豈敢豈敢! 貴人過譽了, 多蒙垂青關注!

Oh my Chinese still leaves much to be desired. My advice is to find a Chinese speaking community near you and spend as much time as possible speaking Chinese with them. Forcing myself to talk to the locals when I lived in Peking is like 60% of the reason I got to where I am (the other 40% is obsessively looking up words in dictionaries lol)

Thank you so much! I’ll go more into sound symbolism in future etymology videos. As early as the late Zhou (and possibly earlier) there was an idea in Chinese linguistics that the sound of a word was intimately linked to its meaning, this is partially what Confucius meant when he talked about “correcting the names”, because he believed that language influenced how people think and the ruler must set a clear and orthodox standard for pronunciation and meaning throughout the realm, otherwise people’s conduct would deteriorate due to wrong-think. In actuality, many Chinese words (especially really old ones) are derived from each other, which possibly lead to this idea. Of course, with dialect words becoming popular, foreign loanwords and phonetic shifts, today about half of phonetic components are only phonetic and have no connection with the meaning itself. It’s a very fun topic but like so many things about Chinese, it can get very frustrating too! XD

Thanks a lot for further elucidation! 👍 Absolutley! Language contact has influenced the Chinese language and characters a lot. Many phonetic compounds are newly created and become phonetic rather than semantic. It's worthy of further exploration though sometimes really make us frustrating.😄

Sure is! I’ll get to it in a future short and/or full episode on talking about one’s own family (since I realised pretty early a lot of honorifics don’t fit neatly into the prefix model)

@@SwedishSinologyNerd You put most Chinese to shame! Even your Mandarin pronunciation is so much better than mine. Would be perfect if you speak Cantonese too! :)

If you're just getting started, I think most textbooks are generally ok (even older ones that you can get online), for listening comprehension, there is a ton of stuff on youtube. If you wanna get good at the language however, my #1 tip is to go to Taiwan or China. Tip #2 is finding a Mandarin speaking community near you to practice with. If all else fails, you may need to find an online language partner. I read a lot of classical texts (you can find a ton on Wikipedia or Ctext), and at the start I used wenlin to help me read them (not perfect a perfect solution, but better than nothing). You never stop learning Chinese, lol, you either continue or you give up. It DOES get easier after that initial steep learning curve tho. If you have the tones and grammar down pat,and sprinkle your language with some classical phrases as well as some slang, you will already be a master at the language to the average Chinese.

I'm actually preparing for my HSK 6 right now. I've been learning the language for probably 3 years, with teachers and on my own, but I haven't come across these honourifics yet. That is why I'm asking. How should I proceed in terms of learning materials after HSK 6? What do you mean by the "initial steep learning curve"?

Haha, you're a faster learner than me! Good luck on the exam! The initial steep lerning curve is the pronunciation (tones), the writing system (characters) and the grammar which can be very frustrating to people used to indo-european grammar. If you're taking HSK-6 you're already past that tho so nvm. Modern (mainland) Chinese education doesn't really teach a lot of the interesting stuff due to national language policies (the 白話 movement was a mistake and you can't convince me otherwise xD). But you still encounter a lot of honorifics in correspondence and historical fiction (which is where I began picking it up). There used to be a pretty good list on Wikipedia but it got nerfed pretty hard. You can still find a lot of info in Chinese tho, just search for 謙詞敬語 and you should be able to find enough to get yourself started ^^

@@SwedishSinologyNerdThanks for all your help! I'll have a look at it! And obviously I'm going to continue to support your work here on KZfaq. I already hold it in great esteem. One last thing: Can you give me any good Chinese-youtuber reccomendation? I couldn't find anyone interesting so far...

@@-.-1328 Depends on what you want to focus on! I currently mostly use YT to learn slang or listen to Chinese content creators. There’s also one guy who used to make a lot of videos on Beijing dialect