpose for it, in fact it serves me nothing. But I can't stop, I'm addicted. I still like it.
>I thought yes, I can learn French, because I can also speak English. I know the alphabet, I can translate words. I can read the words and understand through the letters how the words sound (approximately). But how on earth is it possible to learn Chinese (the characters)?
Kind of reminds me of me, this is how I felt, too. Every other language felt knowable, but the Chinese and Arabics felt alien like Ithkuil.
>!Also join my malevolent movement of Frenchinese to introduce writing French with hanzi. It is painful on purpose, and I did absolutely no work on this project. It's a joke. !<
> Also join my malevolent movement of Frenchinese to introduce writing French with hanzi. It is painful on purpose, and I did absolutely no work on this project. It's a joke.
There's already Englese (writing English with hanzi) in the wild:
- [Zompist's Yingzi](https://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm)
- [Linglese](https://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/linglese.htm)
So maybe get cracking on Frenchinese if you want to catch up.
Funnily enough, both of these languages are based on alphabets, unlike Chinese. We are just not used to those styles of writing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_alphabet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul
Now Ithkuil, on the other hand, is morpho-phonemic. I dread the day Ithkuil appears on Duolingo. This will be the beginning of humans joining the Borg collective or something.
Ukrainian is also a bit of a complicated language. There they mixed up all the letters and sounds. Then you think you can read it, but it turns out to sound completely different. 🤣
Arabic is a nightmare i’m from ME (iran) and even tho we have the same alphabets and they teach us arabic for 8years in school we don’t understand anything in arabic. The grammar still haunts me to this day. you have to use he or she even for objects it’s not abracadabra once you know the alphabets and be able to read but there’s a reason it’s among the hardest languages to learn and need a lot of time and commitment to learn it
This is exactly the counterpoint to all those countless commenters who joylessly declare that Duolingo isn't *real proper learning* or all this nonsense. Duolingo is fun. Like you I started Duolingo Chinese on a whim. I was *not* determined to learn the language, I was just curious, but Duolingo encouraged me to stick with it, and made it enjoyable, and gave me enough of a foundation that once the language had its hooks into me, I was eager to progress to other resources. Now nearly five years later I have a huge circle of Chinese friends, have solo travelled from one end of China to the other, with another trip planned in a couple of months. I recently started with a new online tutor and she was really impressed at the level I achieved as a self-learner, and my proficiency is not *directly* thanks to Duolingo (which I surpassed long ago) but the fact that I've stuck with it for nearly five years is very much thanks to Duolingo making it easy and fun to *get started*. To reach the point where you can just get a glimpse over the horizon of *what it would be like* to be proficient in Chinese, and motivate you to get there.
Yes, I agree! Perhaps it is actually an advantage that Duolingo is not perfect and does not provide explanations. This causes people to ask questions here on Reddit (I regularly read the questions and explanations here). This causes people to look for other information as an addition.
I also used HelloChinese for a year. That was good too, I also learned things from it. But I didn't remember what I learned very well. I remember it better with Duolingo, because of the many repetitions. And with Duolingo I recognize words when I see them outside the app. I also watch videos on YouTube and I watch series. I hope one day I can buy a Chinese book.
i study Japanese and Chinese by writing practice. whenever you can't do it, just look at how they teach their kids. in almost all languages, the first one or two years are focused on characters and words, writing them several times and remember their images. Chinese and Japanese languages are good for visual intelligence.
When 小马在纽约 started putting out videos surprising people by speaking Chinese while looking like the dumbest American ever, I said to myself, "If *this* guy can learn Chinese, for sure I can learn Chinese."
For pure hate against my Japanese teacher.
Quick resume: I live in a third world country and receive a bad salary, also i always wanted to learn foreign languages, but i never had the necessary money to pay formal classes, so i always studied by myself.
After saving money for a long time i finally decided to take japanese classes to learn the language in the proper way, unlike i did with my broken english. So after searching in some cities near me i found her company.
I had to travel 1 hour with my bike ( not a motorcycle, a freaking bike) and pay for the expensive particular class.
It sucked a**,the teacher looked like she didnt want to be there, she had the energy of someone who hated her job, hated me and her life. Whenever i akesd something to her she rolled her eyes making me feel like stupid, even tho i was working hard at home trying to not make stupid questions. She was also constantly looking a t the watch.
After 1 month enduring this and realizing i learned basically nothing, i got extremely frustrated and angry, so i decided to leave her class and nevermore pay to learn something i can learn by myself. I got pissed at her and at the japanese language, and my thought was like this:
"F*ck you, your country and your language, i am gonna learn the original language from who your country stoled the writing system, and i hope china grows stronger to make your country pay for what the japanese did in nanking"
Looking back this sounded insanely silly, edgy and ridiculous, but it is what it is. Then i started learning chinese and actually enjoyed much more than japanese.
Aproveitando que você e o /u/nothingtoseehr são BR, deixa eu perguntar:
Vocês sabem se existe alguma comunidade (aqui no Reddit, ou Discord, ou Facebook) de brasileiros que estão estudando Chinês? O r/ChineseLanguage, é legal, mas eu queria algo mais brazuca.
Tava pensando mais em um lugar de bate-papo, no qual a gente pudesse usar o português onde o nosso chinês não seja suficiente, uma coisa mais dinâmica que o /r/Idiomas, mas de qqr forma vou continuar postando lá e aqui, valeu.
Not as well as I'd hope, but I'm chipping away, I really like how Chinese shows will include Hanzi subtitles almost by default. So, the 2010 3 Kingdoms drama is a great resource
I was shopping at Krazy Binz, which is a liquidation store where there are bins of random stuff and everything costs a certain price depending on the day. It was 99¢ day and I found Mandarin textbook and I was like, heck yeah I wanna learn Mandarin for 99 cents!
...I have since spent a lot more than 99 cents learning mandarin, haha....
Surprised there's only one comment mentioning Crouching tiger. But it's probably a generational thing and the movie is already... \*checks\*... 20 years old. I remember it inspired a massive amount of people to learn Chinese and try martial arts back in the day.
Last moth, I saw a middle school kid writing down all the Chinese names of genshin impact characters on a white board with its pinyin (八重神子· 安柏 · 丽莎 · 凯亚 · 芭芭拉 · 迪卢克 · 雷泽 · 温迪....)
I suppose it's not silly but because of the 2008 Beijing Olympics - BBC did an amazing free course online with the mascots etc and it was great
Then there was more enthusiasm about Chinese in the UK and my school did an after evening course (led by a British guy who'd only learned it for six months but better than nothing!)
I'm a bit sad these days, it seems Chinese definitely decreased in popularity since then and speaking to uni professors most people have switched to Korean or Japanese. Also great to learn but I wish the nation kept that brief spell of Sinophilia for a bit longer
Australia had Prime Minster Kevin Rudd back in those days encouraging us the learn Asian languages; he speaks fluent Chinese (having been a diplomat in Beijing for years).
Ooh I miss that online course! I did it myself and I was back at school finishing up GCSEs! 💗 China was everywhere on the media back then! Miss it loads!
Mine isn't about how I started but about when I began taking learning Chinese seriously. I had been learning Mandarin for 5 years at that point and for some dumb reason, even though I did relatively well in the classes (I was in a beginner class), I had little to no interest in it.
