Walk symbol is doing the Chad Stride
this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2025
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chapotraphouse
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Proof that ancient aliens visited our ancestors to give them advanced Brazilian butt lift technology
Oh my god I finally get how Chinese works.
You're not ment to look at them as letters holy shit I get it now.
God damn it the pee post helped me learn Chinese
Only a small number of chinese characters (usually ones like these that signify basic things and concepts) are ideographs or Pictographs
Most Chinese characters are phono-semantic compounds, which are kinda a bit of a mix between phonographs and ideographs
Oh, here I thought life was going to be easy for once 
Most Chinese characters are phono-semantic compounds, which are kinda a bit of a mix between phonographs and ideographs
This is a good thing. The pictographic basic characters tend to have the pronunciation you learn by rote, but then they become the components of the the phono-semantic characters.
With the phonosemantic characters one side tells you the rough pronunciation, the other side gives you a ballpark e.g. 火 is fire (imagine a burning campfires) 包 is pronounced bao and then if you add 火 fire to 包 you get {炮|pao} meaning cannon. If you add the bamboo radical over 同 tong you get {筒|tong} meaning a barrel. So 炮筒 paotong means the barrel of a cannon.
Many Chinese words are made up of two characters, so by context you can have a decent guess what they mean.
Yay! Ty ty
It's actually easier than I thought to learn the characters.
射 (shoot) also means blast loads btw, so it belongs on the top row with poop and pee and butt
I once went to some cave with some ancient American Indian painting on it when I was in the Boy Scouts.
Some looked like dicks, and I joked with my Troop that I wonder if this "ancient sacred artifact sites" were actually just Paleo-Indian teenagers drawing dicks and asses on the cave walls while bored one night.
I think my theory still holds.
"Human nature doesn't change" is often used as a thought-terminating cliche to justify the status quo but I think this is an actual case of it
"Teenagers be getting bored and doing shenanigans" is probably one of the safer and less harmful assumptions about human society throughout history.
it's more reasonable to assume that the meaning and context of those images was totally different than to project our own onto them. think about how much of our society there is in a teen drawing a dick on a wall. wall-drawing is forbidden. there's even a special word for it that associates it with a countercultural art, if distantly. dicks are obscene and hidden, but nevertheless fascinating. teens are uniquely expected to both obey social rules and submit to the will of others. there's no reason to take any of this as a given for early native american societies.
The dance symbol predicted Thriller????
Common logography W
not worth the massive L of having to memorize thousands of symbols to read anything worthwhile instead of maybe ~80, and we could get that number down too.
I spent 7 years learning Japanese and 1 year learning Italian and I'm better at Spanish than Japanese. I have never taken Spanish.
smh latin dialects acting like they're separate languages
I swear every supposed major difference between words boils down to "here we only say how are you" and "here we only say salutations"
There is also the fact that it doesn't seem possible in such languages to have a good estimation for the pronunciation of newly-encountered 'words' (lexemes? I don't remember linguistics well enough to be precise and accurate here) without looking it up or asking about it.
Learners are told to sound out new characters, because often enough they sound close enough to their components.
水 and 冰 do not sound similar at all in Putonghua, and the same goes for other characters that I have dealt with so far. Not sure how it can be otherwise, considering the initial-terminal rules for pronunciation in Putonghua.
The advice is meant for the majority of phonetic-semantic characters, which is 80% of the language. It requires a good base, of course, so it'd be applied in middle-school level and up.
Your example is equivalent to saying you don't know how to pronounce "baa" because you know the letter "a" but not the "b". If you know 冫 then you know 冰.
Okay, so,what's the rule for picking the right components? Sounds like this is the case of 'baa' being pronounced like 'aa', so the knowledge of how to pronounce 'b' doesn't help, and even if you knew the pronunciation of 'aa', you would still need to make a guess.
I was just looking at this rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y%C7%92u_bi%C4%81n_d%C3%BA_bi%C4%81n
Usually you'd rely on educated guesswork like this - and in many cases the character isn't pronounced exactly the same because of drift (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classification#Sound_change), but Chinese isn't as precise as many people make it out to be: "When one encounters such a two-part character and does not know its exact pronunciation, one may take one of the parts as the phonetic indicator. For example, reading 詣 (pinyin: yì) as zhǐ because its "side" 旨 is pronounced as such. Some of this kind of "folk reading" have become acceptable over time – listed in dictionaries as alternative pronunciations, or simply become the common reading. For example, people read the character 町 ting in 西門町 (Ximending) as if it were 丁 ding".
Apologies, but do we agree that this is much less reliable and clear than what relevant languages (some more than others - Russian, for example, is much less ambiguous in this regard) have?
yes
not worth the massive L of having to trawl through books to learn anything worthwhile when chatGPT can tell you what you want to know in ~80 words, and we could get that number down too
Oh my god 尸 is a human body (body as in corpse) bent over, 米 is rice, and 水 is water.
Incredible
Showering is when you pee and poo while riding on a butt.
Ok, but why is the rainbow being held up by 2 ducks? Is that how rainbows used to work back in the day? I want my double duck rainbows back!
where is this image from?
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