I speedran a RANDOM LANGUAGE and ended up this close to entering an asylum | Duolingo Speedrun #27

🧀CHEESY STORE is live! recordzilla.store/collections/jccbm 🧀The CHEESY STORE is finally up and running!🧀It's quite new and there's only a couple products, but we'll be adding more stuff periodically.

Also, please consider supporting this channel on my brand new Patreon or other socials!
►www.patreon.com/jccbm
►linktr.ee/jccbm

"A square with a Y and a gun," "an L with a 7, and then an armor stand from Minecraft." You may not like it, but this is what peak linguistics looks like.

To be fair , japanese kanji is harder to use. chinese hanzi are harder only to write: generally they are made of two parts. The first gives a hint for the meaning, the second gives a hint for the sound. The hints are somewhat good in chinese. In japanese, not only they are outdated, but sometimes japanese invents new ways to use the characters: an example is 今日. If "今" is read "ima" and "日" is read as "hi" why "今日" is read kyou？ because they decided so! Detail: those weird readings are generally very common, so good luck learning common words! This doesn't happen in chinese: if you read the characters, you can read the word. To be fair, maybe writing by hand is harder in chinese.
P.S: i wish i could have your imagination.thinking of "我" as a "pi with 4 lines" is pretty wild! I am learning japanese, and my mnemonics aren't as crazy as that! share some secrets of the crazy mnemonics next time, mnemonics lord!

When I started learning Chinese, I first got taught pinyin, tone pairs, and so much more.
Now, I can recognize the characters by only seeing them twice. Maybe it's because I have a good memory, or it's because the more you learn, the easier it gets.
Since you are learning characters first instead of getting the basics of pinyin, you will not learn in the best method. The first thing Chinese kids learn is pinyin. I recommend other websites/apps. Like Busuu, YoyoChinese, or even more. To all the people reading this comment, those websites that I mentioned worked for me. They are very effective for learning Chinese.

I've actually fully completed the Chinese course so this was very entertaining, I was impressed by how well you remembered the characters

as a chinese speaker, this was very brave of you to commit to doing

can’t wait for you to do more Chinese,
this is actually so fun to speed-run LMFAOOOO

bro made more progress with duolingo than me in 2 semesters of chinese course on uni

After 20 minutes, this guy has better pronunciation than some foreigners I know living in China.

As someone who has been learning chinese for a while, Duolingo’s way of teaching it is awful lol. If you actually want to learn I recommend Hello Chinese. Very good program imo. The teacher talks are really helpful in breaking down the lessons and explaining more complex topics

i wish cantonese was an option so i could watch you struggle with those 9 tones

Bro ur channel is underrated af keep up the good work ❤

08:28 The left part is a "woman" radical. Originally it was a picture of a sitting woman with crossed legs. The one on the right is where the sound of this character comes from, and it means "giving birth". When combined, they mean "family name".
09:32 This approach will fail you. The flat line on the top has nothing to do with the tone. It means "roof". The square under it is "mouth". There's another one under the "gate". These characters are in fact compositions of simpler ones, bunched together, sometimes even nested. The reason for that is because originally they meant something. They were pictograms, or ideograms. But since many of them had the same pronunciation, they had to figure out how to distinguish which of the meanings they had in mind, so they started adding those "radicals" that provide a distinct meaning to the character that corresponds to the sound. The tones are another tool for distinguishing them, this time in speech. And since that wasn't enough either, they started bunching multiple characters side by side too. That's why in those multi-character words, it's often the case that both characters mean the same thing and support each other, but it allows for different syllable combinations for better distinction of meanings.
09:38 Same here. The character on top is a "tree" radical that provides the meaning, the bottom one is for the sound "li" and it means "child" or "offspring". Together they mean "an offspring of a tree", which is "plum" in this case. Also used as a common surname.
10:10 If it works then only by accident. The little dash is a part of the radical for "words" or "speech" (in traditional Chinese it looks like this: 言 and DuoLingo uses simplified characters). The other part is a picture of a walking human, and it gives the sound "rèn". Notice that there's another character on your screen (number 2) which also has the same radical for "speech", but this one doesn't have a falling tone. Quite the contrary: its tone is raising. BTW the other part 只 is also a simplified version of 戠 which means "to gather, collect". Together they mean "to understand" or "to recognize" (to piece together what someone said). And if you conbine both these characters, you get a word 认识 which means "to recognize someone" or "to know someone". This is an example of what I said earlier about combining characters of the same or similar meaning to make a multi-character word.

love the editing and content haha keep it up

This format is not the best for a language like Chinese, given that characters are not representations of sounds. Gotta give ya credit for taking it on, though, it's definitely earned its reputation as not being an easy language to learn.

Disclaimer, I'm not an expert, however I've lived in a Chinese speaking country majority of my life and am Chinese enough to give at least very simplified answers.

Q: What is Feng Shui?

A: It literally translates to "wind water". As you can already tell, Chinese is a pictorial language, and this has also influenced its naming of things. Feng Shui, putting it simply, looks at the flow of "energy" of any given place or thing and depending on how good/bad the flow is, the effect on the things surrounding it can differ. For example, imagine a flowing pool of water suddenly getting stopped/stuck at a bend. Things would flood, which is generally a bad thing, and that logic can be applied to daily life things, such as placement of your bed (if you are facing directly in front of a door, you'd naturally feel uncomfortable–bad Fung Shui because doors bring in high energy–and logically because instincts has you aware of the possibility of the door opening suddenly because of a possible robbery and you'd be first seen when in danger, etc.).

Q: Is there a way to remember the characters easier? What does each character mean?

A: Honestly, I would say no, there is no singular easy way of remembering them. I'd just straight up say you just have to memorise each one. Each character can have its own meaning, but at times, when combined, it can be a whole new meaning and sometimes, with how you say the word can different too (e.g. 旅行 (lu xing; travel) and 银行 (yin hang; bank)).
While some may argue you can guess from "radicals" (the small extra characters on a character i.e. 女 (nu; female) and 马 (ma; horse) put together to make 妈 (ma; mother, unfortunately, lol)), I'd say, you'd have to be very creative and very lucky to get those right all the time and some characters do not even have radicals or have any meaning tied to its name (e.g. 加拿大 (jia na da; Canada) literally named as such because it sounds like it). My memories of my kindergarten self literally consists of getting daily homework, typically involving me writing 3 characters ~20 times each on a grid booklet.

love the refrences

From what I’ve understood from Japanese Kanji (which takes quite a bit from Chinese), each character is built up by a bunch of other characters. For example, a character for human paired together with a character for bed would be “sleeping” (not an actual example, just showing how it works together)
Unlike English, these characters aren’t after each other. Since Japanese and Chinese basically have no spaces, they use their unique characters to differentiate words. They’re smushed together into one lump of two characters (or even more!)
Also unlike English, the sounds of the characters aren’t consistent. The character for human might be “ji” (it isn’t, just an example) and the character for bed might be “san”, but together they’re not “jisan”, they might be “migi” for example.

In conclusion
These languages are a pain in the behind to learn

I took three years of Chinese in high school, so I am very well aware of how this is going to go— we mainly used babble and Duolingo for homework… 😂

Edit: I’m thoroughly impressed— 😮

Ok your pronunciation was super impressive