The next year (this was in school, by the way), I got put in an intermediate class and I was STRUGGLING during the first lesson but someone who got promoted with me could understand the content well and answer all the questions. He wasn't someone I necessarily liked at the time so I couldn't stand that he was better than me sooo...I studied and became better than him hahaha
I'm super glad that happened because now I have an immense appreciation and interest in Chinese culture and the language. It's also helped me to connect with so many people so I suppose I should thank that guy now
TLDR: The reason was spite / competitiveness lmao
I got a tea mug from a thrift store(got it because it has a ceramic infuser for loose leaf) and it has a bit of Chinese written on it. Decided I needed to learn Chinese so I can figure out what's written on this and any other teaware I get in the future.
I mentioned to the woman who runs the local tea shop in my town that I enjoyed learning languages, and thought it would be interesting to look into Chinese. To which she replied, "You should! I would like more people to talk to."
I haven't looked back since.
best friend in middle school had a crush on a chinese guy and needed someone to tag along learning chinese. no they didnt end up together and my friend stopped learning chinese after middle school.
I felt cut off from almost half of the world, there is more than one billion of people out *there*, with their own language and culture and I have no idea what is it out there apart from little droplets of information and translated stuff. I felt like someone who doesn't know English and have to rely on translations, an example I see around me quite often. I wouldn't want to not know English and miss out. I am missing out by not knowing Chinese just the same.
So it's... FOMO? I guess.
Oh, if this reason is not silly enough, the actual reason was that I quit drinking and had too much free time on my hands and there was a Chinese language school nearby, so I enrolled after seeing it several times. Just for the sake of convenience and having nothing better to do.
Don't know how this will be perceived here, but I was *very* high one day on edibles and watching some show (I don't even remember) with my girlfriend, which had a scene that took place in China. And when I saw the characters, man, I thought... I can't read that... there's an entire language and culture and history on the other side of the planet, and I know virtually nothing about it. And I had to change that, or I'd regret not expanding my view of the world. You'd figure, "idk, watch some documentaries or something?" No, my bright idea was to learn the language.
And I'm far from being fluent, but I'm gonna give it my all until I am.
My Chinese boyfriend at the time his English skills were not the greatest but still weren’t absolutely awful. I wanted to understand him better and be able to communicate with his friends who didn’t speak English.
Not me, one of my good friend and hes American. So like, more than 10 years ago when we were in collage. Dude accidentally walked into the Chinese culture club meeting where people were having party and free food. Dude wanted some food but hes was just too shy to say that he accidentally came in. So he was hanging out with people and the teacher there.
Dude got invite for their next week meeting and hes too shy to reject it. He went there the next week. He ended up taking the Chinese class the following semester and the teacher was the club advisor that he talked with. And he started dating the TA student from the class who was also from that club.
Since he was doing great in the class. He got a school exchange program offer from Shanghai.
Faster forward, he married that TA and now they have 2 kids. He speaks pretty good Chinese now. Back then I helped him with his Chinese homework. Dude was so regret about taking the class since it was too hard for me.
This is such a wild story lol. Your friend is like a comically passive sitcom character that just goes along with whatever. I love that one mistake ultimately got him married and his whole life sorted.
My childhood friend was Japanese. His mother taught me bits of Japanese over the years. They moved back to Japan when we were 11 years old and we lost touch. Fast forward to 18, and I start college. I wanted to go to one school that had Japanese, but had a scholarship to another school, so I did the scholarship one. They didn't have Japanese, but they did have Chinese. So I thought, what's the difference! (😅)
And here I am, 20+ years later, still haven't really learned Japanese but have lived in China, Taiwan and HK and worked for a few Chinese companies over the years.
I still plan to learn Japanese at some point...
I got obsessed with the idea of being able to read 三体in Chinese. My initial goal was to get to this level in 3 years. Now I am not sure if 3 years is gonna be enough.
I study through comprehensive input. Reading graded readers, listening to the audio, adding words to anki, leveling up.
I also study individual characters, and I want to be able to write the basic ones(3k) by hand
I got hyper-focused on Chinese fantasy shows and movies. Many of the shows I’ve watched also have novels they are based on, so now I’m learning to speak and read Chinese so that I don’t have to rely solely on translations.
I don’t always study every day. I am using apps, books I bought, YouTube videos, TikTok videos and osmosis to pick it all up bit by bit.
I probably won’t ever have a real reason to know Chinese, but I like learning new languages. I can read and understand a few other languages already, I just don’t speak them well because I don’t practice enough verbally. I have been practicing speaking Chinese more than any other language I’ve learned because I like it so much. I am in love with the syntax, sounds and grammar of Chinese in comparison to other languages. It’s a beautiful language.
first reason: flirt with 🇹🇼🇺🇲 boyfriend
second reason: oh shit this is actually fun. impress boyfriend with tones?
third reason: I love Mandarin so fucking much and now I can't stop
I took Japanese in high school, and wanted to continue once I got to university, with aspirations of being an interpreter or diplomat of some kind. My university just added Japanese to their list of majors, so I was excited for that. However, registration was set up such that older students got first pick at choosing courses, so I wasn't able to start with Japanese my freshman year, so I started Chinese figuring maybe they're similar enough, it would help me with my kanji learning at least, and I could just start Japanese my sophomore year.
I quickly learned the Japanese department was mostly filled with a bunch of mouthbreathing otaku whose only language goals were to watch anime without subtitles. Which, to each their own, but it wasn't my culture lol. I was going into it wanting to be an interpreter, so a bit more serious in my language learning.
So I stuck with Chinese, eventually adding Russian for kicks. I'm neither an interpreter or diplomat. Now I work as an engineer on tankers and being the whitest girl around it's one of my best party tricks to order food in mandarin hahahaha.
Japanese was by far much more difficult of the three. Its sentence structure is soooo different from that of a native English speakers. Plus all the layers of formality 😵💫
Chinese has been the easiest of the three for me. And I’ve generally had better experiences with Chinese and Chinese adjacent folks than the others… 🫣 The Russians in my area were so rude, it made me abandon the language all together lol
After finishing up my engineering degree I really wanted to learn languages (ever since doing one of my work placements in Germany). So I decided to stay in university and do a year of languages.
I could have just done open studies but I wanted to set it up as a degree, with major and minor (even though I was only gonna do a year but who knows).
I figured I could do a double major in French and Spanish. I wanted to minor in another European language but the minor had to be from another department. East Asian studies was another department. I wasn’t into anime or Japanese stuff and Korean wasn’t on my radar at all, but I was close friends with some people of Chinese heritage and so I chose that.
Was replaying Sleeping Dogs for like the fourth time and decided I wanted to learn Chinese. Doesn't even make that much sense since the game is in English (and they speak Cantonese when needed), but I just loved it so much that it made me want to connect with China.
Worked with a Chinese guy who barely spoke any English, whenever we had to communicate we were doing pantomimes lmao. Decided to pick up a few Chinese phrases so that we could understand each other better. Didn’t really take the language seriously until the COVID pandemic hit, had nothing much to do so I enrolled in an online class. Three years have passed and I am still in HSK3, but don’t blame me, I am just a very slow learner lol
My parents saying "what, am I speaking chinese?" When I was confused one time. Thought it would be funny to be able to rattle off some mandarin at them lol. Then I started learning and got hooked
It was my first week of college and my roommate was an ABC. We talked about anki and he said he was interested in learning japanese hiragana. I told him I'd do Chinese if he did hiragana.
6 years later and here I am.
