#73 The Azure Dragon and Shuai Jiao

[GrahamB]

#73 The Azure Dragon and Shuai Jiao

"Shuai Jiao is a popular modern Chinese martial art, but is it related to other arts and if so, which ones? In this episode we also look at the Chinese cosmological concept of Qinglong, or the Azure Dragon."

https://www.spreaker.com/user/9404101/7 ... shuai-jiao

[GrahamB]

The Azure Dragon on the national flag of China during the Qing dynasty, 1889-1912

[Bao]

Good discussion about mongolian, manchu and general shit etc.

Your friend says that Chinese grammar is not hard and starts to speak about tones, which is not really an issue of grammar. Some dialects understand each other very well, others are very different. So you can't really generalize in that way. Sometimes In mandarin, if you use wrong tones the meaning becomes completely different and leads to misunderstandings.

My Chinese teacher used to give an example about a guy asking a girl in the reception of a hotel about the cost for a room per night. He got one tone wrong and asked: "Can I kiss you for a whole night, how much would it cost?

For the grammar speaking, many people believe it's simple, but this is wrong. In written Chinese grammar can be extremely complex with very long sentences. In middle school Chinese classes, they sometimes pick articles from newspapers looking for grammatical mistakes. Even very few Chinese people write good advanced Chinese. Also, the grammar and what characters you use depend on what you write. Literary, news or medical language all have their specific conventions. So the Chinese language is very, very hard. Even for Chinese.

[Greg J]

My Chinese teacher used to give an example about a guy asking a girl in the reception of a hotel about the cost for a room per night. He got one tone wrong and asked: "Can I kiss you for a whole night, how much would it cost?

Vietnamese is like this as well. I once tried to order a Vietnamese dessert (three bean dessert), got the tone wrong for bean and ordered "three blood desert." Also, I called my mother in law "ghost" a couple of times by mistake...which made her and my wife kind of laugh...but not really