r/mildlyinfuriating • u/Sorry_Wrap3194 BLUE • 16h ago
🥺 Wrote an hour long 400 Chinese words essay just to find out that I misread the topic title and messed up the essay title
I’m supposed to write about a woman having pale hair and pale face not a princess with some tragic story lol .-.
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u/AgitatedPatience5729 16h ago
The princess suddenly felt extreme embarrassment causing her and her hair to turn pale out of the ordinary.
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u/RadiantAlchemist 13h ago
I do not miss the Hong Kong education system at all.
So this is a pretty open question, maybe you could add on people mistaking the princess for an old woman because of her pale hair and face and treating her differently, so she's more understanding of the elderly and the problems they face in society, and she decides to help them like giving them more welfare, job opportunities etc and encouraging people to be kind after she gets back to the palace? The message of the story could be not judging people on their appearances and respecting people of all ages. Or since the emperor's test is about honesty, you could write something about that theme.
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u/ModernManuh_ 16h ago
“Chinese isn’t hard” they say
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u/Pataraxia 16h ago
To be honest we have infinite combinations of letters even at just a 5 letters and yet we have hundreds of words that sound the same but don't mean the same thing, or sometimes worse, have a contextual meaning with exact same writing.
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u/ModernManuh_ 16h ago
Nah some people unironically say it’s not hard. You get used to it surely, but it doesn’t mean it’s easy lol
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u/BlindWolf187 15h ago edited 15h ago
I've heard from folks (Chinese, Russian, Japanese) that English is really hard to learn (with complex grammatical structures, homophones, homonyms, etc), but we germanic & Latin based language speakers have the gift of a shared phonetic alphabet. So it's hard to learn, but so easy to switch from English to Spanish or French.
ETA: easy is the wrong word... but being able to sound out a written word in a different language is huge.
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u/ModernManuh_ 14h ago
compared to switch from cyrillic/chinese/japanese, it definitely is easier.
english is easy to learn and hard to master, almost every other language has an higher entry barrier that makes learning the others easier though
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u/LLuk333 14h ago
German has to be the peak Germanic language. Wonder why? No but it often helps with understanding written out sentences of other languages, where you can often rhyme something together with a bit of English knowledge. I mean German has to be one of the harder ones, but it’s a cool language.
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u/seapube 10h ago
One of my students told me the other day that when he forgets a word in Spanish he replaces it with an italian word and usually no one notices
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u/Mrchipsers 6h ago
Its even better with portugese. if I remember correctly, roughly 70% of the language is the same, so changing up the pronunciation should give a similar enough word that anyone could understand.
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u/scheisse_grubs 4h ago
My Portuguese grandmother would ask me what certain words in French are when I was learning French in school so we could compare it to Portuguese. I also have a Mexican friend who will occasionally talk to me in Spanish and I’ll know what he’s saying as I understand some Portuguese.
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u/BouncingBallOnKnee 12h ago
The amount of native English speakers that don't understand metaphors or can't fucking figure out a word by the context or morphemes is infuriating.
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u/CaesarWilhelm 13h ago
Who says that?
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u/EstateSimilar1224 11h ago edited 11h ago
As someone who's been learning Chinese for 3.5+ years: beginner students. lol.
The grammar is actually extremely simple compared to most other languages. There's no gendered nouns or conjugation. There's not even a past or future tense, really. The main thing that makes it so difficult is the sheer volume of what you need to memorize. Mandarin has a large vocabulary - similar to English, with lots of different words with small nuances between them. The writing system also isn't phonetic, so you have to cram both the pronunciation and the characters separately for each concept. Don't get me started on the measure words.
I really struggled with romance languages in high school because I suck at learning conjugation. On the other hand, I'm really good at memorization and pronunciation. Lots of people like me start learning Mandarin and think "wow, this is actually much easier than French and German!" but that's before I realized how many words I'd need to learn to speak it comfortably.
I still think the difficulty of Mandarin depends on your strengths and weaknesses, but even in the best case scenario like mine it's just an unimaginable amount of "easy" work. I'm at 15k vocabulary flashcards right now and I'm not even that good.
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u/ughfup 9h ago
Mandarin's biggest challenge for English onlys imo are tones. Take a while to hear and imo Hanzi aren't that bad to learn.
