Foreigner Tests Chinese Locals on Their Chinese

all right folks what's up it's kevin here i got my buddy jamie with me what's up guys we're out here in the streets of shanghai and we're going to be putting chinese locals to the test one of my favorite things to do is just to test locals on you know some maybe strange characters or characters they don't use so much or also characters that use a lot every day but they might be you know pronouncing them wrong or they might be writing them wrong so we're going to try and trip some people up today okay so we found someone here i'm going to test him on the chinese we'll see if we see how many he can get right i got five total words for him we're gonna see how many we can get all right in english this means portrait okay [Music] a lot of the people here on nanjing road this is the busiest street in shanghai there are a lot of tourists from all over china okay so you got people from shanghai beijing hunan and way everywhere right so and i'm what i'm finding is people from different places are getting the same ones right or the same ones wrong i think it's all to do with the the influence from the dialects that they have all over china all right good job hey you got the second one right this one a lot of people say tu kwang right but it's tu guam and that kind of means like kind of rough kind of messy this one's going to be pretty easy i think this one most people know but i'm going to see if we can trip somebody up on it uh this basically means like alcohol abuse okay so check it out shoot yourself all right this last one is definitely gonna get him okay because this one has the most strokes out of all the chinese characters in the dictionary okay so i'm gonna try and get him on this one [Applause] so we've already tested people on their reading ability okay now we're taking it to the next level we're gonna test them on their writing okay so i've written down three characters that are part of a chinese idiom which basically means to benefit from something right you benefit a lot from something so eat faith here a lot of people write that third character wrong instead of writing fae they write faith so we're going to test them out and we're going to see how many people write it right how many people write it wrong school this is actually a character that has so many strokes you can't even type it on the computer all right this is all right now a lot of people from xi'an from the shanxi area they know this character very well because this is the name of their traditional noodles that they have there in shanxi they're like these super wide super tasty noodles um a lot of people in shanghai probably will know this character they'll know how to read it they'll know oh it's that it's that noodle character right but let's see if they can write it i'm gonna show them the page i'm going to show you a quick look and then see if they can write it it's a tough one let's see how they do yeah [Music] now a lot of people they managed to write it i gave them a look you know after a couple of tries they were able to do it but one thing they were getting wrong is the order of the strokes now a lot of foreigners when you look at chinese characters it just looks like a picture right and you think you're if you're painting a picture you could start from the top start from the bottom it doesn't matter but in chinese when you're writing characters there's a specific order that you need to do each stroke in and a lot of people were getting that wrong so the next challenge that we're going to be doing is we're going to be challenging people on their stroke order okay i'm not gonna hide the character i'm gonna show them the character they can write their character right next to mine but i bet you they're gonna struggle right in the strokes in the correct order let's see how they do what oh foreign all right so we had a lot of fun today we tested chinese people out on their writing ability you know their reading and also their stroke order as well it was tough it was a tough challenge for them if somebody tested me on my english spelling i'd probably mess up too this wasn't to uh degrade anybody and make anyone feel bad this is just a little bit of fun i feel that they got tripped up at the end with the traditional character patel for you guys out there the the traditional character is a lot harder than the simplified that's the simplified uh chinese character for the one that we were doing earlier that looked like this okay now obviously it's a lot faster to write okay the simplify wants a lot faster to write but a lot of people ask me why do i write in traditional chinese and i think there's a few reasons um obviously it looks nicer a lot of people that write calligraphy and everything see i can't speak english the people that write calligraphy they use traditional chinese a lot of time you know when you get you know when people get tattoos and things it's seen as more of a kind of an artistic uh version of the written language uh but another reason is i kind of think it think that you know i compare it to english a lot of the time here's a question for you guys that you know in the uk and the us imagine if uh instead of writing how we you know spell how we spell now what if people started writing like this all the time you know what are you doing to today what if what if the government said that we're gonna scrap the way that we spell english now and we're going to start writing like this you know it's just it's off you know it's not really it's not right and i feel that traditional chinese is you know the real form of the written language and a lot of people in shanghai have started using it again a lot of my friends and also because i speak and learn chinese you need to write in traditional chinese when you're writing in shanghainese as well just because of the the number of homophones and everything so it's good i encourage people if you're going to learn chinese learn traditional chinese all right thank you for subscribing to monkey abroad make sure that you give this video a thumbs up leave a comment at the bottom let us know your thoughts and thank you very much for watching [Music] you

Channel: Monkey Abroad

Views: 2,896,164

Rating: 4.7665739 out of 5

Keywords: china, chinese, chinese language, chinese people, mandarin, chinese tones, chinese dialect, dialect, language, language test, HSK, Chinese test, chinese language test, 普通话, 中文, 中文字, study chinese, chinese student, write chinese, written chinese, chinese characters, chinese writing, oral chinese, kevin cook, monkey abroad, traditional chinese

Id: HQh1_zyig1M

Length: 10min 44sec (644 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 05 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Damn this dude is good! I'm Chinese myself and even I got some of the pronunciation wrong. What's more impressive is that he seems to know both simplified and traditional Chinese which make it much more impressive!!

[u/[deleted]]

This is very refreshing. He doesn't seem to be one of those bitter hack english teachers in China. There are alot of them who are vloggers and absolutely hate the country, culture, and people. I'm def subbing to this guys content.

[u/Blacknarcissa]

This was interesting.

Where is the guy actually from? I'm British and I thought he was a Brit with a super Americanised accent...

[u/[deleted]]

mad respect for his fluency. its a tough language!!

[u/tyrroi]

What pen is he using?

[u/xi_mezmerize_ix]

All those lines and complexity for very short words?

[u/[deleted]]

His English accent is tripping me up, back and forth from an England based to American/Canadian?

[u/Theothor]

How is this different from English dialects pronouncing words differently?

[u/Wanrenmi]

His Chinese is good but he's definitely cherry picking contentious characters (which he half admits to). This is the equivalent of telling American English speakers from different parts of the country they say "roof" or "route" incorrectly. Except in Chinese, it's even more so.

source: I've been studying Chinese as long as this guy's been alive probably.