And so it begins ... In the first episode, Anett and her fearless guest Yi from Shanghai (China) go on an epic journey through the linguistic wilderness of (Mandarin) Chinese, always trying to stay away from the sun. Along the way, they encounter a special relative of Mandarin, meaningful stress, ten dead lions, missing spaces, Chinese face palms, certain aspects of aspect, entities of cute pandas, stacks of verbs, surprising Chinese inventions, unfortunate names and unfortunate false friends. On top of that, they search for Donald Duck's nephews and discuss why the Chinese government should clearly invest (more) in Natural Language Processing.
Show notes
Chinese and its relatives
- Mandarin Chinese (Wikipedia, Ethnologue)
- Languages spoken in China
- Sino-Tibetan languages
- Dungan language (Wikipedia, Ethnologue)
- Varieties of Chinese
- Mutual intelligibility
- Material used in "Name that dialect!"
Sounds
- Phonectics and phonology
- Standard Chinese phonology
- Syllabic fricatives
- Tone
- Chinese tongue twisters - we read number 24 (Shī Shì shí shī shǐ), 12 and 23
Signs
- Chinese writing system
- Pinyin
- Hanzi Smatter ("dedicated to the misuse of Chinese characters in Western culture")
Words and sentences
- Morphology and syntax
- Chinese grammar
- Analytic vs. synthetic languages
- Grammatical aspect
- Chinese measure words
- Verb serialization
- Coverbs
It was nice listening to you interview with Yi.
But maybe it was a bit too long? Have you thought about cutting it and only keeping those parts you think are most fun and important?
Nice with the subdivision in different chapters. That made it easy to jump to the parts I was most interested in.
Thanks for your comment, Martin!
In fact, this is already a short(er) version of the interview (Yi was really a patient guest ^^). I guess I still have to learn how to choose and focus on the stuff that is really interesting and to not get lost in too much detail. My plan for future episodes is definitely to make them much more concise. Anyway, thanks for listening and giving feedback! 🙂