/lang/ - Language Learning General

China has a pretty big literary tradition and is starting to make some good vidya games and cartoons that utilize aspects of their culture and history. Teenagers are also starting to engage more with China on a surface level. Being able to go full sinophile and knowing the folklore shit and their gods and philosophy will put you ahead. Normals all know shintoism and the sengoku jidai and the famous yokai and shit that's casually scattered in anime now, but in 2003 knowing that stuff was some esoteric knowledge only needs knew. You can be that nerd on the ground floor with Chinese now before it becomes mundane as shit like Japanese culture has

China will never have Japan-tier cultural reach, stop dreaming

They're almost inevitably going to become the world power in every major respect, including culturally, it's only a matter of time

what type of immersive input does China produce

Personally, between traditional novels and web novels, I think Chinese literature is still quite decent even today. However, games, movies, and cartoons feel a bit tacky. Chinese cartoons and movies were still okay twenty years ago, but ever since censorship became stricter, most of them have become pretty bad.

The Soviet Union was a world power for most of a century
Do you watch a lot of Soviet cartoons or read a lot of Soviet (not pre-1917 Russian) literature?

The Soviet Union is not still outputting these materials like Japan and China
Weeb shit only took off in the 90s when tape sharing became easier with the internet and later fansubs in the late 90s early 2000s spreading on napster. If Japanese media stopped being produced en masse in 1991 like Soviet stuff there wouldn't be weebs or Anon Babble today.

but what games or cartoons? do you have examples?
Soviet film is kino, and there is a rabbit hole of obscure Russian music that is really damn good.

games

Genshin
Wukong
Twelve Shadows
The Legend of Jin Yong
Project Jinyiwei
Lingxu Return
Wuchang Fallen Feathers
Feng Qi Luo Yang
Code To Jin Yong
Redemption of Liuyin

cartoons/donghua

Ne Zha 2 is the highest grossing animated movie of all time
Battle through the Heavens
Swallow Star
Renegade Immortal
Qin's Moon
Jade Dynasty
Zi Chuan
Soul Land
Ling Cage Incarnation

Japan is cool because the US thinks Japan is cool
France had motor sports, revolutionary automotive designs, a prototype of the internet (minitel), savate, the Foreign Legion, the animation industry, bullet trains, airplanes, original non-capeshit comics, great sci-fi, parkour, action movies, independently developed MMA... and thanks to the Americanization of the world and anglo stereotypes, people associate France with wearing a beret and being an arrogant coward or portentous gay
Many american movies, even video clips and the whole hollywood industry often copy paste from soviet and ex-eastern block's cinematography. Same used to be with european post war movies and with Asian gems, but Asians are more aware about it nowadays and make a name for themselves with Anime and K-Dramas
80' to y2k ex-eastern block music is great
youtu.be/8jPuXn2-xkI?si=OigcXShEhqbcaZkZ

People here used to adore France, the Iraq invasion incident soured things a bit but modern redditor tier French hate is an overeaction to how much France was loved 30 years ago. Also because people wanna be racist and it's safe to be racist to France online

I am fluent in both English and Russian being a Greek Russian mutt, but my third foreign language French feels like a fucking mountain to climb. Sometimes I feel like giving up, and search for a more useful skill but now I am in too deep.

thanks anon, I'll look into these
interesting pop album. I like the organ in the second song.
I've been getting into Yuri Morozov. Really cool stuff. youtube.com/watch?v=gC_jhRY-ig4

the Foreign Legion

So fucking based. Why don't more countries have something like this?

China has a pretty big literary tradition

And the only shit people(Chinese or westerner) care about is either 2000 years old, 200 years old, or a webnovel. Nobody normal is going to go and learn Mandarin so he can learn literary Chinese(200 years old) to read 1(1) book, and then go learn literary Chinese(2000 years old) so he can read another 3(3) more books. They could just read it translated to Mandarin but then what's the point? May as well read translated to English instead, that's what a normal person would do. The webnovels are nice but as with Japanese and Korean ones you have to dig through a billion garbage ones before you find something good.

is starting to make some good vidya games and cartoons that utilize aspects of their culture and history.

