AR&IO Chinese Course Episode 4: 不管是不是宣傳

this is episode 4 of AR & igho the
active research and informed opinion Chinese language course in this episode for the first time in the series I'm gonna do some Q&A with you in the audience I'm gonna ask some questions and you can pause the video and write out an original answer if you don't want to do that you can just see the answers I give and we discuss the grammar and word choice we're going to be using the same words that we learned in earlier episodes of course before we get into too much new vocabulary if you look at the title of this episode Oh chi-su she's young tran bougwan sure for sure since when one of the significant things here is that I'm not phrasing this in the way I as a native speaker of English would naturally tend to phrase it so this sentence is whether or not it's propaganda I first wrote this in my own words in Chinese I expressed it in comprehensible Chinese the way an english-speaking foreigner would phrase it and then I googled around the internet to try to figure out what is the most common way a native speaker of Chinese would say this and this is one of the ways I saw this all over the Internet alright so let's say one of the most labor-intensive elements of this series of videos is that I make an effort not to give you artificial textbook Chinese and not to give you my own version of comprehensible Outsiders Chinese but to depict the Chinese language the way Chinese people really say it and use it so we struggle with and get used to those types of idioms those types of sentence patterns so bougwan Oh glad book 1 translated here as whether or not but it has a little bit of the sense of not withstanding in English you can tell I'm Canadian because I say notwithstanding a lot Americans don't use the word nearly as often as Canadians do nor do the British so the point is here it's not really asking you a sincere question like the person is not stating this with the tone of sincerely not knowing whether or not something is propaganda this would be the beginning of a sentence saying something like well whether or not what we're reading is propaganda we can still learn a lot about Chinese culture from it whether or not something is propaganda we can practice the Chinese language deepen our appreciation of the language the grammar so on and so forth whether or not this is propaganda maybe it's really helping us develop a sophisticated attitude towards politics in China in the 21st century so it's this kind of whether or not whether or not it's propaganda let's make the best of it as a source so here's an easy question that you could give many different answers to just on the basis of the propaganda we talked about in the last few episodes we SHIMAA bike show in yellow Suns a judo jungle way Shenyang shin-soo Choo is a drum corps we're just getting started with today's lesson but among the new words we've introduced already we've seen one of the most important phonetic irregularities in the pinyin writing system we've seen it occur twice pinyin is famous for its reliability and its predictability in the sense that one a symbol corresponds to one sound in a fairly predictable way however you might have noticed that this new word change fan here what we might expect to be an a sound instead is what a native speaker of English would perceive as an e sound sin sounds like an en ending change Fang likewise the very commonly used word sends a Senza you can compare my voice to my lovely assistant in either case this is not what a native speaker would expect to hear with the letter A it's much closer to what we would expect here with the letter e so we return to our writing exercise let's hear that question one more time way Shenyang shin-soo Choo a trunk or why did Bethune shoe to live in China but including the extra verb Yahoo he or shifts the sense of the choice a little bit it's a little bit more like why would he have wanted to live in China why did he want to live in China and this is really a sort of simplified way of stating the question here on screen briefly now I googled around for an example of how a native speaker of Chinese would pose this question to cut their native speakers of jenny's this is asking the question in terms of why would Norman Bethune have wanted to leave behind the comforts of Canada in order to live in a strange difficult far-off place like China I'm asking you here to give two answers many possible answers would be equally valid try to write one answer using the sentence pattern wait that should that we learned before and one sentence pattern with in Wei and soy there are many possible answers you could offer on the basis of the Chinese propaganda we heard in the last few episodes beginning the sentence with way this means that we're now going to state the objective or the purpose that he was working towards wait is she so why did Norman with you choose to live in China wait there's a color changing we'd assured tangia turn one on both Sanjaya Congre done Joan wait there should change our color changes in order to join in the struggle against the Japanese in order to join in the anti-japanese or this verb tangia is used to mean joining in all kinds of activities formal and informal joining in a club joining in a sports team but it is specifically used in politics to mean joining one side or the other of an ongoing struggle including outright war or civil war taking a step away from the propaganda version of history for just a moment we could of course give several very different answers reflecting the real life the real intellectual motion personal concerns of norm Bethune oniton Beethoven sheikah Phaeton foods a virgin Allen Cheung by Johanna eager fetch on food zadran foods a' is love one vocabulary foods a means complicated very good word to know the main word i think here that's confusing for you still confusing for me is the verb chun so the first three words here Alan Chung oh that's just the name Alan and then this Chung is a very confusing verb here in context it means that he called him so Alan called with uni Alan described him as being right he called him a very complicated man oh I told and sheikah feet on food father Jane earlier today I was listening to chapter one of a Chinese language textbook that have never worked with before and the author of this textbook was assuring me the Chinese is really a very easy language to learn I don't know if people imagine you'll sell more textbooks that way the sentence we're looking at here has two examples of a peculiar way in which Chinese remains a remarkably difficult language to learn even when you're at the intermediate level even when you're at the advanced level so Todd's I do a die you may be familiar with duei duay alone is level 1 vocabulary you may be familiar with Dai Dai is also level 1 vocabulary however you could read this sentence and struggle to understand it not knowing that when they