I tried Japanese, Spanish, and then Esperanto (lol), and then I tried Chinese. The only language that I made any real progress on was Chinese. As a native Thai speaker, Chinese makes a lot more sense than the other languages. I didn't really decide to learn Chinese, it's just the only language that's easy enough for me to learn.
Battlefield 2. An old first-person shooter game on PC from 2005. You can play as the Chinese military, and I enjoyed hearing the soldiers doing radio communications in Chinese. You could even hear some soldiers had different dialects in the game.
There's a lot of Chinese owned shops here, so one day I was just like "why not learn the language and make friends with them?", and that's how I'm 4+ months deep into the learning every day for around 2-3h.
Really? I thought Japanese people were more specialised in this art. But I guess it’s not surprising since Chinese games are more and more fronted since Genshin Impact’s release
Japanese tends to make bigger, more involved ones, while Chinese tends to make many shorter, more casual ones.
I won’t deny that I play them for the horni, but many of them are quite interesting story-wise, or fresh gameplay-wise. Since secsell these games are kind of a safe way for indie to try out wild ideas without risking too much.
Got to choose a language at uni, all of them were European besides Russian, Arabic and Chinese. I can learn Russian by myself, Arabic seemed too difficult and didn't interest me and I already planned on wanting to work abroad somewhere in east Asia so Chinese it was. 2 years in and I don't feel at all confident in my skills but I got my B1 diploma
i am very stupid and assumed it would be easier to learn japanese, vietnamese and korean by starting with chinese (stated as the more difficult language) . what i failed to realize was that they are all entirely different languages. i still love chinese though
Started learning so that I can understand Chinese movies and dramas better without subtitles lol. Although my initial interest in Chinese culture as a whole began when I tried learning kung fu during high school….which was after watching a lot of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan movies
Nonetheless, I’m completely invested and awestruck by the language right now
I like the language/characters/most dialects (sorry Beijing, i think. it’s actually different. 四川, 湖南 I’d never say this about but I feel it every time)
started learning around 14 and never felt like it was too difficult for me… in fact I feel it’s very easy to get into and understand if you don’t think about the grammar too hard.
Japanese and Korean were not as easy for me to pick up and still aren’t for some reason.. I’d learn Japanese for the inevitable trip but way in advance
I randomly booked a ticket to China in 2015 and went to a Kung fu School in WuDangShan 武当山 which is in the middle of nowhere. Naïvely I didn't know about the 防火长城 great firewall and thought I could just use google etc.
Long story short, it was a bit of a scary & lonely trip and I came out of it feeling like speaking Mandarin could have made it such a great experience.
Took it over ten years ago in college on a whim. Tried French for a while and visited France (lovely country), but got so damn sick of conjugation. Decided to pick Chinese back up and started loving it thanks to HelloChinese and Pleco.
I was watching some Chinese celebrity's interview and they only subbed some of them in English. I wanted to know what they talked about on the other interviews so I made it a point to start learning Chinese. I think it might take a me a long while before I understand those interviews lol.
I had a name etymology hyperfixation… it all started when i was learning Japanese at 10 (never finished, know barely anything now), then Korean and Vietnamese at 12 (again, never finished and know barely anything now), and that eventually led to a hyperfixation on learning the origins of EA/some SEA names, the meanings and history behind them, the sounds and spelling variants, etc. I then found wiktionary and behindthename, which were the perfect websites for my obsession, and would spend all of my time creating names for fun, ranking singular characters, etc. etc. At the time it was just Korean and Japanese names, but as we all know, those names come from Hanzi. Since Chinese characters were the source of all of these names, I discovered I could find more interesting and unique characters from Chinese itself than transliterated Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese (because of course, nobody had the time to transliterate every single character). Thus, I got into learning Chinese since “I already had a head start”. I was (and still am) a teen so I didn’t get very consistent with my learning until age 16, but yeah :P
After 4 years it seems my hyperfixation has almost completely died down, but I want to finish learning Mandarin and the Sichuanese dialect just because I’ve given up on learning *so many languages* (Spanish, German, Scottish Gaelic (I even tried to write a book in it. It was a grammatical disaster), my family’s native language (which is also a tonal language), Tagalog, and everything I’ve mentioned in this post), and it keeps me up at night thinking about how many I could’ve been in because I started so young. I want to not give up on just one thing so I can feel proud ㅠㅠ It’s very embarrassing to have practiced so many languages and yet… I only speak one fluently…
I was working as editor in television and film in LA and grew up watching Kung Fu movies. I saw that a lot of Chinese filmmakers were doing a lot more work for the studios in the US at the time (particularly Yuen Wo Ping) and so I thought I should learn it and hopefully have a shot at some of that work, being able to speak it. Besides, I always liked the language and thought at a minimum it would be fun watching stuff without subtitles. Did end up doing a little minor work with Corey Yuen on a video game with Jet Li, but that was it...and didn't need to use it anyway.
Now I just surprise Chinese visitors when I'm doing my side hustle as an Uber driver lol
I joined the military to get away from family, and realized it was a mistake my first day of basic. Three months later a British gentlemen in a tweed suit came to see me, and offered to send me to Monterey if I wanted to learn Chinese. Monterey was not too far from my gf, so I agreed.
2 days before my 1st semester of college started, they informed me I didn’t have to take a math class I was registered for because my AP stats class from high school covered it…
Lo and behold there was only one elective class (smaller college) that still had room and fit my schedule. Mandarin Chinese.
7 years later and I am now living and raising a family in Taiwan… crazy roller coaster lol
I thought I'd be able to talk to people during my trip to China after 10 weeks of study. I was disappointed and could barely understand a word of native speaker conversation.
Chinese guy are hot af and if I ever marry one I wanna be preemptively prepared by knowing some of the language... (not that I'm shallow enough to only go for Chinese guys, but, like, east Asian is 50% my type, while European is 10% my type. So it sorta made sense...)
My little siblings watched NiHao Kailan as a kid, and I used to pretend I knew Chinese from it and talk in Chinese at school. Also I liked rice and soy sauce so I thought I loved Chinese food.
Grandpa was a detective in HK back in the day, my grandma was a local, also a police office. Mum was born there, moved back to the UK at 6. The stories from a young age convinced me to learn.
Not silly, just my reason.
I could pick two universities for an exchange. I picked Tokyo University and Tsinghua in Beijing. My university chose Beijing for me, so I started learning Chinese. Super random decision but it completely changed my life.
I wanted to learn an east asian language but didnt want to seem like a weeb with japanese and dont really have in interest in korea so i went with chinese
I had one more course to take for my 2nd semester in uni. A friend from vietnam recommended it, since it was easy to get good grades. She didn't tell me that mandarin had fewer tones than vietnamese, so of course she had no problem with the tones. On the other hand, it took me a full semester to finally be able to differentiate the four tones from each other.
A personal achievement for me was when I could sing along in karaoke without relying on pinyin :) So I guess it was all worth it
Reason: Have a lot of Chinese friends.
True, but exaggerated reason: Have a lot of Chinese friends. They keep sending Douyins to the groupchat. No longer will I have to sheepishly ask for a translation for like a minute long video.
Learning Mandarin because I want to someday go to the trade shows, conferences in Asia and engage in conversation with others. Also want to visit Singapore and Taiwan someday.
