Learning Chinese from Tyrants, Ep. 1, Refusing to Answer Questions about Human Rights.

27 September 2019 [link youtube]


加拿大記者提人權問題,中國外長憤怒回應, "Canadian journalist raises human rights issues, Chinese foreign minister responds anger", the Chinese politician being Wang Yi (王毅).

Link 1: https://cn.nytimes.com/china/20160603/canada-china-wang-yi/zh-hant/

Link 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Yi_(politician)

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Youtube Automatic Transcription

Akiva to manatee from go to PNG cut away
put a large social motive online Alma what's your function buddy Sean I have to say that your question is a full of prejudice and against China and arrogance where I don't know where that come from apart from being a useful word in general our man is a great example of the type of vocabulary you will not learn from textbooks you will not learn from official vocabulary lists you will not learn from university courses but it is in fact a word in very frequent very common usage that you need to know this word is not found in the HSK list and most of the textbooks using university programs are directly based on the HSK vocabulary list and it's also not found in the TOC full vocabulary list the Taiwanese competitor to hsk so this is a really important really commonly used word that the politician employs here that you need to know in Chinese but there's this strange implicit sense of censorship in terms of what gets into the textbooks and what doesn't so this kind of this kind of slightly insulting vocabulary just does not make it into the lessons for foreigners and it's a word you really need to know so this is one of many reasons why studying the Chinese language as it is used by members of the Chinese Communist government is useful and instructive of course we also learn something about the reality of the political situation in China so the sentence he says and you're gonna hear it again later in this video or if you want to you can rewind a course and hear it again at the start of the video is well pooja Tong show made' Fong lied to a man and he says it much more rapidly than I - this arrogance like I don't even know where it's coming from and structurally the part of that sentence that's difficult for a foreigner to remember is the use of lie so from where what place it's coming song Shimada found lie we would naturally tend to leave out the lie and of course if you're a beginner in Chinese it is a little bit strange to us that almond is at the very end of the sentence but the more you speak read and write Chinese the more normal that starts the scene so a very simple sentence in terms of how people actually use almond and spoken Chinese Tom on the again it's very clear that this is complaining it's not really a descriptive statement of fact it has a negative connotation you can pair em I'll mat with duay you can say something like Tod way woman title man that are Samantha's typed away wool huh no man I searched around the internet and I found that that type of sentence construction was only appearing in text books was only appearing in lessons given to foreigners and that Chinese people themselves were not using it at least not in written speech in the internet so this is another way in which textbooks and official wordless official vocabulary lists can be misleading in terms of how people actually use the language no reason for it I'm not saying you can't pero man with duay but you know it's worthwhile to take that moment and check if the examples you're working from in a dictionary or text book if they're misleading or not in this case they are but there's a simple usage a moment and here's a slightly more literary sounding example this comes from a newspaper article so the arrogance and bias of the concept of pure literature right Shawn the same children we know from changsu children see the owl man you can't Yin there are no shortage of concerns about China's treatment of human rights advocates such as the Hong Kong booksellers given these concerns why is Canada pursuing closer ties with China how do you plan to use that relationship to improve human rights and security in the region and did you typically raise the case of the Garrett's directions with the foreign minister today I want to make a response to the questions asked by this journalist about China Yacouba tom vanity from got the PNG most of these official statements from the chinese government are using level 1 vocabulary most of the time they state their meaning very plainly in very plain language so beginner and intermediate students really can start learning by studying what's going on in the world's most densely populated dictatorship and tyranny a pretty early stage development language so here's t1 t1 this could have been the first word you ever learned in the classroom because teachers tend to use it quite a lot it's a complex sentence that it appears in though so needed T when do a jungle I just remind you that normally you're going to be pairing the verb t1 with Yong so male Ren sangeeta t1 nobody had any questions from her there wasn't anybody who asked her any questions this is the kind of construction you would expect but here in a more complex sentence we have duay but it's not a question being asked to China so that the function of tie here is completely different from the level 1 use of C on Cuba to monitor you from going to PNG when you break it into pieces this sentence is not too hard not even for a beginner PNG n that I've highlighted in red at the end of the sentence this is prejudice bias very negative word very negative connotations sometimes in English we describe something as being biased in a very neutral or even scientific sense no no this is a this is a word with lots of negative connotations however the other crucial word here that effectively functions like a verb in the sentence is cheolmin right so needed T when cheolmin the three jungle to PNG n right your question is brimming with contempt your question is permeated with prejudice but the interesting thing is that cheolmin normally has a positive connotation it can be used with positive or negative connotations but it is more frequently found in sentences like you know being full of joy full of hope full of optimism full of laughter his smile was full of warmth this kind of thing put your social media online Alma what's your lunch I'm gonna show you chew I don't wanna so you get here a sense of the brutal simplicity of the Chinese authoritarian style and it makes it much easier for level 1 students to approach he's here saying in the simplest terms possible have you ever even been to China obviously meant as a reproach to the journalists in reality if the journalist would then say that she's actually lived in China for 10 or 20 years and has a PhD in the topic he's still gonna reject her opinion so it's really irrelevant it's just rhetoric she thought don't go up so when you could eat you are by the mall by really solid by total Jojo question I usually vengeance party me and you go ah GG Jima this four character phrase you see on screen has been used at least since 1956 when it was written by the dictator Mao Zedong himself and this gives the sense of the Chinese people being poor and blank literally poor and white but this is white in the sense of a blank sheet of paper specifically so Chinese is full of these four character phrases that normally hearken back to a specific literary source in this case this is specifically Chinese communist authoritarian jargon so this line of reasoning this type of excuse making still very common with American left wingers with European socialists and communists any evils on the part of the Chinese government can be excused because of this claim that they've allegedly lifted people out of poverty and backwardness we might say any much but when the question is asked why don't these people get to vote why don't they have elections why don't they have freedom of speech why can't they criticize the government and use papers oh well do you even realize that we help to lift 6 million people out of poverty Ruka ago how the position of a true Malucci returned without the farmer you do not religion by Paul Hornung chair Lee Road on the chef I don't drama as you learn more and more vocabulary in Chinese you also learn more ways to structure a sentence and that's why you have to learn each piece of vocabulary along with some examples of how it's used now it is not used so Don John here does not appear at the beginning of the sentence the way most locative particles do the way you normally state the location of something so he leaves it until the end of the sentence to say don't you even know that human rights are protected in the constitution of China okay so see an ephah Constitution and you could guess the meaning here because Phi is law also used to mean France France is the country of laws fog wall so CN fuh Constitution in the Constitution human rights have been protected so it's a little bit of a complex sentence structure with BA alright I admit this is not easy sense they're not all easy guys but in the Constitution human rights are already protected don't you even know that well I encourage all of you to take the time to read the constitution of China you're in for some big surprises because according to the Constitution everyone in China also gets to vote they get to elect the government so there are a lot of things promised to you in the constitution of China rights that people don't get to exercise privileges the people of China have never received but sure your human rights along with and including universal suffrage in the right to vote are written down on paper in the constitution of China where they are ignored by everyone not just this particular journalist well cousin see you logic to mothers in China Trump are pushing as a tumour entity we will find you our turmoil value do you know that China has written protection and promotion of human rights into our Constitution and those who other people don't know better than the Chinese people about the human rights condition in China and it's the Chinese people who are in the best situation could the in the best position to have say about China's human rights situation so I would like to suggest you that please don't ask questions in such an irresponsible manner and we welcome Goodwell suggestions but we reject groundless or unwarranted accusations [Music]