are combined duay thigh has a unique verbal meaning this is basically a completely different verb and you can't guess the meaning not even if you already know today and you already know die even if you've done the memorization you can still make the mistake because reading this character by character you think Todd's I way and then we have a separate meaning starting with the next word died and no you have to figure out even if you're using a dictionary your dictionary won't help you if you just look up today or you just look up die you will not figure this out how did I knew Jim hi Jodi for me and today Radian so these two characters combined form a new word form a unique verb they die which is something like to cope with now if you look it up in your dictionary may or may not say cope but the reason why I'm using the English verb cope is that it almost always has sort of negative connotations you're struggling with a problem you're dealing with something and you know normally we don't say you're dealing with something or coping with something in English if it's a wonderful thing to enjoy dealing with okay so that's I do a die you and for judging hi Jodi follow me and today trivia all right so whoa whoa whoa whoa we have another example of exactly the same phenomenon in Chinese you may already know the word Sun and you may already know the word die but if you look them up separately in the dictionary you won't be able to figure out what the sentence means you must figure out that when the two words are combined Suns I is again a unique verb or verbal expression in the Chinese language so it looks like two separate words but this Suns eye is in fact one word with one meaning and it is basically a fancy way to say that something exists you may recognize the Sun from Xiong Sun meaning to survive so it has meanings related to persisting continuing so on and so forth the example I'm giving you on screen contrasts textbook Chinese the type of example you're likely to find when looking up sun's eye in a dictionary to the way people use the language in the real world and if you google around you can confirm this hypothesis very easily nice action justice young sons I - MA that's just far too many words from a syllabic language do you believe that in this world there exists ghosts right are there ghosts do are ghosts something that really exists in this world but you know it's so much easier to just use verbs and Chinese like yo yo grandma that's the way people in practice will really use the language so now we're equipped to completely understand the sentence in full and then maybe we can give an answer to the question that started this whole discussion maybe we can give an answer that will offer a rather less propagandistic perspective on why it was that Norman Bethune left Canada to live in China by tolling sheikah future foods a virgin part a three day new Jim hang judging for me since a Chilean PT Aaron don't go so to be polite we may say deleterious aspects of his character existed the word deleterious may seem I don't know tremendously polite and refined in English but let me tell you something this is level 2 vocabulary trade en the disadvantages of something the deleterious aspects of somebody or something and I mentioned before it seems that tongues I is a needlessly fancy and abstruse way of saying that something exists but I suppose it might be more polite than just saying he had disadvantages to his character to say that there were aspects of his hair this is foun yin aspects that were disadvantageous you know such as how he dealt with women and alcohol yes the unspoken witness to history here is his wife and his marriage back in Canada that he left behind taking these considerations into accounts we might come up with a very different answer to the question I am not showing off my handwriting here this is very far from calligraphic but this is writing very rapidly with two very different pens my answer in way to aging tangia see Pena me John me John Civil War si Vania me John the Spanish Civil War because he had joined in the Spanish Civil War because he participated in the Spanish Civil War where you might say because he took a side in the Spanish Civil War therefore how could he not go to China therefore he had to go to China this sentence pattern is not sarcastic in tone it really just emphasizes that something inevitably is gonna happen or that you felt that you had to do something anyway tinysine tendency by nature sweet toffee cup this is a little bit provocative this answer but I am suggesting to you that he was a Canadian he did have a certain kind of comfortable status in Canadian society but he alienated himself from Canadian society by joining the Communist Party by fighting in the Spanish Civil War and of course the side he fought on in the Spanish Civil War you know he lost the war they lost so after when you're in that situation what are you gonna do well maybe he really had no better option then going away to China here's a simple answer that some of you might use yourselves in your daily life if somebody would ask you why did you decide to move to China why did you decide to start learning Chinese we did catch a sin - uncle in order to start a new life wait there's two K she seemed they're so [ __ ] and this phrase is used often enough to describe people who are starting a new life after a divorce after their marriage has broken apart and they are like Norman Bethune and move on we can practice using in way and swore ye as a sentence structure to then make it explicit that he was going to China to start a new life because his marriage had ended in failure anyway topic William say how high she you should back on so you talk a she seemed they're so [ __ ] in waited a hoodie in sway ho hi shot Ayesha by Gao jiong Tsui takashi-san - oh ho well you can call me sentimental you can call me optimistic but whether or not it's propaganda I do believe that one of the reasons he went to China was to help the sick the injured and the poor and uh I'm very glad that I didn't end up with a degree in the Medical Sciences because I'd probably be tempted to buy an airplane ticket to all kinds of conflicts civil wars and disasters all over the world if there were the possibility for me to really make a positive difference why does she do so being most of this vocabulary we've already learned so you can probably guess the sentence being you end right being do you remember being there's a quiz at the end I promise so being you could pretty much learn jocha Shang pinyin as one set phrase it is used very often with this complete set of five characters all group together so I'm suggesting to you here whether or not it's propaganda I think he went in order to provide treatment to the sick of the wounded wait there she told you Sean Bean Bing boom glass Ubu she's young Tran hey guys I'm cynical but I'm not that cynical [Music] then at the end [Music]