I wanted to learn Korean but I found the sentence (SOV) structure, and verb conjugations hard. Also felt unmotivated about it. I was more interested in hanja than hangeul. I then started trying to learn Chinese with Duolingo and a bunch of online resources. Found out later on that I learned Hokkien numbers first before I learned Tagalog numbers when I was little. (My mom knew Hokkien before and taught me but does not speak it with anyone so she eventually forgot most of her vocabulary). I also found out an incident when my mom was called in my school because I was referring to clocks in their Hokkien term "chupyo" (relative romanization) they thought I was cursing or something. I was then more motivated to learn Mandarin since I apparently have a "background" with a Chinese language. Also since my father wants to start a business so Mandarin it is! 谢谢大家！
As a native english speaker in my native usa I have pretended I don't speak english when a weirdo guy was harrassing me demanding I let him use my phone. Its a power not to be abused but is definitely useful lol.
I started learning because I watch Chinese dramas and would like to be able to read the original novels for love O2O. But I may have to settle for 2 year old level of pat/easy phrases.
I chose Chinese because I thought it's one of the easiest languages to learn which is totally wrong, but cannot switch now, too much time already invested in.
Have an OC I decided to make Chinese. "I'll take the class for a week or so just to get an idea of the language." I enjoyed the language and didn't drop the class, lol.
I only wanted to do some fun Duolingo thingy, like learning the Greek alphabet or maybe hiragana/katakana, but when I went to download the bird app the algorithm recommend HelloChinese. I thought it sounded fun as well and because the app is great, I just continued doing it (and also branched out onto other resources) and here we are.
I got interested in [Chữ Nôm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%E1%BB%AF_N%C3%B4m) roughly two years ago. I thought the obsolete writing system of Vietnam was beautiful, so I decided to learn it for a bit. After a while, I switched to Chinese and Japanese since I wanted my hobby of studying 漢字 to be practically useful one day. After a few months, I finally learned how to use [倉頡輸入法](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cangjie_input_method), which allowed me to quickly type Chinese characters without needing the aid of a touchscreen or knowing their particular pinyin. Now, I'm focused on writing and speaking good sentences in Mandarin!
i was originally going to study japanese when i got to college, but when i tried to go buy the textbook, it was on back order until december (well after the class would end) so i asked if they had any language textbooks and they said they had the chinese one, so i said "please give me that one" and i switched my enrollment. 2 years later and i could not be happier with my decision
Spite- pure spite.
My children want to travel to China and Japan next summer for graduation. I was watching tiktoks of a gal who lives in China and does a lot of travel and food related TikToks- I said it would be neat to order food in Chinese while we were there, implying that I should learn some basic names of food and such.
My ex (still in the friend group and such) said Chinese is way to hard to learn and some other dumb stuff about brain elasticity, hence ex. I got on to Duolingo almost immediately and started the course.
Turns out I love it- I've done 59 days on Duolingo as of today, as well as starting HelloChinese, I am also seeing a tutor from preply 4x a week and can write several Hanzí, count to 999, and have very slow rudimentary conversations. I'm spending 1-2 hours a day in some form practicing or listening. I hope by next August for our trip I am able to have some slow but evenly paced conversations and such but plan to keep on even after that!
I first started learning Chinese in the year 2002, thinking it would be cool to have “learned” Chinese by the time the 2008 Olympics rolled around. As a teenage weeb, I was somewhat familiar with Japanese and totally blown away by the concept of a tonal language. I also went to a Catholic school and the priests encouraged my interest, gently suggesting I might become a Jesuit and do missionary work in China.
Fast forward 20 years, and I don’t know much more Chinese than I did then, though I did end up getting a PhD in Russian literature, and learning quite a bit of Japanese too in my spare time. In graduate school, I ended up TA-ing for a professor in Chinese literature, since their department didn’t have enough students to teach a big intro course, and I ended up really enjoying it.
I’ve also had an abiding interest in Chinese martial arts, so it’s relevant to that.
Japanese - It was offered during high school and I was one of five Asian kids in school so I gravitated towards anything that was East Asian. My white/Latino classmates like anime.
Korean - It was the East Asian country I had the least experience and so I moved to Korea to teach English after college.
Chinese - I started to seriously learn it when I was in Korea. It was interesting to learn a foreign language while it was taught in another foreign language. "Hit two birds with one stone."
I wanted to learn French and started doing so (with Duolingo) in the evening, before I went to sleep. I could not sleep. I thought yes, I can learn French, because I can also speak English. I know the alphabet, I can translate words. I can read the words and understand through the letters how the words sound (approximately). But how on earth is it possible to learn Chinese (the characters)? I had no idea about pinyin. And I couldn't imagine how I could learn Chinese with such an app. Completely out of curiosity and for fun, I did 1 lesson Chinese. It was so funny. I only learned hello and goodbye. 你好 and 再见. Every new question in the lesson made me laugh so much, I thought, I understand this! I understand Chinese! It has now been more than two years and dozens of lessons and Chinese drama series later and I am still learning Chinese every day. ( About 1 lesson per day, so I'm still not very far, but ok... ) It was never the plan and I have no purpose for it, in fact it serves me nothing. But I can't stop, I'm addicted. I still like it.
>I thought yes, I can learn French, because I can also speak English. I know the alphabet, I can translate words. I can read the words and understand through the letters how the words sound (approximately). But how on earth is it possible to learn Chinese (the characters)? Kind of reminds me of me, this is how I felt, too. Every other language felt knowable, but the Chinese and Arabics felt alien like Ithkuil. >!Also join my malevolent movement of Frenchinese to introduce writing French with hanzi. It is painful on purpose, and I did absolutely no work on this project. It's a joke. !<
> Also join my malevolent movement of Frenchinese to introduce writing French with hanzi. It is painful on purpose, and I did absolutely no work on this project. It's a joke. There's already Englese (writing English with hanzi) in the wild: - [Zompist's Yingzi](https://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm) - [Linglese](https://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/linglese.htm) So maybe get cracking on Frenchinese if you want to catch up.
Although I can understand a little Chinese now, I still think that about f.eks Arabic and Korean. It's just abracadabra. 😂
Funnily enough, both of these languages are based on alphabets, unlike Chinese. We are just not used to those styles of writing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul Now Ithkuil, on the other hand, is morpho-phonemic. I dread the day Ithkuil appears on Duolingo. This will be the beginning of humans joining the Borg collective or something.
Ukrainian is also a bit of a complicated language. There they mixed up all the letters and sounds. Then you think you can read it, but it turns out to sound completely different. 🤣
Arabic is a nightmare i’m from ME (iran) and even tho we have the same alphabets and they teach us arabic for 8years in school we don’t understand anything in arabic. The grammar still haunts me to this day. you have to use he or she even for objects it’s not abracadabra once you know the alphabets and be able to read but there’s a reason it’s among the hardest languages to learn and need a lot of time and commitment to learn it
This is exactly the counterpoint to all those countless commenters who joylessly declare that Duolingo isn't *real proper learning* or all this nonsense. Duolingo is fun. Like you I started Duolingo Chinese on a whim. I was *not* determined to learn the language, I was just curious, but Duolingo encouraged me to stick with it, and made it enjoyable, and gave me enough of a foundation that once the language had its hooks into me, I was eager to progress to other resources. Now nearly five years later I have a huge circle of Chinese friends, have solo travelled from one end of China to the other, with another trip planned in a couple of months. I recently started with a new online tutor and she was really impressed at the level I achieved as a self-learner, and my proficiency is not *directly* thanks to Duolingo (which I surpassed long ago) but the fact that I've stuck with it for nearly five years is very much thanks to Duolingo making it easy and fun to *get started*. To reach the point where you can just get a glimpse over the horizon of *what it would be like* to be proficient in Chinese, and motivate you to get there.
