I know this is an oddly specific question, but I end my trip to China in a few days and if I come back without the Chinese Vogue I might get 凌迟ed.   I know it is somewhat rare because last time I was unable to find it in Chengdu (I had to order it online to a friend's house). I know it's a very long shot, but if someone happens to see it before the 24th please tell me where you found it! I am also hoping the airport has it.   Thanks!

I hope this message finds you well.   I am originally from India, currently studying in China. I have been trying to log in to the Pudn website to upload some important resources related to my studies, but unfortunately, I am unable to access my account directly. I kindly request your assistance in helping me retrieve the login credentials or any support to gain access. Your help would be greatly appreciated, and I would be extremely thankful if you could guide me in resolving this issue. Thank you in advance for your time and support. I look forward to your response.

Heya, casual viewer here. So, I have been thinking it would be a good idea for everyone to share their music here, let players build a playlist for cantonese/mandarin/english music here to listen to, would be a great way to promote engagement and further everyones learning. If it gains traction here perhaps forum moderators could sticky this post later.   Figured to bring some forum games here since it looks like its been relatively quiet lately. Here's a quick rundown on how it works:   1. Person A posts a song with artist, name and a link to listen. Note, the post must be on this thread. 2. Person B quotes person A or whatever song they find relevant, and replies with another song artist, name, and link. Note, it must be a different song. 3. Person A quotes the previous post, and responds with another song, in the same format. Note that there may be infinite potential participants in a chain of songs at this point so long as the songs are all different.   If two separate chains of replies reach the point where they both contain the same song, then participants can create a separate thread to discuss undoing the post, merging chains or temporarily pausing one until further notice, etc. Any further rules are yet to be confirmed.   I'll start to get the ball rolling.    陀飛輪 - Eason Chan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBcuy4CK5LI&list=PLChZDnr6Jv1M3pssfyqocG0Ijl4BR50T8&index=4   Cheers.

I'm looking for some recommendations of satirical stories. Hoping to read online or with ebook/pdf download. 

Google, Chat GPT and others are failing me.  Where can I take the HSK in the US?

Mastering Chinese has always been a lifelong dream for me since I was 18. I am now 31 and I have been a lurker for well over 10 years and actually live in China for the last 2 years, but Chinese has not improved at all (mostly due to work and other personal factors). I can communicate basic convo's in Chinese but struggle much more than that. At this point, I am pretty ashamed of my ability and so have resolved recently to refocus on studying and improving (also alongside the fact as of a 1-2 months ago, I no longer work and so I can fully focus on this).    I am starting a mini-journal to document my journey. I found this super helpful with another big project that I did in my life (long story for another time). My goal is to be near-native fluency for general everyday use - in particular, being able to converse and make friends at a deeper level on specific topics.    I have hit the books again as of 1 month ago. At that time, my vocab was basically HSK 5 level (i.e., 2,500 words). Listening was OK (heritage speaker) but struggled a lot with unknown words.    I have spent the last 30 days focusing on vocab via Anki, working through the HSK lists (HSK2 at this point). 30 days later, I've largely studied most of HSK vocab for HSK lvl 6 (i.e., hitting the ~5,000 mark). I've been punching out roughly ~100 new words per day, which is equivalent to ~1.5 hours per day and ~800 reviews per day per day. Stats below.    I have spent a little time to reading but have not managed to get much progress on this. I went through one Korean drama in Chinese using LanguageReactor and tried my hand with a manga (used an IPad to take screenshots and then translate unknown words via Pleco / ChatGPT). Next plan of action is to focus on blogs / news articles etc. Obviously I hear the consenus that I need to be converting to reading naturally as opposed to Anki.    Will update this on a regular basis over time.   

