/s
This is from hellochinese, the mandarin learning app.
Workers trying to defeat the King Koopa
this post was submitted on 18 May 2026
75 points (97.5% liked)
Memes
55812 readers
971 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 7 years ago
MODERATORS
I misread the post and was wondering how that includes a screwdriver, plunger, lunch box, Mario, Luigi.
I read "all the things IN the picture" π
Chairman Maorio
That looks fun! Mandarin is down the road for my language learning journey for now though.
It always puts me to shame when I learn how many languages most communists spoke. Like Marx learned English and Russian to be able to study those country's economics. Engels was apparently fluent in 12, and could read 20 languages.
That's amazing! I believe every communist should take up language learning, as it unlocks entirely new spaces for us to see and viewpoints. I can only speak ~1.3 languages right now, but I'd love to make it to 5 or so eventually!
I think USian communists are at a disadvantage, given how little foreign languages are taught in our schools. Not that it's an excuse, but it does mean finding free time on our own as adults (a less ideal time for learning languages) while working to support ourselves.
I hope to at least eventually brush up on the ones I learned in school. Learning Mandarin would be really useful, but I don't know when I'd find the time if I'm being honest with myself.
Yep, schooling really does put things at a disadvantage, but it's a practical pursuit nonetheless!
What made you want to learn Chinese? Is it as difficult as it looks? I hear Chinese is very complicated. I'm trying to learn Spanish and Esperanto myself. I love languages.
Mandarin is the 2nd most spoken language in the world, only behind english. Its also the 2nd most important language for programming, and has the largest open-source community in the world, so that'll be a plus for my work.
I'm also learning spanish, and am much further along there than I am in Chinese. I feel like with those 3 languages I'll never be too far from someone who can understand me.
Genuine question, in what way is Mandarin important in programming? Mentioned that to my friend and he said no way. I'm not a computer person so he didn't bother explaining.
has the largest open-source community in the world
That alone would be worth it
Upvote
I say this here because it's frankly not enough for me to just upvote this comment.
Oh and for how easy it is. If you're coming from a germanic or a romance language, it shares almost no words and roots, which means its going to take overall its going to take longer. But in most ways its much easier and more logical. No verb conjugations, no weird plurals, easier tenses, logical word and character construction. I'd argue its even better constructed even than esperanto, which still kept the weird verb declinations.
The only extra annoyance is measure words (which english has also, ie a flock of birds, a pile of clothes).
Does it have different words for the number of objects in a group like Japanese does, or just different types of groups of objects?
Numbers stay the same, but the words for "collection/group" change depending on the object. It goes [number] [measure word] [noun]
I'm not familiar with Japanese so I can't say.
If I remember correctly, the "group" names in Japanese are based on shape but aren't always intuitive, and sometimes a certain number of them will have its own special name or way of counting - the sort of thing that requires a lot of rote memorization.
Generally no. One minor example I can think of is δΈ€ and δΊ which both mean two and it can be difficult remembering when to use one or the other. But to my knowledge it's based on the way the number is being used not the item being counted.
I like to think of ε © being "a couple (of)" and δΊ being "two" like a numeral. Like ζζε ©ει»θ©± "I have (two) a couple phones" or ζε¨ι裑δ½ε ©εΉ΄ "ive lived here for (two) a couple years".
δΊ is like maths, numbereng something like 2nd is η¬¬δΊ or floor 2 is δΊζ¨
One of the fun things about learning Japanese is that on rare occasions I can read a little Chinese. I'd pronounce the words wrong, since it's different spoken, but the English translation would be correct and the meaning would be understood, like numerals.
Oh yes same. I can get context from japanese but dont know how to pronounce things (anymore).
I'm learning Mandarin right now as well, and in some ways it's much easier than other languages I've learned. Grammar is pretty straightforward, there's not conjugation or tenses to worry about either. If you learn a word, you just have to learn it once, there aren't any variations. The whole thing with tones is largely overstated I find. Even if you get the tones wrong, people will understand you from the context. Where it gets trickier is with writing because the character based system is genuinely more difficult to learn than an alphabet. The characters are basically words written in two dimensions instead of one. Most are composed of subcharacters of which there is a common set of. But the upside here is that once you learn them, reading is a lot faster because each one is basically like an icon. So, you can scan through text a lot easier than with words all written out left to right.
It was always the tones that made me anxious about trying to learn it; I'm glad to hear that's overstated.
Same, I'm basically tone deaf and just assumed that Mandarin wouldn't be accessible to me. But then I finally decided to give it a go, and turned out to not be much of an issue at all. I also find that it's easier to remember the tones in a context of a sentence. It's a lot like when you put an accent on different words when you speak English, so you can just memorize the cadence of the sentence, and you'll start learning the tones implicitly.
I've just decided to postpone the writing for now. If you're mainly going to be using a keyboard, then they convert pinyin into the correct characters anyway. When learning I turn pinyin off tho, so I can get used to fully recognizing the characters for reading, even if I couldn't draw them from scratch.
That's the approach I took as well. For the first year, I just stuck with pinyin, and then once I got comfortable enough conversationally, I started making some effort to learn the characters. I find drawing them out really helps you memorize them so you can recognize them later, so even if you're going to write using pinyin, practising writing is still useful. And it does get easier, because there is a fixed set of symbols that all the characters are composed of. So, once you learn the first batch, it only gets easier from there. But yeah, putting that off is the correct call.
Is the app good? I recall having My Chinese coach on NintendoDS it was quite fun , considering that you could draw characters with a stylus ^_^
I def like it, although I've been supplementing with comprehensible input platforms like https://www.vidioma.com/
These apps have their place, but they won't get you fluent as quickly as listening to native speakers with context.
a good friend of my gf is Chinese native speaker, but , to my shame, I still never used this opportunity to practice yet.