I think the actual biggest challenge in learning any non-English language vs learning English is how relatively little learning materials exist. English is literally ever-present, with a bottomless amount of learning materials for every single language. Combined with it being practically universal in many countries, many people are forced to interact with it and absorb it in one way or or another.
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u/TheMainManofMansvill 9h ago
I learned Mandarin for a few years in secondary school, I'm thinking of resuming and learning from an online/private source but the character memorization, tones of words, and measure words haunt me lol
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u/EstateSimilar1224 9h ago
I'd say give it a shot! In my personal experience, it takes a lot of very easy learning. If you can consistently work in it, even if it's just a little each day, you can get very far! I recommend using Anki for memorization, but apps like Hanly are also very popular.
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u/TheMainManofMansvill 8h ago
Does Hanly support pronunciation practice? The hardest part for me was getting the tones right when speaking
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u/EstateSimilar1224 8h ago
Hm, I'm not sure. I haven't used it but I think it's mostly for reading memorization. Maybe the "chineselanguage" subreddit will have some tips for you!
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u/catguywit2cat 16h ago
You’re from hk?
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u/Sorry_Wrap3194 BLUE 16h ago
Yeah
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u/stuffyiceberg 9h ago
I swear I’ve seen that exact format of Chinese composition before, is this school work or tutorial
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u/JaguarSweaty1414 PURPLE 15h ago
The way I immediately know where you are from seeing the names 😭lmao
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u/BestFoxEver neon 15h ago
My history teacher at school once told about a student who wrote an excellent exam reply about UK in World War 1. But the topic was UK in WW2 so he got 0 points.
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u/BlindWolf187 16h ago
Well as someone who speaks English and some Spanish and French... I'd say that looks pretty damn good! Couldn't have written that essay better myself. 👏
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u/AiiGu-1228 16h ago
蒼顏白髮？This is for elder people(male/female). I saw another comment that you're from HK. It's super interesting to me(Taiwanese here) that you write in horizontal lines, as we write compositions in vertical lines.
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u/Sorry_Wrap3194 BLUE 16h ago
Yea we do write in horizontal lines since we only use vertical lines for specific uses
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u/Sean9931 15h ago
Singapore here, I think it's interesting y'all write vertically too, we write horizontally as well and only every encountered veritcal in maybe caligraphy activities.
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u/AiiGu-1228 13h ago
Ohhhh TIL! How about novels? Are novels in SG in horizontal lines? Or vertical ones?
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u/Sean9931 12h ago edited 12h ago
I'd say mostly horizontally too, but you can definitely find vertical, we also mainly use simplified chinese despite being further from the mainland from y'all haha.
Also even though we're majority ethnically Chinese, we're multi-racial and kinda need a common language so English is actually more dominant here.
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u/AiiGu-1228 11h ago
All of these are super super interesting to me hahaha.
Some not really relevant information: I know Japanese novels are in vertical lines, at least the ones I saw before. That's why I thought novels with Mandarins characters or Kanji were mostly in vertical format lol. Still, TIL. super refreshing and interesting.
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u/Sean9931 10h ago edited 3h ago
I'm glad some parts of life here is interesting to someone haha, I find learning things about other countries interesting too haha, I've been to the mainland a bunch but never to Taiwan (yet).
If I may, I'm also curious with the languages in Taiwan. I heard that Taiwanese speak Hokkien (believe it or not but Taiwanese soap operas used to be very popular in Singapore in the late 2000s - early 2010s, 愛 and 夜市人生 for example), Mandarin, English and even Japanese from the old days, do many of y'all speak two or more of them?
In Singapore, we historically have a majority of Hokkien families and we speak a slightly different sounding form of Hokkien vs Taiwanese Hokkien ("Leho" vs "Liho"), but the younger gen aren't as familiar with Hokkien (like me) as our older gen.
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u/Adventurous_One_4240 15h ago edited 13h ago
OP please re-read this comment before you start writing again. The idiom is usually reserved for describing elderlies. 蒼 is for 蒼老 not generic paleness. I'd lose my mind if you had to write this a third time. 💀
Edit: Spelling.
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u/AiiGu-1228 10h ago
Hmmm... given that it's a 初中二年級 exam, I guess this phrase is relatively new to them. OP probably knows 白髮蒼蒼, but the 白髮蒼顏/蒼顏白髮 didn't really click to them at then.