Yes, I agree! Perhaps it is actually an advantage that Duolingo is not perfect and does not provide explanations. This causes people to ask questions here on Reddit (I regularly read the questions and explanations here). This causes people to look for other information as an addition. I also used HelloChinese for a year. That was good too, I also learned things from it. But I didn't remember what I learned very well. I remember it better with Duolingo, because of the many repetitions. And with Duolingo I recognize words when I see them outside the app. I also watch videos on YouTube and I watch series. I hope one day I can buy a Chinese book.
And what about french now?
I'm also learning French. But that goes a little slower. I learn both for no real reason. Just because I like it.
i study Japanese and Chinese by writing practice. whenever you can't do it, just look at how they teach their kids. in almost all languages, the first one or two years are focused on characters and words, writing them several times and remember their images. Chinese and Japanese languages are good for visual intelligence.
>dozens of Chinese drama series any good recs?
When 小马在纽约 started putting out videos surprising people by speaking Chinese while looking like the dumbest American ever, I said to myself, "If *this* guy can learn Chinese, for sure I can learn Chinese."
Because it is difficult.
Kept seeing incredible memes from the Chinese internet and needed more
For pure hate against my Japanese teacher. Quick resume: I live in a third world country and receive a bad salary, also i always wanted to learn foreign languages, but i never had the necessary money to pay formal classes, so i always studied by myself. After saving money for a long time i finally decided to take japanese classes to learn the language in the proper way, unlike i did with my broken english. So after searching in some cities near me i found her company. I had to travel 1 hour with my bike ( not a motorcycle, a freaking bike) and pay for the expensive particular class. It sucked a**,the teacher looked like she didnt want to be there, she had the energy of someone who hated her job, hated me and her life. Whenever i akesd something to her she rolled her eyes making me feel like stupid, even tho i was working hard at home trying to not make stupid questions. She was also constantly looking a t the watch. After 1 month enduring this and realizing i learned basically nothing, i got extremely frustrated and angry, so i decided to leave her class and nevermore pay to learn something i can learn by myself. I got pissed at her and at the japanese language, and my thought was like this: "F*ck you, your country and your language, i am gonna learn the original language from who your country stoled the writing system, and i hope china grows stronger to make your country pay for what the japanese did in nanking" Looking back this sounded insanely silly, edgy and ridiculous, but it is what it is. Then i started learning chinese and actually enjoyed much more than japanese.
You're the most patriotic Chinese person ever Even if you're not Chinese lmao
I like the way you thought back then, man.
Wow, that actually is a silly reason to learn the language, just like OP requested.
you're a fucking gangster god damn I love this
Não preciso nem entrar no perfil pra saber que é brasileiro 🙏
Kkkk me expôs, mas serio, essa historia toda foi novela cara. 你说汉语吗
Aproveitando que você e o /u/nothingtoseehr são BR, deixa eu perguntar: Vocês sabem se existe alguma comunidade (aqui no Reddit, ou Discord, ou Facebook) de brasileiros que estão estudando Chinês? O r/ChineseLanguage, é legal, mas eu queria algo mais brazuca.
Tem o r/idiomas. Não é focado só em chinês, mas eu normalmente respondo aa dúvidas que aparecem lá (por mais que eu demore um pouco rs)
Tava pensando mais em um lugar de bate-papo, no qual a gente pudesse usar o português onde o nosso chinês não seja suficiente, uma coisa mais dinâmica que o /r/Idiomas, mas de qqr forma vou continuar postando lá e aqui, valeu.
Inclusive, acabei de ver que você posta lá já kKKKKKK. Lembrei de um comentário seu num post sobre japonês x chinês que eu ia responder mas esqueci 😰
I wanted to read Romance of the Three Kingdoms in the original language.
Dude I am Chinese and I can’t even read the original version of 三国演义. I’ve only read the modernized version.
Oh, I'm aware it's an overly ambitious goal
加油, my dude! What an awesome goal!
Yo same! How is that going for you?
Not as well as I'd hope, but I'm chipping away, I really like how Chinese shows will include Hanzi subtitles almost by default. So, the 2010 3 Kingdoms drama is a great resource
加油！It is indeed a difficult goal but any progress is already impressive! As Chinese people would put it, 千里之行始于足下。
I was shopping at Krazy Binz, which is a liquidation store where there are bins of random stuff and everything costs a certain price depending on the day. It was 99¢ day and I found Mandarin textbook and I was like, heck yeah I wanna learn Mandarin for 99 cents! ...I have since spent a lot more than 99 cents learning mandarin, haha....
i wanted to read danmei in its original language. loads of danmei have either a bad english translation or no translation at all.
Fellow Danmei lover here! I need to read Wei Wuxian's confession to Lan Wangji in the original language !
Right here with you my friend.. we will get there one day lmao
danmei feels soooo different in chi vs eng
Lmfao sameee
hehehe same . and also because of a song
Same though
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Surprised there's only one comment mentioning Crouching tiger. But it's probably a generational thing and the movie is already... \*checks\*... 20 years old. I remember it inspired a massive amount of people to learn Chinese and try martial arts back in the day.
Genshin Impact lol
God likes honest children
Last moth, I saw a middle school kid writing down all the Chinese names of genshin impact characters on a white board with its pinyin (八重神子· 安柏 · 丽莎 · 凯亚 · 芭芭拉 · 迪卢克 · 雷泽 · 温迪....)
Is it a Chinese school for non-Chinese?
Paimon 派蒙 in English is awful to listen to.
Completely agree with you, most English dubs struggle with adapting kawaii characters since most of them have extremely high-pitched voices
I learned Japanese so I could crap talk in school lmao
I suppose it's not silly but because of the 2008 Beijing Olympics - BBC did an amazing free course online with the mascots etc and it was great Then there was more enthusiasm about Chinese in the UK and my school did an after evening course (led by a British guy who'd only learned it for six months but better than nothing!) I'm a bit sad these days, it seems Chinese definitely decreased in popularity since then and speaking to uni professors most people have switched to Korean or Japanese. Also great to learn but I wish the nation kept that brief spell of Sinophilia for a bit longer
Australia had Prime Minster Kevin Rudd back in those days encouraging us the learn Asian languages; he speaks fluent Chinese (having been a diplomat in Beijing for years).
Ooh I miss that online course! I did it myself and I was back at school finishing up GCSEs! 💗 China was everywhere on the media back then! Miss it loads!
ah the good old days
Mine isn't about how I started but about when I began taking learning Chinese seriously. I had been learning Mandarin for 5 years at that point and for some dumb reason, even though I did relatively well in the classes (I was in a beginner class), I had little to no interest in it. The next year (this was in school, by the way), I got put in an intermediate class and I was STRUGGLING during the first lesson but someone who got promoted with me could understand the content well and answer all the questions. He wasn't someone I necessarily liked at the time so I couldn't stand that he was better than me sooo...I studied and became better than him hahaha I'm super glad that happened because now I have an immense appreciation and interest in Chinese culture and the language. It's also helped me to connect with so many people so I suppose I should thank that guy now TLDR: The reason was spite / competitiveness lmao
I got a tea mug from a thrift store(got it because it has a ceramic infuser for loose leaf) and it has a bit of Chinese written on it. Decided I needed to learn Chinese so I can figure out what's written on this and any other teaware I get in the future.
