If even .01% of the Americans joking about learning Chinese actually dip a toe into the language, culture, and (god forbid) history… mega self own from the us state
this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2025
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chapotraphouse
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Whole lotta folks are gonna find out they have more in common with the FOREIGN ADVERSARY™'s citizens than with their own government
It would be so fucking funny if this backfired so spectacularly that it resulted in the total collapse of the "China bad" narrative in the US.
It would be nice. More probably, it also gets banned before that happens.
One of the first things I was served upon opening the app was a Frieran meme. China really pointed at me and said "weeb".
As the redditors pissed about this love to cite... It's the Streisand Effect.
Redditors are pissed about this? Oh god I need to see this, I need to taste their tears.
I have a Chinese buddy who studied in America and now lives in Hong Kong. He tried to teach me how to pronounce stuff in Mandarin and oh my god its so hard.
"how hard can it be if babies do it" is usually my mantra when I try learning languages
Babies have special brain shit going on the helps them learn super fast. My ancient and decaying brain matter is no match.
I don't know fam, most adults with very directed study/practice can become fully fluent in a language in about a year. Babies take like whaat, 5 or 6 years before they start to become regularly coherent? And their vocabulary still sucks for years after that.
You have the advantage of already knowing way more than babies so you've got more to build on.
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It’s mostly the pronunciations and teaching my tongue, palate, throat, etc. new ways to make sounds. For instance, I can’t roll my Rs either and I know a fair bit of Spanish.
As I understand it, babies are initially able to produce and hear differences in basically any sound, but will in due time come to hone in on whichever sounds are used in the language they're being raised with. Listening for only a few sounds and remembering how to produce only a few sounds reduces the cognitive load, basically.
I'm able to make a pretty broad range of sounds, but I'm not sure how exactly I gained this ability. A part of it was certainly taking the time to learn the International Phonetic Alphabet and actually consciously learning the mechanics of making different sounds, but another part of it I think was just always enjoying making weird mouth noises, beatboxing, mimicking things, or doing silly voices or accents. Growing up with two languages probably also helped, but I'm told I have a "slight foreign accent" in Norwegian, so the exact extent of that help is a bit questionable.
Anybody, in any case, is able to learn to make new sounds and distinctions. It's probably easier than you might think, although it also might take some perseverance for some people, and you might never get perfect native-like pronunciation — but why should you want that, anyways? Own your accent, I say.
I think the problem with learning new sounds is oftentimes just having bad teachers, though. For instance rolled R's actually are fairly common (non-phonemically) in American English, especially in "what'd" or sometimes other contractions ending in -t'd: /wətəd/ → /wəɾəd/ → /wəɾəɾ‿/ → /wəɾɾ‿/ → /wər‿/ — this coalescence of /ɾəɾ/ to /r/ is considered to be more widespread in African American Vernacular English compared to other forms of American English, though. Like if you've seen that viral video "I've Never Seen Cops Run This Fast" you probably noticed how the cameraman very prominently says "outta there" as "ou[r]ere" and "speed it up" as "spee[r]up".
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I finally started getting my verification codes. Like, hours later. It's an improvement.
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Oh i bet the chinese users are stoooookkkeeddd about a bunch of yanks polluting their space
It's the internet, if regular people from different groups, especially Americans and Chinese, the former of whom's government and media has been fomenting a cold war and racist propaganda for decades, can get together and have regular interactions I see that as an absolute win.
Luxemburg emphasized: “There can be no socialism outside the international solidarity of the proletariat.”
just saw this comment
I love how comments there can have pictures in them, unlike TikTok. Someone posts dog and they get a dog tax paid stamp in reply
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They don't care, and I'm have a feeling that the app will not put up with nonsense from foreigners. This is not a Meta subsidiary, don't forget.
As an example (as others have mentioned on here) that your country (or province, if inside the PRC) is shown on your profile cause of all the trolling from the Taiwanese.
If they need to ban Americans I'm sure they would, but why do that when you can just moderate them? At least give it a try...
some are showing concern but from what i see it's a lot of excitement and curiosity. many americans are shockingly being polite and using AI to provide translations (possibly the only good thing AI is for)
Most Americans will just go to instagram/facebook/twitter unfortunately
The great Satan won this round I’m afraid. Still though, I’m really curious to see some metrics (if those are even available anywhere)
One very funny statistic for now
Is Lemon8 the app for organizing lemon parties
It's ByteDance's image based app, for people who don't want to doomscroll short form videos and just doomscroll still images/landscapes/image macros instead.
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like another commentor said, any amount of americans being exposed to chinese culture is a positive.
Making a top level comment cause lots of people in this thread just spreading blatant misinformation regarding the ability to learn languages as a child versus an adult. No investigation no right to speak.
https://www.nature.com/articles/1301553
Unique childhood plasticity has been demonstrated particularly in the areas of vision, audition, motor, and language abilities
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10149040
The ability to learn certain aspects of language, however, is limited after early childhood. This sensitive period for language learning makes it an important model system for the study of developmental plasticity in children.
Another clarifying example is when people who immigrate to a new country at different ages attempt to learn a second language. When the amount of experience with the new language is held constant, there is an advantage to being younger than 8 years old for acquiring the second language to proficiency.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2920538/
Test performance was linearly related to age of arrival up to puberty; after puberty, performance was low but highly variable and unrelated to age of arrival. This age effect was shown not to be an inadvertent result of differences in amount of experience with English, motivation, self-consciousness, or American identification. The effect also appeared on every grammatical structure tested, although the structures varied markedly in the degree to which they were well mastered by later learners. The results support the conclusion that a critical period for language acquisition extends its effects to second language acquisition.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/427544/
Synaptic density increased during infancy, reaching a maximum at age 1--2 years which was about 50% above the adult mean.
I’m not disputing any of this, however a lot of this is balanced by the fact that babies have to learn how to learn and what language is. You do not.
If you moved to China, and your full time job was learning Chinese, and also your household chores were taken care of so you could focus on learning Chinese, by the end of the year you would be better at Chinese than a 3 or 4 year old born in China. You have a base understanding of how language works and don’t have to relearn the existence of grammar and sentence structure.
If you and your 7 year old child were both put in that environment, the child would probably learn faster than you, I won’t dispute that. But the larger limiting factor is time spent.
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Found something a bit weird, on profiles it looks like it shows users’ “IP Address”? But also that’s not long enough to be an IP address, and it’s not even made up of numbers? Can someone who knows Chinese clarify what this is?
All major social media platforms in China were ordered by law to reveal IP location (just the cities) of their users since April 2022 because a lot of anti-Russia comments were made by Taiwanese trolls when the war in Ukraine started.
Most Chinese people are Russia simps and the social media fights got really ugly flamed by trolls, so they decided to just reveal the IP location of the users instead.
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Mark my words, if the Supreme Court finds out about this, they're overturning the Tiktok ban immediately.
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i can't help because the verification doesn't wori for me, but it's really cool to see
Is there a trick to creating an account? I get errors whichever means of verification I try.
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