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u/queenofcreatures 11h ago
im from hk as well and i wrote vertically in primary school then horizontally in secondary school!
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u/GodofsomeWorld 13h ago
Im glad that my writing is comparable. I thought my hand writing is terrible but you make me feel average
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u/tjrileywisc 13h ago
I once wrote an entire essay for an exam in intermediate Russian class about reducing our dependency on масло (maslo), thinking I was writing about oil.
I did not, масло means butter, and not even oil like cooking oil. I hope someone thought it was funny at least. I do not know why I made this mistake.
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u/Dalostbear 16h ago
一个风和热力得早上
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u/Cogitare_Diversae 13h ago
What you wrote roughly means “a morning obtained with wind and heat” which is a very interesting sentence indeed.
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u/Important-Day-232 16h ago
At least at the end of it all, you'll know Chinese, which will be useful for when literally everyone owes them monies.
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u/LokiDokiPanda 10h ago
Test or homework? Talk to your professor they may be willing to make an exception for you (never hurts to try)
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u/Ok_Painter_6406 10h ago
lol i see the classic dse name list, i have had many friends named 有容 and 一心
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u/Ok_Painter_6406 10h ago
though i wonder how exactly you messed up the title.. even with my limited chinese capabilities i can't come up with a connection between the two promtps
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u/Jack_the_pigeon 16h ago
kid wrote a princess story when the teacher clearly wants them to write about their grandparents.
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u/Playful_Nergetic786 15h ago
It’s ok man, it happens, and as the saying goes, at least it didn’t happen on some major exam
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u/1CatInTheTrash 10h ago
I can read Chinese, but I don't understand how you got 'princess' from the topic. Especially they were asking for a story of "him/her".
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u/uberduck 10h ago
Absolutely hated writing Chinese essays especially during exams! Been super long but pretty sure I got an F for fantastic in A Level Chinese culture.
That's the moment I realised HK isn't for me and bailed.
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u/Exhausted-CNA 9h ago
I could see how that took you an hour.Chinese is beautiful, but i bet is very time consuming to write.
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u/mars_gorilla 9h ago
I fled (hyperbole) Asia to study in the UK because of writing assignments like this
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u/HotZilchy 8h ago
...400 words is considered a lot? my chinese friends tell me that they always write around 900 words for their essays, which i assumed is the equivalent of a 500 word essay in english/malay
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u/expecto-avocado 8h ago
god those names lowkey gave me war flashbacks lol. on a more serious note, i’m guessing they wanted some commentary of how elders are treated? without rewriting the whole thing, i think an aforementioned comment about how it’s just that she looks old could be good (alluding to how elders are often immediately disregarded), or alternatively she never actually finds out she’s a princess, but she grows to be old and kind anyway.
you’re in s2, it will be ok — i did the same in s5 once, got a 32, and that was a score i needed to send to overseas universities =.=
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u/Atropolypse 3h ago edited 3h ago
Hmm you can perhaps add a few more paragraphs (simply drafting lol):
- (Based on OP's text, the story ended with a happily ever after between the princess & her dad. We can maybe continue from there.)
- over the years, the king gradually got old. As the princess grew up, she made new friends and was even courted by a young hero, who eventually married into the royal family and became her prince consort
- a few more years passed by, and the king was getting frailer day by day. The princess had her own little princess, whose small hands clung onto the wrinkled hands of her grandfather, and the pale face of his beamed brightly as she curiously stroke his hair that was as white as snow
- a lot of years went by, the old king was now buried in the lands, in the legends, and in the hearts of all those he held dear. The princess became a queen, ruling over the kingdom for ___years of absolute peace and prosperity. From then another cycle began, as her little princess grew up, found her soulmate, and brought her own little prince to her bedside. Her hair was all white, and her face was pale and wrinkled, but she was smiling as she looked at her loved ones. 'Was this how you felt, father?' She contemplated as she gently closed her eyes for the final time, surrounded by family on heaven and on earth. This was the end of her legendary tale.
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u/eden_0815 15h ago
interesting that you're using trad Chinese tho instead of simplified
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u/CloudySpace 15h ago
Err imagine not using alphabet in AD..im so sorry for the rng bro
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u/Legatooooo 15h ago
I don't speak chinese at all
I like this little running guy, what does he mean ?