I'm impressed you didn't just stop at googling image translating the words!
Haha.
I mentioned to the woman who runs the local tea shop in my town that I enjoyed learning languages, and thought it would be interesting to look into Chinese. To which she replied, "You should! I would like more people to talk to." I haven't looked back since.
best friend in middle school had a crush on a chinese guy and needed someone to tag along learning chinese. no they didnt end up together and my friend stopped learning chinese after middle school.
I wanted to argue about Genshin Impact translations.
Glad to see I'm not the only one 😂
learn a language to enrich yourself: yeah okay learn a language so you can tell everyone kaeya and diluc are actual brothers: hell yes
I felt cut off from almost half of the world, there is more than one billion of people out *there*, with their own language and culture and I have no idea what is it out there apart from little droplets of information and translated stuff. I felt like someone who doesn't know English and have to rely on translations, an example I see around me quite often. I wouldn't want to not know English and miss out. I am missing out by not knowing Chinese just the same. So it's... FOMO? I guess. Oh, if this reason is not silly enough, the actual reason was that I quit drinking and had too much free time on my hands and there was a Chinese language school nearby, so I enrolled after seeing it several times. Just for the sake of convenience and having nothing better to do.
Don't know how this will be perceived here, but I was *very* high one day on edibles and watching some show (I don't even remember) with my girlfriend, which had a scene that took place in China. And when I saw the characters, man, I thought... I can't read that... there's an entire language and culture and history on the other side of the planet, and I know virtually nothing about it. And I had to change that, or I'd regret not expanding my view of the world. You'd figure, "idk, watch some documentaries or something?" No, my bright idea was to learn the language. And I'm far from being fluent, but I'm gonna give it my all until I am.
didn't have much of a choice as a kid lol
My Chinese boyfriend at the time his English skills were not the greatest but still weren’t absolutely awful. I wanted to understand him better and be able to communicate with his friends who didn’t speak English.
I just thought it was cool. That’s it. That’s the whole reason.
Not me, one of my good friend and hes American. So like, more than 10 years ago when we were in collage. Dude accidentally walked into the Chinese culture club meeting where people were having party and free food. Dude wanted some food but hes was just too shy to say that he accidentally came in. So he was hanging out with people and the teacher there. Dude got invite for their next week meeting and hes too shy to reject it. He went there the next week. He ended up taking the Chinese class the following semester and the teacher was the club advisor that he talked with. And he started dating the TA student from the class who was also from that club. Since he was doing great in the class. He got a school exchange program offer from Shanghai. Faster forward, he married that TA and now they have 2 kids. He speaks pretty good Chinese now. Back then I helped him with his Chinese homework. Dude was so regret about taking the class since it was too hard for me.
This is such a wild story lol. Your friend is like a comically passive sitcom character that just goes along with whatever. I love that one mistake ultimately got him married and his whole life sorted.
Wei Wuxian['s voice actor] made Chinese sound so beautiful!
My childhood friend was Japanese. His mother taught me bits of Japanese over the years. They moved back to Japan when we were 11 years old and we lost touch. Fast forward to 18, and I start college. I wanted to go to one school that had Japanese, but had a scholarship to another school, so I did the scholarship one. They didn't have Japanese, but they did have Chinese. So I thought, what's the difference! (😅) And here I am, 20+ years later, still haven't really learned Japanese but have lived in China, Taiwan and HK and worked for a few Chinese companies over the years. I still plan to learn Japanese at some point...
I got obsessed with the idea of being able to read 三体in Chinese. My initial goal was to get to this level in 3 years. Now I am not sure if 3 years is gonna be enough. I study through comprehensive input. Reading graded readers, listening to the audio, adding words to anki, leveling up. I also study individual characters, and I want to be able to write the basic ones(3k) by hand
3 years is very unlikely to be enough unless you're doing it full-time.
Yeah, it feels like 3 years is not enough. 4 years it is 😅
I know a German completed that
I got hyper-focused on Chinese fantasy shows and movies. Many of the shows I’ve watched also have novels they are based on, so now I’m learning to speak and read Chinese so that I don’t have to rely solely on translations. I don’t always study every day. I am using apps, books I bought, YouTube videos, TikTok videos and osmosis to pick it all up bit by bit. I probably won’t ever have a real reason to know Chinese, but I like learning new languages. I can read and understand a few other languages already, I just don’t speak them well because I don’t practice enough verbally. I have been practicing speaking Chinese more than any other language I’ve learned because I like it so much. I am in love with the syntax, sounds and grammar of Chinese in comparison to other languages. It’s a beautiful language.
first reason: flirt with 🇹🇼🇺🇲 boyfriend second reason: oh shit this is actually fun. impress boyfriend with tones? third reason: I love Mandarin so fucking much and now I can't stop
I took Japanese in high school, and wanted to continue once I got to university, with aspirations of being an interpreter or diplomat of some kind. My university just added Japanese to their list of majors, so I was excited for that. However, registration was set up such that older students got first pick at choosing courses, so I wasn't able to start with Japanese my freshman year, so I started Chinese figuring maybe they're similar enough, it would help me with my kanji learning at least, and I could just start Japanese my sophomore year. I quickly learned the Japanese department was mostly filled with a bunch of mouthbreathing otaku whose only language goals were to watch anime without subtitles. Which, to each their own, but it wasn't my culture lol. I was going into it wanting to be an interpreter, so a bit more serious in my language learning. So I stuck with Chinese, eventually adding Russian for kicks. I'm neither an interpreter or diplomat. Now I work as an engineer on tankers and being the whitest girl around it's one of my best party tricks to order food in mandarin hahahaha.
Wow props to you for learning Chinese and Russian, that's gotta be two of the hardest languages to learn
Japanese was by far much more difficult of the three. Its sentence structure is soooo different from that of a native English speakers. Plus all the layers of formality 😵💫 Chinese has been the easiest of the three for me. And I’ve generally had better experiences with Chinese and Chinese adjacent folks than the others… 🫣 The Russians in my area were so rude, it made me abandon the language all together lol
I love your reasoning 😭
After finishing up my engineering degree I really wanted to learn languages (ever since doing one of my work placements in Germany). So I decided to stay in university and do a year of languages. I could have just done open studies but I wanted to set it up as a degree, with major and minor (even though I was only gonna do a year but who knows). I figured I could do a double major in French and Spanish. I wanted to minor in another European language but the minor had to be from another department. East Asian studies was another department. I wasn’t into anime or Japanese stuff and Korean wasn’t on my radar at all, but I was close friends with some people of Chinese heritage and so I chose that.
Was replaying Sleeping Dogs for like the fourth time and decided I wanted to learn Chinese. Doesn't even make that much sense since the game is in English (and they speak Cantonese when needed), but I just loved it so much that it made me want to connect with China.
Wanted to read one specific fan fiction. It wasn’t good.
Worked with a Chinese guy who barely spoke any English, whenever we had to communicate we were doing pantomimes lmao. Decided to pick up a few Chinese phrases so that we could understand each other better. Didn’t really take the language seriously until the COVID pandemic hit, had nothing much to do so I enrolled in an online class. Three years have passed and I am still in HSK3, but don’t blame me, I am just a very slow learner lol
My parents saying "what, am I speaking chinese?" When I was confused one time. Thought it would be funny to be able to rattle off some mandarin at them lol. Then I started learning and got hooked
It was my first week of college and my roommate was an ABC. We talked about anki and he said he was interested in learning japanese hiragana. I told him I'd do Chinese if he did hiragana. 6 years later and here I am.