The anime are all eh. They're just Japanese anime but in Mandarin and with lower quality in all ways. Not untolerable but not good either, maybe they'll get better over time but who knows. I feel like you're trying to equate China to Japan just because they arr rook same or something. The situation of the two countries is very different, Japan started prospering in the 70's and 80's, China will (presumably, maybe) start prospering somewhere between the 20's and 40's, everything is different from technology all the way to how people interact and create. There's many differences in the government, local culture, amount of people and their average wealth(notice how Japanese anime and the like just so happened to blossom when the average Jap was swimming in money), censorship, understanding of the world and so on. Just because the Japs made good anime and games doesn't mean that Chinese will, and in the first place even if Chaina becomes Nambaa Wan as you think that doesn't necessarily mean that they'll make ANY good content. Look at American literature and cartoons for example, there's some decent, nice stuff but they're very few.

Also, even if China makes good content I don't think it'll spread among foreigners. What they make is made for their own consumers, so of course it'll reflect the tastes of the consumer base. The end result of this is that as you say they "utilize aspects of their culture and history", which ends up being bizarre babble to the average foreigner. They may endure a show or two like that but they're not going to endure thousands of them, they'll give up on Chinese media after a few. The autists and those with genuine interest in the culture will stay of course, but they're an extreme minority. Japanese anime utilizes their culture too but does so in a far more lukewarm way, this is part of the reason why weebs multiplied so much in the last decade.

Being able to go full sinophile and knowing the folklore shit and their gods and philosophy will put you ahead. Normals all know shintoism and the sengoku jidai and the famous yokai and shit that's casually scattered in anime now, but in 2003 knowing that stuff was some esoteric knowledge only needs knew.

You're looking at this shit the wrong way. You're trying to be the cool wizard with esoteric knowledge, but that's just you trying to soothe your ego meaninglessly. Back in 2003 the kids who knew about Susanoo-no-Mikoto were being shoved into lockers and crying all the way until classes end and their bully finally lets them out, all that epic esoteric knowledge amounts to precisely fuck all outside of the one and a half imageboards that you'll be able to talk about them in. If you want to learn because you're genuinely curious then that's fine, but even in the places where you can talk about mysterious Japanese mythology or whatever the fuck are riddled with posing retards who don't actually give a shit AND happen to be dead as fuck. Mind you, there's no real autistic cult following like these for China at this point and there's zero reason to believe that there ever will be. If you want that knowledge then you can learn and I even encourage you to do so, but there's no point in it if you're trying to satisfy your ego or look cool, nobody will give a shit about your 50k character essay on the Heavenly Kingdom written in literary Chinese, so you'll have to find intrinsic reasons to go so deep into Chinese culture.

That's not how literary Chinese works. Written Chinese was nearly static as Classical Chinese as a separate language from vernacular Chinese much like Europeans used to write in Latin instead of their actual language. This only changed in 1911 barring some authors who wrote in a local dialect.
Also we're comparing to Japanese, most Jap learners will never read a book older than 1900 or even possess that ability as Japanese also has a language reform with 19th century Japanese practically being like Shakespeare's English

Thanks for writing all this stuff that I wanted to but was too lazy to write
Chinese culture is just not great, they have a completely different cultural attitude to art and aesthetics than the Japanese, they worship their achievements from 1000 years ago and keep everything very safe and stale. Becoming a world power would only exacerbate all this.

Look at American literature and cartoons for example, there's some decent, nice stuff but they're very few.

objectively wrong

People here used to adore France

Don't remember that except Anon Babblefags. People used to love France for shitty things like being pretentious or a fag, not cool stuff like martial art or guns or cars.

