Can I Speak Chinese?

hey letters this is larry6 here another video i am on the streets of asia and i wanted to talk about something that is uh very much a thing that happened to me thing that happened to me and probably a thing that would happen to you if you moved abroad but maybe it depends on what country you move to or want to [Music] i have a theory that your chinese or language skills in general so this can apply to any expats abroad will actually deteriorate or just stop improving altogether what do i mean by that so when you first move to asia or china let's just use china as an example if you move to china you will be constantly praised over and over and over again by your use of the word nihao literally learning to say hello is enough to make people really impressed with your language skills and it kind of gives you this bizarre self-confidence so my first theory about why your language skills will probably stop improving is because your normal everyday circumstance in normal everyday conversations with people are probably actually limited to very very simple phrases and i actually don't mean that in your country of choice i mean the country you can come from think about this when you go out and you buy a hamburger when you go out to the supermarket when you go out to do basic things how often do you have very in-depth conversations about varied topics or is it more like you go out and say i would like one of these thank you very much how's your day it's usually normal simple conversations and that kind of has to do with the fact that as human beings we go out and socialize we're not actually super super we're not actually super super apt to go out and try to uh start massive conversations with random people combine this with the fact that i think most human beings are a little bit scared or embarrassed to make mistakes i think it's only natural to want to save face and not be the kind of idiot that's sounds stupid or like a child when he's trying to speak a foreign language and also compound this with the fact that you're in a completely foreign uh completely foreign country and your kind of context or realization of how things work might be a lot different than what you're used to back home or the habits that you had back home next are the kind of repeated conversations that you're going to have with the locals so every day you go to the same shop let's say i go to the shop here every single day and i see the same person every day right you'll have that same conversation so many times that you will eventually sound fluent in that conversation so maybe you don't know how to talk about you know your likes and dislikes but you do know how to say uh today the weather was great it's in the end right and you say it so many times that you become so fluent at that statement that people kind of expect that you you speak fluent chinese so instead of them kind of taking it slow with you eventually they're going to start going wow this guy's fluent in chinese and just start spouting things you while you nod stupidly and say means yes what's this milk that's really good it's delicious there's pork knuckles over there as well i should just call it pig's feet though that's what they are knuckles sounds so much less threatening than uh than pig's feet really yeah knuckle sounds like more foam you know one time in taiwan i actually saw hitler's pig's feet it was literally hitler brand pig's feet because they thought it was like a funny german kind of plane whereas you wouldn't be able to get away without at home so these repeated exchanges with people over and over again will kind of like especially all this praise you're getting will kind of boost your confidence to a point where you actually think you're better at chinese or whatever language you're learning than you actually are so instead of going to the fruit seller and talking about the price of apples it might go a lot deeper than that right so you have to be aware that this kind of blow to your confidence when you don't understand something or someone kind of disappointed because they can't have a conversation with you can lead to you kind of hiding from the fact that you should probably uh you know get out there more make the mistakes and put in the effort to study more as well another perspective at least for me and i think vivi would agree she probably doesn't understand this because she grew up being able to read chinese characters right every day she went to school she practiced strokes and it took a lot of effort it's not like us learning the alphabet right so was it difficult to learn chinese characters that's pretty hard and what made it hard because you need to remember like every character like for example the english it's like just a it's like one stroke and then b and just like this and every single chinese character you need to do a lot of like completely right if you are missing one or that probably you will accidentally change another meaning right so you need to like for example one word for example cow you need to practice for like a thousand times so that you're not gonna make a mistake become a nude yeah exactly so what am i getting at here this is probably the worst uh kind of caveat or the worst barrier to improving at chinese or maybe any language that requires characters like japanese is the fact that characters are so foreboding they're so complex and so difficult to learn but let's say you do learn them let's say you learn them one by one and you're putting in all your effort the problem is if you go to mexico and you don't speak spanish but you're a native english speaker at least you can read signs so for example if the sign says um if the sign says something you completely don't