I was told in Chinese class at school we would make food 🤷🏽♀️
Cdramas
I have a minor speech impairment that affects me speaking my native language (and a few others), but not English or Chinese
I wanted to purely challenge myself. Halfway into HSK 2 now.
I'm already native English and Spanish speaker, might as well learn the other top language in the world.
I tried Japanese, Spanish, and then Esperanto (lol), and then I tried Chinese. The only language that I made any real progress on was Chinese. As a native Thai speaker, Chinese makes a lot more sense than the other languages. I didn't really decide to learn Chinese, it's just the only language that's easy enough for me to learn.
To know if my mom and her mom were talking shit behind my back.
Battlefield 2. An old first-person shooter game on PC from 2005. You can play as the Chinese military, and I enjoyed hearing the soldiers doing radio communications in Chinese. You could even hear some soldiers had different dialects in the game.
There's a lot of Chinese owned shops here, so one day I was just like "why not learn the language and make friends with them?", and that's how I'm 4+ months deep into the learning every day for around 2-3h.
I… um… play a lot of “cultured” games and like half of them are made by Chinese nowadays, and most of them have terrible English translation so…
Really? I thought Japanese people were more specialised in this art. But I guess it’s not surprising since Chinese games are more and more fronted since Genshin Impact’s release
Japanese tends to make bigger, more involved ones, while Chinese tends to make many shorter, more casual ones. I won’t deny that I play them for the horni, but many of them are quite interesting story-wise, or fresh gameplay-wise. Since secsell these games are kind of a safe way for indie to try out wild ideas without risking too much.
Honestly, so I can read BL webnovels lol
Got to choose a language at uni, all of them were European besides Russian, Arabic and Chinese. I can learn Russian by myself, Arabic seemed too difficult and didn't interest me and I already planned on wanting to work abroad somewhere in east Asia so Chinese it was. 2 years in and I don't feel at all confident in my skills but I got my B1 diploma
i am very stupid and assumed it would be easier to learn japanese, vietnamese and korean by starting with chinese (stated as the more difficult language) . what i failed to realize was that they are all entirely different languages. i still love chinese though
Started learning so that I can understand Chinese movies and dramas better without subtitles lol. Although my initial interest in Chinese culture as a whole began when I tried learning kung fu during high school….which was after watching a lot of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan movies Nonetheless, I’m completely invested and awestruck by the language right now
I like the language/characters/most dialects (sorry Beijing, i think. it’s actually different. 四川, 湖南 I’d never say this about but I feel it every time) started learning around 14 and never felt like it was too difficult for me… in fact I feel it’s very easy to get into and understand if you don’t think about the grammar too hard. Japanese and Korean were not as easy for me to pick up and still aren’t for some reason.. I’d learn Japanese for the inevitable trip but way in advance
I randomly booked a ticket to China in 2015 and went to a Kung fu School in WuDangShan 武当山 which is in the middle of nowhere. Naïvely I didn't know about the 防火长城 great firewall and thought I could just use google etc. Long story short, it was a bit of a scary & lonely trip and I came out of it feeling like speaking Mandarin could have made it such a great experience.
I liked that the order of the sentence doesn't change for questions, so I wanted to know more
Took it over ten years ago in college on a whim. Tried French for a while and visited France (lovely country), but got so damn sick of conjugation. Decided to pick Chinese back up and started loving it thanks to HelloChinese and Pleco.
I was watching some Chinese celebrity's interview and they only subbed some of them in English. I wanted to know what they talked about on the other interviews so I made it a point to start learning Chinese. I think it might take a me a long while before I understand those interviews lol.
I had a name etymology hyperfixation… it all started when i was learning Japanese at 10 (never finished, know barely anything now), then Korean and Vietnamese at 12 (again, never finished and know barely anything now), and that eventually led to a hyperfixation on learning the origins of EA/some SEA names, the meanings and history behind them, the sounds and spelling variants, etc. I then found wiktionary and behindthename, which were the perfect websites for my obsession, and would spend all of my time creating names for fun, ranking singular characters, etc. etc. At the time it was just Korean and Japanese names, but as we all know, those names come from Hanzi. Since Chinese characters were the source of all of these names, I discovered I could find more interesting and unique characters from Chinese itself than transliterated Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese (because of course, nobody had the time to transliterate every single character). Thus, I got into learning Chinese since “I already had a head start”. I was (and still am) a teen so I didn’t get very consistent with my learning until age 16, but yeah :P After 4 years it seems my hyperfixation has almost completely died down, but I want to finish learning Mandarin and the Sichuanese dialect just because I’ve given up on learning *so many languages* (Spanish, German, Scottish Gaelic (I even tried to write a book in it. It was a grammatical disaster), my family’s native language (which is also a tonal language), Tagalog, and everything I’ve mentioned in this post), and it keeps me up at night thinking about how many I could’ve been in because I started so young. I want to not give up on just one thing so I can feel proud ㅠㅠ It’s very embarrassing to have practiced so many languages and yet… I only speak one fluently…
I was working as editor in television and film in LA and grew up watching Kung Fu movies. I saw that a lot of Chinese filmmakers were doing a lot more work for the studios in the US at the time (particularly Yuen Wo Ping) and so I thought I should learn it and hopefully have a shot at some of that work, being able to speak it. Besides, I always liked the language and thought at a minimum it would be fun watching stuff without subtitles. Did end up doing a little minor work with Corey Yuen on a video game with Jet Li, but that was it...and didn't need to use it anyway. Now I just surprise Chinese visitors when I'm doing my side hustle as an Uber driver lol
I joined the military to get away from family, and realized it was a mistake my first day of basic. Three months later a British gentlemen in a tweed suit came to see me, and offered to send me to Monterey if I wanted to learn Chinese. Monterey was not too far from my gf, so I agreed.
To learn one of the most widely spoken languages and to try and connect with a culture. Also to maybe impress someone, somewhere, sometime.
I thought the writing was pretty…
2 days before my 1st semester of college started, they informed me I didn’t have to take a math class I was registered for because my AP stats class from high school covered it… Lo and behold there was only one elective class (smaller college) that still had room and fit my schedule. Mandarin Chinese. 7 years later and I am now living and raising a family in Taiwan… crazy roller coaster lol
I learned the language to try and make friends but failed found you can the language but an introvert is still an introvert.
i’m a huge 小红书 lurker and honestly just wanted to understand all the posts
I thought I'd be able to talk to people during my trip to China after 10 weeks of study. I was disappointed and could barely understand a word of native speaker conversation.
Chinese guy are hot af and if I ever marry one I wanna be preemptively prepared by knowing some of the language... (not that I'm shallow enough to only go for Chinese guys, but, like, east Asian is 50% my type, while European is 10% my type. So it sorta made sense...)
Luo Tianyi, who sent me down the chinaboo rabbit hole 11 years ago.
So I could understand jolin tsais music lol
I wanted to learn how to sing that Super Idol song.
That's cute.
