Hong Kong Cinema/Martial Arts Films: Big Fight in Little Corona

[rabidtictac]

My favorite Zhuge Liang line is when he provokes Zhou Yu into fighting Cao Cao by telling Zhou Yu that Cao Cao wants bone the Qiao sisters.

"Hey, pssst. Hey. That guy over there totally wants 2 fuk ur bitch." -Kongming, brilliant strategist

Zhuge Liang also talked a guy to death in-person. The guy was Wang Lang. Kongming scolded him so bad that he died of anger.

[Kugelfisch]

Nah, Chinese is just such a pain to listen to that even native speakers can't stand to hear it for more than an hour without a break.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

Japanese is way more pleasant to hear, which is why animu will always triumph over bootleg animu.

[Jiangshi]

Most Mandarin dialects are godawful sounding (still not as bad as Japanese in my opinion), especially compared to the Guangxi based dialects of Cantonese. Regardless, Chinese is just an incredibly primitive, inferior language by any objective standard. The purpose of language is to convey information, and Chinese with it's never ending list of homophones as well as it's lack of grammar and proper sentence struture is one of the most imprecise garbage languages on earth. Anything latin-based is head and shoulders above that abortion of a language.

[Kugelfisch]

Huh huh, check it out, Beavis! He said "homo".

[Liar Revealed]

Chinese with it's never ending list of homophones as well as its lack of grammar and proper sentence structure is one of the most imprecise garbage languages on earth.

Aren't there supposed to be "tones" that differentiate these homophones? I could never get a handle on tones, thus I failed at learning this language.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

From my experience with Three Kingdoms, I can say that have way too many different variations of "ch", "j" and "sh".

Like all Chinese languages, Mandarin uses phonemic tones to distinguish homophonic syllables, which it has five. For example, mā (妈) means "mother", má (麻) means "hemp", mă (马) means "horse", mà (骂) means "scold", and ma (吗) is a yes/no question particle. Although all these words consist of the same string of consonants and vowels, the only way to distinguish each of these words audibly is by listening to which tone the word has, and as shown above, saying a consonant-vowel string using a different tone can produce an entirely different word altogether.

Holy fuck. They even write poems and shit that makes use of this nonsense.

For example, "Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den" in Mandarin is "Shī Shì shí shī shǐ". Easy, ain't it?

[Jiangshi]

Chinese with it's never ending list of homophones as well as its lack of grammar and proper sentence structure is one of the most imprecise garbage languages on earth.

Aren't there supposed to be "tones" that differentiate these homophones? I could never get a handle on tones, thus I failed at learning this language.

There are (in mandarin it are 4 + the neutral one, cantonese are a few more), but i'm not talking about those. If the difference was just the intonation as in Mā / Mà it wouldn't be homophones (but they come in addition to homophones). I'm talking about words that are pronounced exactly alike but have different meanings. You can only differentiate them from context (and even that is not always possible) or by looking at the written symbol. If you can only read pinyin you won't be able to know which word is meant. Many books use that for puns, like when the Grand Master of Bodhi asks the Monkey King for his last name but he misunderstands it as him asking to describe his character traits in Journey to the West.

From my experience with Three Kingdoms, I can say that have way too many different variations of "ch", "j" and "sh".

Like all Chinese languages, Mandarin uses phonemic tones to distinguish homophonic syllables, which it has five. For example, mā (妈) means "mother", má (麻) means "hemp", mă (马) means "horse", mà (骂) means "scold", and ma (吗) is a yes/no question particle. Although all these words consist of the same string of consonants and vowels, the only way to distinguish each of these words audibly is by listening to which tone the word has, and as shown above, saying a consonant-vowel string using a different tone can produce an entirely different word altogether.

Holy fuck. They even write poems and shit that makes use of this nonsense.

For example, "Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den" in Mandarin is "Shī Shì shí shī shǐ". Easy, ain't it?

Part of that is a pinyin problem. While X and J are pronounced differently for instance, Zh is pronounced exactly as J. It depends upon the vowels that follow which of the two you use.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

Pinyin sucks balls. I'd say 98% of all Germans don't know how to pronounce the X, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

[Jiangshi]

As i said, not only does pinyin suck balls, but the chinese language in general is a subhuman level of communication. Considering the proper pronunciation of the X is not even a sound used in most languages you cannot blame people for either just pronouncing it as an X or go with a Sh sound. As a matter of fact, it's best when people don't bother pronuncing it at all. There is no value in learning to speak this language.