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u/Aahhhanthony May 26 '19
As someone who went through college majoring in Chinese and double minoring in japanese and Korean, I feel this. My last bit of formal chinese study was basically “if you forget how to write a character, it should be uncommon enough that you can just figure out another word to replace it”. They’d never yell at us though, only take points away for failed attempts.
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u/LokianEule May 27 '19
Wow, with education like that, what do you do as a job now?
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u/Aahhhanthony May 27 '19 edited May 27 '19
Currently in grad school for my masters with hopes of moving onto a Ph.D in Chinese history afterwards.
I have two friends who did pretty similar tracks (not all 3, but 2 asian languages). One is currently getting a masters for international relations to work with Korea (with the government maybe? who knows). The other is currently a translator for a chinese newspaper (given the article in chinese and has to translate it into english..which seems like a really kick ass job and I wish I had an opportunity like this before grad school).
There's also other opportunities that I know as well, especially if you get really good at one language (B2-C1 for an Asian languages and English native) and have a second languages to a point where you can mold it to your needs (B1 level when starting). I remember there are also some really sweet government jobs (the language direction position or whatever it's called for CIA, for example), if you don't mind the meh entry level salary pay and not much mobility.
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u/jpl1210 May 27 '19 edited May 27 '19
I’m a mixed Chinese/White American but moved to Taiwan a long time ago. My interactions were if any of my white friends said Chinese it was highly praised no matter how hard they butchered it. But if I said passable Chinese I got shit on hard. Just like this post, it seemed like they had a whole dialog ready in the back of their minds for when they meet someone like me. Then every time, right after we just met, they would complain about why my mother didn’t teach me Chinese. Every time, complaints, about my mom, who they don’t know. Just learned enough to get by and rarely use it.
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u/Xidata May 27 '19
Expectations are way different for people that look like they could have been raised speaking the language. I’ve heard similar stories about Japanese-Americans.
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u/jpl1210 May 27 '19
Yeah, I think that’s quite the same thing I got. I have lots of sympathy for that person.
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May 26 '19 edited May 27 '19
Unless they thought I was Chinese (ie. not a face to face interaction), I've never had any Chinese person be anything but gracious with my shortcomings in Chinese writing. And that includes those intense police officers at Tiananmen.
But I can surmise that this is a joke nonetheless :P
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u/bluesydinosaur May 27 '19 edited May 27 '19
I think many comments here are missing the point of the comic, it is less about the attitudes of Korean, Japanese or Chinese speakers towards learners, but more of a commentary on the differences in language difficulty. That making mistakes in writing is more forgiveable in Hangul or Japanese, but for Mandarin one wrong stroke can totally change everything about what you were trying to write. And that the Chinese writing system might me more difficult to learn compared to the more phonetically-based systems of Korean and Japanese. I didn't see it as commenting about how Chinese speakers treat learners, and I'm glad most of you didn't have bad experience with them.
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u/GreenBlobofGoo May 27 '19
There’s a Chinese show called 中国汉字听写大会 “Chinese Character Dictation Contest”. It exists because nowadays everyone types on their computers or phones so people’s writing skills are just getting worse and worse... to the point that even the government got worried.
There’re 2 seasons in total.
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u/bad_advices_guy May 27 '19
please, why writing's already been shit even before the rise of technology.
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u/LiGuangMing1981 May 26 '19
I can't say I really agree with this - I'm a non-native speaker and I communicate in Chinese a lot via WeChat with customers here in China, and they've only ever complimented my written Chinese, even when I've made mistakes (and I'm sure I make a lot of them, particularly in word choice and grammar, considering my Chinese is entirely self taught).
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u/fluffyxsama May 27 '19
Love how Korea and Japan dress like regular people but the Chinese dude dressed like he's about to start doing Kung fu jumping over treetops.
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u/calm_incense May 26 '19
Korean: Hangul / Hanja
Japanese: Kana / Kanji
Chinese: Pinyin / Hanzi
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u/Dragon_Fisting May 26 '19
It's too bad zhuyin didn't stick. It can reasonably fit into hanzi text as a substitute for knowing a word. It could have been the Chinese version of Kana and pinyin could have still been a more convenient input method for either
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u/AndInjusticeForAll May 26 '19
Japanese is typed with a 12 key flick input method where each row in the kana chart has one button. Then you flick in either of the directions up, right, down, left or no flick to represent which vowel you want. It would be awsome if zhuyin could be used together with a keyboard like this.
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u/LiGuangMing1981 May 26 '19
I know they use it in place of Pinyin in Taiwan, but do they fit it into hanzi text the way that the Japanese use Kana? I don't recall ever seeing it used that way on my visits there.
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u/YangZD May 27 '19
It's good that Korean can do just fine without Hanja, but for me Korean mixed script (a la Japanese, but only for sino-korean words) has a nice charm to it.
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u/faitswulff May 27 '19
I'll also chime in against the spirit of this comic strip. Native speakers make mistakes like these often enough (hard not to if you're typing quickly in pinyin). They're generally very forgiving and even a few puns have come out of it.
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u/LokianEule May 27 '19
I've never had this experience with my Chinese learning. Honestly, I think this post is just biased. Look, they made the Chinese guy darker and he's wearing traditional clothes, but they gave the other two western clothes. They're just trying to make Chinese look scary.
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u/bluesydinosaur May 27 '19 edited May 27 '19
I think the comic is less about the attitudes of Chinese speakers but more on the difficulty of the Chinese language itself.
And yes, the comic is using artistic license to depict learning Chinese as more scary. It might seem "biased", but thats really the point in comedy.
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u/Pidgeapodge May 27 '19
The comic is not a commentary on how you are treated, it is a commentary on the actual difficulty of learning these writing systems.
Those three characters aren’t a Korean, a Japanese guy, and a Chinese guy. They are personifications of the countries, aka literally Korea, Japan, and China. The comic’s author makes comics about the interactions between the countries.
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u/AndInjusticeForAll May 26 '19
memory.exe has stopped responding
starts writing in pinyin