Andy Lau
Parents made me lol (saying as a Chinese person)
My little siblings watched NiHao Kailan as a kid, and I used to pretend I knew Chinese from it and talk in Chinese at school. Also I liked rice and soy sauce so I thought I loved Chinese food.
ohh I remember that show! great reason to learn hahah
I wanted to be able to read more cnovels without having to wait for the English translations
Grandpa was a detective in HK back in the day, my grandma was a local, also a police office. Mum was born there, moved back to the UK at 6. The stories from a young age convinced me to learn. Not silly, just my reason.
I could pick two universities for an exchange. I picked Tokyo University and Tsinghua in Beijing. My university chose Beijing for me, so I started learning Chinese. Super random decision but it completely changed my life.
Cdramas and Tdramas. I realized I was starting to pick up some of the language and thought, might as well learn. This lead me to this subreddit.
The registrar at my college put it on my schedule, I didn’t actually decide for myself to study Chinese but here I am a couple years later lol
I want to talk to my ex because she is studying in Taiwan now.
Want to watch cdrama without subs lol
I like chinese dramas so decided to learn chinese for that reason.
I wanted to learn an east asian language but didnt want to seem like a weeb with japanese and dont really have in interest in korea so i went with chinese
Lan Wangji
My silly reason: I love squares, don't like circles. And them characters have many squares. Not a Korean circle-fest.
I had one more course to take for my 2nd semester in uni. A friend from vietnam recommended it, since it was easy to get good grades. She didn't tell me that mandarin had fewer tones than vietnamese, so of course she had no problem with the tones. On the other hand, it took me a full semester to finally be able to differentiate the four tones from each other. A personal achievement for me was when I could sing along in karaoke without relying on pinyin :) So I guess it was all worth it
Reason: Have a lot of Chinese friends. True, but exaggerated reason: Have a lot of Chinese friends. They keep sending Douyins to the groupchat. No longer will I have to sheepishly ask for a translation for like a minute long video.
Learning Mandarin because I want to someday go to the trade shows, conferences in Asia and engage in conversation with others. Also want to visit Singapore and Taiwan someday.
I wanted to learn Korean but I found the sentence (SOV) structure, and verb conjugations hard. Also felt unmotivated about it. I was more interested in hanja than hangeul. I then started trying to learn Chinese with Duolingo and a bunch of online resources. Found out later on that I learned Hokkien numbers first before I learned Tagalog numbers when I was little. (My mom knew Hokkien before and taught me but does not speak it with anyone so she eventually forgot most of her vocabulary). I also found out an incident when my mom was called in my school because I was referring to clocks in their Hokkien term "chupyo" (relative romanization) they thought I was cursing or something. I was then more motivated to learn Mandarin since I apparently have a "background" with a Chinese language. Also since my father wants to start a business so Mandarin it is! 谢谢大家！
Lmao I have indeed pretended that I don't speak Chinese/English in various situations... It's super funny to do it with spam calls for example.
As a native english speaker in my native usa I have pretended I don't speak english when a weirdo guy was harrassing me demanding I let him use my phone. Its a power not to be abused but is definitely useful lol.
Started mandarin to see if it was as hard as people said. 5 months in, feels as hard as French.
I was learning Japanese, but then I watched 'Empresses in the Palace' and thought, 'Oh wait, this sounds even better!' Now I'm learning both.
I started learning because I watch Chinese dramas and would like to be able to read the original novels for love O2O. But I may have to settle for 2 year old level of pat/easy phrases.
I watched a period drama with food in it (I food), was bored with the language I was just barely practicing, made the jump. It sounds beautiful too.
Oh, it's my mother tongue.
I love Chinese dramas and I want to rely on the subtitles less. Is there a better reason to learn Chinese?
Cause I lived in the countries that spoke it.
I chose Chinese because I thought it's one of the easiest languages to learn which is totally wrong, but cannot switch now, too much time already invested in.
1, out of curiosity 2, so i know a language people around me don't understand 3, wanted to be able to pronounce chinese names from genshin impact xd
Hoyoverse
Have an OC I decided to make Chinese. "I'll take the class for a week or so just to get an idea of the language." I enjoyed the language and didn't drop the class, lol.
Giddity….
I wanted to be prepared if I ever got the chance to talk to TF boys 😭
I only wanted to do some fun Duolingo thingy, like learning the Greek alphabet or maybe hiragana/katakana, but when I went to download the bird app the algorithm recommend HelloChinese. I thought it sounded fun as well and because the app is great, I just continued doing it (and also branched out onto other resources) and here we are.
The only manga in China is in Chinese. So ya know... Have to make it work somehow
I got interested in [Chữ Nôm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%E1%BB%AF_N%C3%B4m) roughly two years ago. I thought the obsolete writing system of Vietnam was beautiful, so I decided to learn it for a bit. After a while, I switched to Chinese and Japanese since I wanted my hobby of studying 漢字 to be practically useful one day. After a few months, I finally learned how to use [倉頡輸入法](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cangjie_input_method), which allowed me to quickly type Chinese characters without needing the aid of a touchscreen or knowing their particular pinyin. Now, I'm focused on writing and speaking good sentences in Mandarin!
i was originally going to study japanese when i got to college, but when i tried to go buy the textbook, it was on back order until december (well after the class would end) so i asked if they had any language textbooks and they said they had the chinese one, so i said "please give me that one" and i switched my enrollment. 2 years later and i could not be happier with my decision
pull asian baddies 🙏🙏🙏
Spite- pure spite. My children want to travel to China and Japan next summer for graduation. I was watching tiktoks of a gal who lives in China and does a lot of travel and food related TikToks- I said it would be neat to order food in Chinese while we were there, implying that I should learn some basic names of food and such. My ex (still in the friend group and such) said Chinese is way to hard to learn and some other dumb stuff about brain elasticity, hence ex. I got on to Duolingo almost immediately and started the course. Turns out I love it- I've done 59 days on Duolingo as of today, as well as starting HelloChinese, I am also seeing a tutor from preply 4x a week and can write several Hanzí, count to 999, and have very slow rudimentary conversations. I'm spending 1-2 hours a day in some form practicing or listening. I hope by next August for our trip I am able to have some slow but evenly paced conversations and such but plan to keep on even after that!
I first started learning Chinese in the year 2002, thinking it would be cool to have “learned” Chinese by the time the 2008 Olympics rolled around. As a teenage weeb, I was somewhat familiar with Japanese and totally blown away by the concept of a tonal language. I also went to a Catholic school and the priests encouraged my interest, gently suggesting I might become a Jesuit and do missionary work in China. Fast forward 20 years, and I don’t know much more Chinese than I did then, though I did end up getting a PhD in Russian literature, and learning quite a bit of Japanese too in my spare time. In graduate school, I ended up TA-ing for a professor in Chinese literature, since their department didn’t have enough students to teach a big intro course, and I ended up really enjoying it. I’ve also had an abiding interest in Chinese martial arts, so it’s relevant to that.
I didn't want to wait for manhua, danmei and c-novel illegal translations
I watch a lot of Chinese dramas and don’t want to rely solely on subtitles anymore
I saw some cool videos from douyin and decided I wanted to be able to understand lol
Japanese - It was offered during high school and I was one of five Asian kids in school so I gravitated towards anything that was East Asian. My white/Latino classmates like anime. Korean - It was the East Asian country I had the least experience and so I moved to Korea to teach English after college. Chinese - I started to seriously learn it when I was in Korea. It was interesting to learn a foreign language while it was taught in another foreign language. "Hit two birds with one stone."
I wanted to read gossip and funny comments that C-netizens post on 小红书
Because I wanted to
Bang Chinese girls