78
Tankies will deny that chinese are libs
(thelemmy.club)
Didn't know there were this many types of liberalism
Animal Farm
How is this book not banned? It's literally nazi propaganda
Interesting that they read a Japanese author on misogyny.
Does God Play Dice
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded."
Smdh they aren't even reading Dungeon Crawler Carl? Apparently my enemy is not the Chinese government, but its people
Those books are 110% reddit slop. But I do enjoy them from time to time
You know how I feel about Liberals, Carl!
Mongo is appalled
and? the 100 highest-rated books on Goodreads (basically the angloid Douban Books) is beyond chopped.
Holy fuck this is somehow even worse than I expected, and my expectations were very low. At least that Chinese list has some stuff on it that passes for literature.
That seems astroturfed, most of those are very recent, and I assume still unfinished series so they probably pay for higher scores to rise sales.
100 Years of Solitude is a really good book though.
When asked, a large amount of people will admit to reading slop and some classics they read in school. Doendy seem all that surprising.
But not in a book recommendation engine, otherwise it will recommend slop based on the stuff they forced you to read as a kid or the slop you read when you didn't know better because everyone was reading it.
You shouldn't punt anything you didn't like in there.
As a side note, when I was using a similar site it thought I was japanese or russian, because I like old time scyfi, and apparently the only people reading those obscure works also liked things written in japanese or russian. I don't know how to feel about that.
Harry Potter is #3 and theres no LOTR anywhere? My lib sensors are off the fucken charts
People who read books are liberals
who rate books on silly internet websites, but still
I tried reading Dream of the Red Mansions and three Kingdoms but failed. There are simply too many damn names to keep track of. Dates back to village life when every Chinese knew 150 people by name and knew all their family trees. It's worse in pinyin because the Q X and Z makes it unreadable.
I succeeded in reading the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, only after listening to a podcast on it, and also putting over 400 hours into Total War: Three Kingdoms.
That said, I could barely tell you any specific thing that happens in it other than an extremely funny sequence early on where a farmer serves his lord (And I think it is either Liu Bea or Cao Cao) his (the farmer's) wife (maybe just her hand, I can't remember) for supper because he does not have any other meat, and the Lord eats it, until he finds out that it is the farmer's wife, in which he then graciously forgives the farmer and thanks him for the meal, which according to the author demonstrates his magnanimous relationship with the common people, and I am like "This sounds like he told the guy to serve him whatever meat he had on pain of death, and then he had to save face from being huge sack of shit."
And this guy is supposed to be one of the good lords.
It's an absolutely insane story though, with so many cool battle sequences.
Journey to the West is fun. Mao's favorite super hero.
That's not literature, it's a manga.
Manga is literature!
Thats why you play the dynasty warriors games first to have a mental image for all these characters
Cultural appropriation
What about the Q, X, and Z makes it unreadable?
Those are the least common letters in English and they are jarring to the eye when used often.
Pinyin was developed as a romanization system for the phonemes of Mandarin. But it's a poor system. Xi doesn't sound like "she," Pinyin X is a sound English doesn't have. It's like "sh" but instead of using the tongue tip you use the tongue blade.
Taiwan has Bopomofo but it's symbols like hiragana. for Romanization it uses the older Wade-Giles system which also looks alien.
Hsieh-hsieh sounds more like "thank you" than the alien xiexie.
X and Q were used because they're so uncommon in English, which made them great for representing uncommon sounds. I've never seen anyone assert that X in pinyin is equal to /ʃ/, only that it's the closest sound English has.
It also makes more sense to have 1 letter per phoneme rather than "hsieh" where you have "hs" for /ɕ/, "i" for /i/, and "eh" for /ɛ/. It's a very poorly constructed system to have these superfluous Hs all over the place and "eh", in particular, is extremely anglo-coded. I can't think of a speaker of any other language using the Latin script that would put that H on the end to signify that sound to the learner, which makes for a very biased system of romanization.
Sorry, I don't IPA.
Neither does anyone else.
That's why Pinyin was invented.
And better yet, Bopomofo which can't be represented with the Latin letters.
Xi jinping is not Whe jinpeeeng.
Nor is Beijing "bay-zheeng" as so many of its long-term foreign residents pronounce it.
???
Pinyin has no bearing on people refusing to learn proper pronunciation. When you learn Mandarin, you learn what the actual sounds are that the pinyin corresponds to. This response is incoherent.
Hmmm, what's your HSK level?
Wait until you find out Beijing mandarin is not "standard" and Beijingers sound like they have marbles in their mouths. Made a very unpleasant acquaintance with one this evening and Culturally they're jerks as well as linguistically, not less because they're told from birth that they're right and everyone else is wrong.
Sounds like people in Tokyo. "Largest city narcissist syndrome" or something.
As for variations on pronunciation, yeah, that's true across every language. When you teach a new language to people you just have to pick (or create) a variation that will be intelligible to people who speak it natively. You can't teach the infinite variations of pronunciation, grammar, etc. in a beginner language course. You'd just confuse people.
Or New York City where people assume without explaining the whole world knows the difference between bronx brooklyn and so on. Unless you live there, who cares? And they sneer at us for being "flyover territory" because obviously the only other place that exists is LA. Imagine "standard" English was assumed to be Noo Yawk accent.
So it's more that you aren't used to it and maybe aren't that interested in language learning to begin with? Pinyin seems like a very good and intuitive system to me, I understand the rationale behind why those specific letters make those specific sounds. But if languages aren't your forte then that's fine, it can't be everybody's thing.
I disavow
People are still reading Siddhartha? A stroll down memory lane of my 60's youth.
this post was submitted on 18 May 2026
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