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you could be a rapper yourself with wordplay like that Don't think he's confusing "The highest good is like water" with "Come Mr Tally Man tally me banana"

The rapper Common, in an early song, pronounced Dao "tay-oh"

For many months last year I was at 1 star. I did wonder how many people I'd pissed off that much... but I'm sure people I've met in person rate me worse, so I'm not going to let it bother me. In terms of personability I'm probably a 2 anyway Clearly online interactions are already a step or two removed from "real life", and though it doesn't happen on TDB nearly as much as elsewhere online, there's a tendency to treat each other as less than human. So I do think that being able to rate people as if they were electronics bought on eBay probably exacerbates that.

Publicly rating people.. something pretty much unique to the internet, isn't it..? Seems quite bizarre when you think about it, but these things are so widely accepted now; I barely batted an eyelid at first.

"Do as many pronunciation drills as you can, as early as you can." Yes, this is one major thing. The same advice I gave Saoshun here. I've known many laowai who didn't practice tones and/or pronunciation from the start and, years later, still have problems (in some situations) being understood. Zuckerburg seems like an example of that.. his pronunciation and tones are horrible (I know he's been busy with other things, though ). My other advice is always going to be: learn the characters, from the ground up. The pronunciation, meaning, and physical appearance of each character are all deeply connected. If you can learn the writing system from the ground up -- strokes, radicals, character history, etc -- at the same time as learning to speak, your understanding of the language as a whole will be much stronger than someone who just picks up spoken Chinese, or someone who just learns to read text.

litu100.com is just an ad dump now. I don't know how you'd get one, but if you could somehow get an invitation to the litu1000 site and sign up, you could surely ask the members who the photo came from / who's in it...?

Will your friends (these 2 natives) help to teach you? Would you be able to find a long-term teacher? Would you be able to go to China? I really don't know where to start... If you're serious about learning to read/write and speak, the best thing is to go to China. Find a school, or get a job out there (perhaps teaching English) and find a tutor. Learn the fundamentals (tones, pronunciation, grammar, character structure) from teacher/tutor. And then of course you will pick it up by living in it. If you can't go abroad, you will still benefit greatly from a teacher, at least at the beginning, to teach you the fundamentals. You could learn to just speak, or just read/write, but these things (tones, pronunciation, grammar, characters) are intimately connected. Neglecting any of them from the beginning will slow the progress of learning all the others, in the long run. And you'll benefit from someone to tell you where you're going wrong. Here are some suggestions, focused a little more on reading and writing, based on my experience. Others might tell you differently, but I'm sure these things worked for me, at the beginning: Speaking To learn the 4 tones well, you need to drill. Repetition. And someone to listen to, and to correct you. People who don't learn the tones well sound silly and have difficulty making themselves understood even if their grammar and pronunciation is perfect. Listen, repeat.... To learn pronunciation, learn pinyin. Learn the initials and finals (e.g. in "Saoshun", s and sh are initials and ao and un are finals), and practice certain difficult sounds. Again, good to have someone to listen to, and to correct you. There are some sounds that just don't make sense at first. Listen, repeat.... Grammar The grammar is mostly very simple and logical. To my eternal joy, there's no conjugation of verbs; making past/future is very straightforward. For example, (again at a basic level) generally all you need to do to make something past tense is stick one of 2 particles at the end of a sentence. As you get more advanced there are some seemingly weird structures that will need explaining, but again they're really very logical. Characters For me, this was the easy part, though it seems daunting to begin with. Firstly, learn the basic character parts (radicals) and their pronunciations. You can see them here: http://zhongwen.com/ To learn the correct stroke order you'll again benefit from a teacher though there are loads of websites with animations that show you the stroke order. Learn to write 一 and 乙 and 口 and so on, getting progressively more complex. The radicals are generally found in combination in each character. e.g. 妈 = 女 + 马 mother = woman + horse Woman gives meaning, horse (ma) gives pronunciation. If you learn all the written structures, pronunciations, and meanings of the most basic parts of the written language, the more complex parts come quite easily. Not all are so straightforward, but you can often guess at the meaning and/or pronunciation of a character if you know the components. Then all you need to do is... repetition. To learn a character, write it out. A lot. With its pinyin pronunciation. And with all this, of course, you need to learn the words..

Quite a task... What degree of fluency would you hope to achieve?

Literally "beautiful picture" No, I think that's just Google Translate being a useless pile of garbage. Litu just means Pretty Picture. http://www.litu1000.com/ It seems to be here now. Looks like a forum for photographers to share photos. Invitation only to sign up...

