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Oct. 22nd, 2020 08:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynworking on Duolingo's Chinese lessons. early on there is the inevitable lesson on food. they did this with the Italian class, too, so I assume pretty much all their languages other than maybe High Valyrian do food early on.
(I only watched seasons 1-6 of Game of Thrones and never read the books but from what I remember I can't recall the characters with Valyrian lines even mentioning food. At least the Klingon language class on Duolingo would include, like... gagh.)
anyway, they teach you mian, which is noodles, and fan, which is rice, and yu, which is fish, and one of the sentences they have you practice is 'I do not eat noodles, I do not eat rice either'.
my reflexive response as I got to the end of the sentence was, 'well, what the hell do you eat, then?'.
(Side note: I grew up in New York City, at least to the age of 11, and after my family moved to New Jersey my primary exposure to Chinese was via Hong Kong action movies. As far as my ear is concerned, Cantonese sounds like an actual people language that actual people speak, and Mandarin sounds like an over-simplified conlang with weird gratuitous phonemes. unfortunately Duo does not offer Cantonese.)
(I only watched seasons 1-6 of Game of Thrones and never read the books but from what I remember I can't recall the characters with Valyrian lines even mentioning food. At least the Klingon language class on Duolingo would include, like... gagh.)
anyway, they teach you mian, which is noodles, and fan, which is rice, and yu, which is fish, and one of the sentences they have you practice is 'I do not eat noodles, I do not eat rice either'.
my reflexive response as I got to the end of the sentence was, 'well, what the hell do you eat, then?'.
(Side note: I grew up in New York City, at least to the age of 11, and after my family moved to New Jersey my primary exposure to Chinese was via Hong Kong action movies. As far as my ear is concerned, Cantonese sounds like an actual people language that actual people speak, and Mandarin sounds like an over-simplified conlang with weird gratuitous phonemes. unfortunately Duo does not offer Cantonese.)
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Date: 2020-10-22 09:24 pm (UTC)No clue if Taiwan's official language is Mandarin or Cantonese.