understand at least you can sound it out and through context maybe over time you will get to know what that means so of course it's not as efficient to walk around and just start reading newspapers you can't read or signs you can't read but what is what is efficient is all that passive learning you're doing just by reading stuff around you right now in china or in a chinese speaking country or in japan you're walking around and you're not seeing those letters that you can potentially understand you're looking at characters that mean nothing and those will not gradually absorb into your brain because they're not in a latin alphabet right so this whole kind of uh this absent part of language learning passive language learning for reading is completely gone so the fact that there's 30 000 characters out there and you probably are going to be learning them very very slowly means that you can't learn through context and you have a ton of work ahead of you if you want to be able to read so to me that slows down language learning ability massively now it's not all doom and gloom at the end of the day you will probably if you are one of the you know small percentage of people that really puts in the effort you'll probably pull it up and it's actually ultimately super rewarding to learn a different language especially chinese if you choose to live in china or hong kong or taiwan or wherever people can actually use the language and i think it's really really cool and i think it expands your mind and look it helps you look at things in different ways first off i want to address something that people have asked me countless times over and over again i've done videos on how i learned chinese but this is going to be targeting all of you about how to learn any language uh this is so i don't have to answer all these emails anymore and you guys can actually learn how i learn chinese and you can maybe put it towards any language that you want to learn no matter where you are you don't have to be in said country so this is what i did the most important thing is to find a language partner so a native speaker of whatever language that you're using and have weekly or twice weekly sit-down conversations only in chinese or whatever language you're you know you're learning and i found that paying someone is a lot better than just getting a freebie because they're kind of beholden to continue to teach you anyway try and tell stories about your life and your day when you don't know a word have the partner teach it to you add it to your flash card tech go back the next conversation or lesson that you have and have the exact same conversation practicing the words that you learned and didn't know before now you have a new conversation and you rinse and repeat keep doing that over and over again tell stories from your daily life tell stories from maybe your past and this got me to fluency so much faster than any other method because the reason is you're learning things that you're actually going to say in your own language so your brain attaches real and true meaning to those words it's not some non-relatable textbook that someone else wrote so i found that this method was super super good i had multiple language partners throughout china but my fluency really blew up and increased when i got that language partner sat down had that conversation wrote down the words i didn't know studied them the next day brought him back to the next lesson and then now it's attached to real meaning in my brain hopefully that helps you guys out so i hope you appreciate this video if you did go downstairs give it a thumbs up uh if you haven't subscribed already please do that if you want more videos like this and you want to see this stuff i can't really talk about new videos sometimes go to patreon.com i want to say thank you so much a lot winners and i'll catch you on the next one hey guys i wanted to give you a quick update on the nose situation so basically what happened was uh olivia butt stomped me in the last video you saw the uh the broken nose thing she butt stomped me when i was laying on the bed and uh she sat up and i was laying the bed and she just landed on my nose and that was a little while ago but anyway it's all everything's all healed up and that instead of actually going to the doctor uh vivi and i sat in the bathroom for a little while as we clicked it back into place and it took exactly three clicks and it looks like it's fairly straight this nostril's a little bigger than the other one but i can breathe now uh and everything seems okay so i just wanted to give you guys a quick update on that and another thing that's about to happen is i'm about to head to the hospital so my wife can give birth to our next child wish us luck why am i in the cold anyway thank you so much for watching lavender's uh click down below if you want to see another lava 86 video new loudly six video every single wednesday at 1 pm est top right corner you can watch an adb china video 1 pm est every single monday and right below that a new serpents a day video every single friday at 1 pm est thanks

Channel: laowhy86

Views: 101,721

Rating: 4.8629432 out of 5

Keywords: learn chinese, speak chinese, mandarin chinese, chinese language, basic chinese, chinese learning, beginner chinese, chinese tones, laowhy86, serpentza, adv china, advchina, mandarin chinese (human language), learn mandarin, how to, living in china, china vlogger, china (country), chinese people, chinese culture, chinese wife, language learning, how to learn any language, speaking chinese, foreigner speaks chinese, american speaking mandarin, cmilk, c milk

Id: zmuu73Vlc9k

Length: 10min 2sec (602 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 26 2018