(This is a summarized version of a longer essay on my personal website)   Inspired by Scott Young and the legendary Tamu post on here, I decided to go full-speed at Mandarin. This is my report back to the community of an intense 1-year studying protocol, and share my methods. I also compiled some of the best anki decks into a single mega-deck, which some might find useful.    TLDR: Over the last 365 days, I studied Mandarin for fun at an intense pace. With anki, tutors, and traveling accelerating my learning, I ended up getting to the level of comfortable conversational fluency. My Mandarin isn't perfect nor perfectly fluent, but I can now handle everything up to technical conversations in the area of my PhD.   Month 1: I happened to watch a snippet of the anime Demon Slayer in an obscure Chinese fan dub. Ironically, this caught my attention. I also had lots of Chinese friends, so why not learn a little Mandarin? Oh my, I had no idea how obsessed I'd end up with this "little" side project.   My school had a breakneck-speed Mandarin beginner class. I loved it. Within a week, we learned pinyin. We learned the tones. We learned to read. We learned to write. Then started talking immediately, every single day. Talking in horribly horribly broken Chinese, but nevertheless having conversations.   The beginning was by far the hardest time, and many tuned out or dropped out. But I had lots of fun. I played a lot. I wrote a horrible poem about humanity colonizing Mars. My Chinese was absolute crap, but I was improving fast. Chinese is my fifth language, and I had a few tricks up my sleeve.   Month 3: Spaced repetition is a superweapon. Anki is the core reason why I was able to study Chinese efficiently. Alongside Anki, I adopted other methods to learn faster: Frequency-based learning. Comprehensible input. Reading lots as soon as I could, especially graded readers. Buying a calligraphy pen-brush and learned how to write the 600 Chinese characters. FSRS. Creating a 100,000-card Anki megadeck.   The other superweapon I implemented was personalized tutoring. My first month studying Chinese was mostly in a 20-people class. But then, I took Bloom's Two-Sigma effect to heart and got myself lots of 1-1 tutoring. The more time I spent on tutoring, the more it accelerated my studies. There’s legends like Tamu spending dozens of hours with tutors, but I’d mostly spend up to six hours a week. More would start to detract from my main focus, which were still my math studies. My default for working with tutors was to lead a "normal" conversation. I had two strict rules for conversations with tutors: 1. Only Chinese, no English. 2. Correct every single mistake I make.   At the start, this tutoring was excruciatingly slow. But it was very worth it. After the chat, I’d ask them to send me a summary of my key mistakes and newly learned vocabulary. It’d add that to my Anki.    I made lots of mistakes. I still do. Tutoring gives me a tight and fast feedback loop on fixing my mistakes.   Month 6: My Chinese still had far to go. Apart from the study sprints while traveling, I tried to keep up a consistently high pace back at home. Chinese wasn’t my focus then — math and neuro were. Chinese was consistently the largest side project, clocking some 15 hours a week. Consistency was the most important part to keep a high pace of progress. Here’s what a typical focused day might’ve looked like: Wake up, 1 hour of Anki Do my main thing for 8-9 hours (math undergrad, neuro grad school, …) 1 hour tutoring call before dinner some days 1 hour of Chinese content before sleep, e.g. anime dubs or books   Month 12: Exactly 365 days after I started, I reached a vocabulary of 8000 words and characters in my Anki. 8000 words and characters makes most content I encounter relatively understandable. My vocabulary is a weird personal mix: Basics including everything up to HSK5, anime vocabulary, biology, mathematics, and random everyday stuff from travelling.   Vocabulary is only one part of fluency. It's important to keep eyes on the goal: The goal of any language is to communicate effectively. Prompted for feedback on my progress, my usually reserved tutor recently commented: “This was the fastest learning pace from zero to advanced conversational fluency I have ever seen."   That's kind, but being fluent feels like it’ll always be an overstatement. Especially for Chinese. I’m definitely not Fluent™. If there's demand, I might post an interview with my tutor here.   I sometimes still get my tones wrong. Full-speed native speech is sometimes still tough. Local dialects remain a complete mystery to me.   I’d say I’m comfortable with Chinese. I can comfortably travel in any Mandarin-speaking place. I can comfortably hold long conversations. I can comfortably watch most content. I can comfortably build relationships entirely in Mandarin. This an excerpt of my full experience write-up, you can check it out here: isaak.net/mandarin I also listed out 60 pages of methods which where useful, from beginner to advanced. That includes my personal anki deck, and much more. isaak.net/mandarinmethods   I'm grateful for this forum and r/Chinese for helping me, even though I was lurking for most of that time. I'm not sure what happened to Tamu, who's been away for a while. It's been a decade since his post, but it was life-changing for me.   Tamu, if you're out there — huge thank you for the inspiration. What a legend.

Hi everyone,  I have been wanting to get a traditional Chinese tattoo and the tattooer is recommending this idiom: 露珠成海 about how dewdrops put all together form the ocean. I haven't found any information on Internet and wanted to double-check the meaning before I get it engraved on my skin  Is it an actual saying? Does the translation make sense to you?  And if you have any other 4 or 5-character idiom/proverbs/chengyu I am more then willing to take a dive into Chinese culture :)   Thanks in advance!

I am fed up with my existing(western) provider.  Apparently every time I log in from someone's wifi, it tags this as a "hacking attempt" and disables my account.  The other day was  the last straw when I couldn't receive an important message.  I'm sure coming from China doesn't help.  Then, there was a problem with  12306 and I had to password reset. I used Qunar for years for train tickets with no problems. However, now, Qunar refuses to work unless your 12306 login works. I never bothered with using 12306 because it was the official train app and it sucked. I set it up a long time ago and never checked it again.  So I had to go through 12306 password reset, and it insisted on not completing until I clicked on an email it sent to the email I have now.  No such email arrived. So I can't change my train tickets. I suspect, though cannot prove, the email 12306 sent was blocked by a spam filter used by my western email host. I had to go all the way down to the train station and spend a half hour with the lady explaining the situation until she agrees to totally delete my 12306 account so I can start over completely. Meanwhile, there are no tickets left so I had to buy commercial class for triple the price.  I set up a Netease (126.com) email a while back but botched the signup process because I didn't understand its weird concept where you have to set up a "master email".  No other service I have ever used does this.   What else is there?  qq.com but I do not like them since way back in the day.  "why don't you just use Gmail" I cut Google out of my life some time ago and have never looked back.  Moreover the Great Firewall blocking is an issue, I want something guaranteed to work smoothly inside China.  Moreover, something that works smoothly in the west, too and doesn't get tagged as spam just because the email  originates from China.   I don't mind paying, I don't want something like what happened with the train tickets to happen again. I also want to be able to receive emails from anyone's wifi without getting blocked for "hacking".  I want to set up my new fresh 12306 account with a Chinese email guaranteed to receive password reset emails.  I read the 2018 thread on  emails. https://www.chinese-forums.com/forums/topic/56461-163com-email/

Mongolian Empire Gallery, National Museum of Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar.