this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2024
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Aka "Capitalistn'ts" (hexbear.net)
submitted 1 year ago by RNAi@hexbear.net to c/languagelearning@hexbear.net
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[–] AernaLingus@hexbear.net 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

Broken down it's (traditional/simplified/JP)

無產/无产/無産 non-owning
階級/阶级/階級 class

Easy peasy! One of my favorite things about Sinitic compounds is that they tend to be a lot more transparent than their Greek/Latin counterparts in English. Idk what order hanzi are taught in China, but these characters are elementary enough that a Japanese kid who's made it past the fourth grade could parse out the general meaning. Also it's very cool that you can get cross-linguistic understanding both within the Sinitic language family and with the other unrelated East Asian languages like with the direct conversion to Japanese here (I could have also written it in Korean hanja as 無産階級 (무산계급)). Doesn't always work that way, but it is pretty damn handy.

(oh also the Pinyin is wúchǎn jiējí)

[–] RNAi@hexbear.net 6 points 1 year ago (6 children)

All this seems way harder than english

[–] itappearsthat@hexbear.net 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

my friend your language has twelve fucking tenses

  1. Simple present - I play tennis
  2. Present continuous - I am playing tennis
  3. Simple past - I played tennis
  4. Past continuous - I was playing tennis
  5. Present perfect - I have played tennis
  6. Present perfect continuous - I have been playing tennis
  7. Past perfect - I had played tennis
  8. Past perfect continuous - I had been playing tennis
  9. Future simple - I will play tennis
  10. Future continuous - I will be playing tennis
  11. Future perfect - I will have played tennis
  12. Future perfect continuous - I will have been playing tennis

This doesn't even include counterfactuals (I would have played tennis, but...)

Anyway the way this is done in Chinese is as follows (not going to pretend to be an expert, this is a newbie explaining things to other newbies): consider the phrase "Yesterday, I played tennis". English is a high-entropy language in the sense that it has a lot of redundancy. Here, the verb conjugation "played" is redundant; the "ed" confers no additional information since it is already clear we are talking about the past from the use of "Yesterday". In Mandarin the direct translation of this sentence would be "Yesterday I play tennis" or "Zuótiān (yesterday) wǒ (I) dǎ (play) wǎngqiú (tennis)". If you just want to talk about things in the generic past tense you use the le particle, so "I played tennis" would be "wǒ (I) dǎ (play) le (past-tense modifier) wǎngqiú (tennis)".

[–] EllenKelly@hexbear.net 5 points 1 year ago

I would have played tennis, but lawnsports are colonial and I am a good person

<jk, grumbles about labour aristocracy, I'm colonial as, and I've totally played tennis, I'm actually prrtty good>

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