Yes, 麗圖 = Litu = Beautiful Pictures

The image that says "麗圖 中国摄影人原创 www.litu100.com“ ? This is just about the website the photo came from, litu

Well, now that pinyin is learned by most children in China (or the majority of those who go to school and learn to read and write), it should have more staying power than the others...

那我怎么感觉有点儿饿呢

Forgetting about words is the goal, but this is all but impossible when our language is (sublimely) insufficient. If we use one word (sound) to mean more than one thing, we often get confused. Though I did not know what you meant by tzujan immediately when I first read it on here, I figured it out. It's not something that I could easily confuse with meaning "potato" or "sacrifice" or whatever. But if we use chi to mean qi and ji and things that are correctly spelled chi in pinyin (pool, tooth, etc), things can start to get confusing. There are acupuncture points such as "Yang Chi" and "Feng Chi" which mean "Pool of Yang" and "Pool of Wind" (or something like that)...they have nothing to do with qi (directly) but could be confused as such by some. In the end it's still not absolutely important, it just bothers me. 欲是其所非而非其所是則莫若以明 "If one wants to affirm all their negatives and negate all their affirmatives, there's nothing like being clear." (ZZ)

Indeed, it doesn't matter at all. But for those who speak Chinese, and especially those with obsessive tendencies, the pinyin makes a lot more sense in every case (something like Chiang Kai-Shek, for example, is barely close to the pronunciation Jiang Jieshi...I don't know how they got there..) The only one that really bothers me is chi. Neither the chi meaning energy nor the chi in Tai Chi are spelled like that in pinyin, and easily conflated by many. Energy/breath is qi and the martial art is Taijiquan!!!

Ah. Refreshing works!

Thought I'd been banned for some reason... If I go to thetaobums.com I still get a picture of an elderly man meditating and "offline. be back soon. 坐忘" So I'm thinking there are probably still a few who are getting that, and haven't realised yet...?

I used to have an iPod Touch, and downloaded a Holy Bible app. It allowed me to choose from a number of translations (KJV, NIV, etc) and read them alongside each other. It was very interesting to see the differences. So (not having seen your app) I think even if you couldn't compare English and Chinese, comparing 2 English translations might also be useful for people.

1. English speaker learning Chinese, or vice versa, wanting to compare in order to learn (this would have been cool to have when I was first learning) 2. Bilingual reader wanting to check the English translation alongside the Chinese (this would be cool to have now, if I had a phone for it) 3. English speaker who doesn't care to learn Chinese but feels that it gives a more "authentic" vibe to see the Chinese text I know you're making this app for those interested in reading the DDJ, not learning a language, but there are many out there who fit in one of these 3 categories...

I am currently eating peanut butter out of a bowl. Mixed it with actual butter. Mmmmm.

I would check it out but don't have a smartphone, so... sorry for the redundant comment...

We think we've grown out of the traditional Christian taboo on sex, but we're actually very much still reacting to it in our attitude towards sex even now. The fact that men consider it "epic" to be able to pick up a different woman every night (I used to have this mindset too), and entire social lives are built around this pursuit, shows just how estranged we've become from the original act: two animals having sex, for two reasons -- for pleasure and to reproduce. (Not all animals do it for pleasure of course, but look at bonobos, macaques, giraffes...it is often of evolutionary benefit for it to be pleasurable.) When I say "Christian taboo", this applies elsewhere too. The (sub)cultural obsession with having sex with as many people as possible probably arises to a greater extent in societies where sex is hidden behind a curtain, portrayed as naughty, and historically "forbidden", but where in reality everyone is (of course) still having sex regardless. This describes many societies throughout the past few hundred years. I don't know that it's 'natural' for two people to spend their lives together only having sex with each other, but I equally don't know that it's 'natural' to go out frequently in the nighttime with the sole purpose of having sex and not reproducing. Very odd, really. In a healthy society (paradox?), I think the attitude would be somewhere in the middle. Rather than spend one's early adulthood seeking as many partners as possible, and then getting bored and choosing one to sign a legal contract with saying that you'll never leave each other until one of you dies, it seems to me that a free breed of people would choose partners as and when they found one with whom they had a mutual connection, and then move on as and when that connection broke down.

- not sure if posted before. worth posting again anyway. - i realise that it's most likely staged, but....let's just pretend it's real either way, OK? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHE94f91Daw

I suppose it depends on perspective. I'd argue that we force things all the time, and often quite successfully. However, our use of brute force is often harmful, and in the short term we often don't know what the outcome will be. And yes, eventually everything will indeed separate back. Then again, if I eat all the peanut butter before it separates again...

Most on this forum, I think, have already discussed general differences between translations/translators many times, and so I don't know if you'll get much of a conversation out of this topic. But there are a bunch of us always happy to discuss individual chapters, whether it be linguistic or philosophical or practical questions, etc...