is it so different?

This video is for those who have maybe wondered, "how does Chinese even work, like, at all." Chinese, on the surface, seems so different from our own language, but I hope that this video makes you see that they are perhaps more similar than you thought.
I am a university student studying Mandarin Chinese, and pronounced things to the best of my ability. That being said, I am a student and I had to sacrifice some accuracy in my explanations for the sake of simplicity. Although, I believe everything in this video is true to the best of my ability.

Music
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Track: Chopin - Nocturne in E flat major, Op. 9 no.2 [Copyright Free]
Track: Chopin - Ballade no. 1 in G minor, Op. 23
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[Cactus_Langs]

No dumb clickbait and straight to the point, I love this video!

[areitu]

One of my friends decided to learn French and mandarin at the same time. He said French started off easy but got challenging very quickly, while Mandarin started off challenging but didn’t get harder because it was mostly vocabulary, vs learning the intricacies of liaisons, irregular verb conjugations, etc.

[mydogisbailey]

Tones and characters are insanely difficult for foreigners to grasp. Everything else about the language is not so difficult

[chengong]

As a Chinese speaker, the third misconception is also commonly shared by learners for English in China. If you don’t know about Latin and other old indo-European languages, every English word seems arbitrary and you just have to memorize it.

[PoweredByPieGD]

this is an really well made video and as a native-ish mandarin speaker i think your pronunciation is perfectly understandable! very easily digestible, great job!

[rexnemo]

I have found that I learnt more about grammar from studying Chinese language than I ever did when learning English !

[greens]

the edit on this is fucking good! clearly a lot of heart and hard work in this video, props to you

[Borishal]

Excellent. Most people have no understanding of language and yet by hold fast to a hundred misconceptions. It is refreshing to see a simplified approach to the subject.

[hedgeearthridge]

The most useful thing I learned from this is the last thing: the Romanized chinese accent symbols do exactly what they look like, if it ticks upward then the tone goes up. Nothing is ever that easy, it's really surprising 😂

[verdantTree]

Great video. The morpheme breakdown of 圖書館 / 图书馆 would be better broken down to "picture-writing-building", i.e. building that houses pictures and writings.

This is actually a "Chinese" term that was invented by the Japanese during the Meiji period, adhering to Chinese language rules. In order to describe newly introduced western concepts, the Japanese invented quite a few other such terms like this, for example 電話 (denwa/dian4hua4) telephone, 哲學 (tetsugaku/zhe2xue2) philosophy, 博物館 (hakubutsukan/bo2wu4guan3) museum, etc. Whats interesting is that many such terms eventually made their way over to China, where they were adopted and have now practically become native words.

[ufufu]

ugh i LOVE your editing style. it's so cool

[coffeegator]

the "autobiography" example was very understandable

[caleb.]

This was such a well made video i went to your channel to see more and was so surprised that your other video is "making a bong in minecraft" LOL!

[Vedertesu]

This is giving me motivation to start studying Chinese again. I studied it for a couple of years in primary school, but didn't continue on secondary school. It's not even been a year yet of my last Chinese lesson but I already miss it, even though I didn't like it much then.

[etaoinwu]

The retro style of your video is amazing!

[JonathanRamirez-uyjp]

This is not "how to make a bong" second part

[katemassey]

I really love this video! You summarise so succinctly what fascinated me about the language when I was first curious about it and what got me hooked when I started learning

[handlingitwell]

Unique, elegant, and clean animation style! I like your incorperation of Chinese phrases into this, and your pronunciation is better than some of those "learn Chinese youtubers" out there! I especially appreciated your explanation on how "Chinese" varies based on region. As a Cantonese and Mandarin speaker, I don't really like the word "dialect" as it is very misleading. Languages like Serbian and Croatian are so mutually intelligible yet they are distinct languages; yet Cantonese and Mangarin are often referred to as the "same language" even though they are not mutually intelligible. Thanks for the video, it was satisfying and enjoyable to watch.

Only three suggestions that seems to have not been mentioned yet:
1:54 誤解一 is more correct here.
7:09 a more correct translation of "in Chinese" would be 中文裏/中文里.
8:36 having 是 and 的 would not be necessary as the characters are inferred through context.

[jakubbriza]

6:56 the word for ball is actually in second tone - qiu2. This is the first time I have found a mistake in Chinese, that means my Chinese must be getting better 🤣 The video is splendid by the way, very nicely done, good job 👏

[FluffyFuri]

Finally a video that's not shitting on the Chinese language

The pronunciation may be off but it still nice to see people actually understand

ps, 马码玛犸 are mǎ, 吗 is ma (轻声/soft tone), and 蚂 is má