Also because people wanna be racist and it's safe to be racist to France online

you described Poles
DDT is my favorite probably. The former Eastern Bloc has this tradition of "bards" like the Polish Kaczmarski and Gintrowski, the Czech Nohavica, the Russian Okudzhava, Shvechuk. A typical Eastern European phenomenon, the closest to this are various types of poetic songs from South America
youtube.com/watch?v=ZSAMl7sbuVY
Because we live in the American world. The French aren't even arrogant, it's a pure made up by Brits and Americans bullshit in which whole Europe believe. But there is the Spanish Foreign Legion too.

That's not how literary Chinese works.

It does, though obviously the difference between literary Chinese of 200 years ago to 1000 years ago isn't anywhere as big as the difference between one language and another, so acquisition will be far simpler.

most Jap learners will never read a book older than 1900 or even possess that ability

Fair point, but in the case of learning Japanese nobody outside of actual Anon Babble autists even pretend to care about the literature, whereas with Chinese you see people talk about the great ancient literature(which they're right on) but at the end of the day just how many of these people will bother learning to read literary Chinese, and among those just how many will then proceed to read a sizable amount of classical literature? They talk about it like you can just hit HSK 2 and then immediately get to reading Confucius and have a blast, but that's really not the case at all, literary Chinese is more like a nice treat that you have after enjoying modern Chinese. Literature is not like movies or eroge or whatever where you open it up and get bukkake'd with all the shit you love and manage to enjoy the experience even with limited comprehension. And I also want to add that as literature is just one form of media out of many one can simply just not like it. It's good that Chinese has good literature whether in the form of ancient text or modern web novels, but as a reason for learning the language it can be invalidated by just the words "I don't like reading."

It's a bit the same like everyone saying you should read Harry Potter in your TL. I already know the manga I bought, so I figured it would be a good start. Besides, there a three manhua in my haul.

I have no clue how to practice output
Hate the practice books and shit
Is it over?

Your TL's general if you are any good at ragebaiting responses

write essays
watch videos and pretend like they are talking to you

schöne Mischung, anon. Wäre cool, wenn mehr Leute hier Bilder von ihrem TL-Lesestoff posten würden. Meiner Meinung nach würde das den Faden ein wenig schönen. Hier ist ein Teil meiner Sammlung von deutschen Büchern.

Danke, anon. Ich hab auch alle Bände von Deltora's Quest auf Dänisch, die müsste ich aber erst aus dem Regal holen und fotografieren. Vielleicht später mal.
Ich mochte im Übrigen von Hesse Unterm Rad sehr. War aber ehrlich gesagt auch das einzige Buch von Hesse, das ich gelesen habe. Hast du Siddharta schon gelesen? Ich hab das hier auch noch rumstehen, aber nie reingeguckt.

I do hate people who act like you can do so much higher end input at such a low level. Japanese do this do where pre-JLPT N5 will act like they can comprehend manga without translating and HSK3 people will act like they can actually read novels. I think that's a problem in general with people learning languages trying to act like they're just better at it than you.
Regarding Chinese, the big problem is Chinese universities will accept HSK4 (and sometimes HSK 3) foreigners when they are such low levels of the language. HSK 6 should be the point you consider yourself at reaching mid-game on learning Chinese with HSK band 9 being the end of midgame.
People think of the HSK levels wrong. It's more like Runescape tier shit where everything below level 70 is early game, and level 92 is halfway to 99. HSK 6 is level 70 and HSK 9 is level 92 in Runescape terms.

Fishing lvl?

see/hear a word in an anki sentence card 100 times

still don't remember it

see/hear the same word in 3 different contexts

remember it forever

Technically, I'm at HSK 4. Practically, I feel like I just started learning the language when I try to read. I know all the words, all the grammar (up to that point, not all the words and grammar there is) but actually using it when reading? Eh.
I can read very simple short stories with a browser pop up, but it's still hard and exhausting. It's also kind of demotivating although I know the only way to get better is powering through.
But really, the HSK levels don't mean much in real life.