Thank you for your service 🙏
Neodosa
I mean, China has lots of 'cool' things, but it is actively suppressed by the media landscape in the west. It should also be noted that China lacks soft power only in western countries. According to the Bennett Institute, China is more popular in the global south than the US.
This will definitely turn the tide of the war 🤯
Does anyone actually understand the appeal of these streams? Is it just kids that watch it? or is it an NPC fetish like moist says?
Yeah it seems that the discourse varies a lot based on which platform you're on. I've heard a lot of bad things about the Baidu forums lol
I would much rather recommend you to find words to learn instead of characters, since this will actually let you understand the characters a lot better. Learning the words and the characters they are made out of will help you map the underlying meaning of the characters a lot better, since characters in themselves are hard to define using english words. Take for example "面" which if you look it up in a dictionary will be translated as: surface, flour, noodles, aspect, side. The meaning of this character will depend on what characters it is used in conjunction with, and so how will you be able to understand which of these meanings it has if you don't know the words and grammar?
Also, I would strongly recommend that you start with focusing on listening instead of reading, since this will help you develop a better accent and it will make learning the characters a lot more effortless.
Additionally, understanding comments on social media is actually kind of an advanced skill, since you need a very good understanding of the culture and references.
Traffic does seem to be greatly improved, and that's like the main reason I'm hyped about this game. Now, you'll have to care about parking, cost and comfort of the transit, meaning that I can put all of my knowledge gained from watching RMTransit and NotJustBikes to good use. Also, you can now build walking-only streets in the base game
Unpopular opinion: I like these changes
I would actually recommend you to use (chat)GPT to translate Chinese language resources. If you want to find resources on, say, how to maintain the dictatorship of the proletariat, you can ask ChatGPT for a search query in Chinese regarding this subject. Then, you can go to Baidu.com and search for it and find a source. Then ask ChatGPT to translate it for you.
Anki changed my life man. Not just when it comes to language learning but also school, and I've even used it to memorize statistics and talking points which help during debate.
In the beginning stages I did use Duolingo and some Youtube videos covering basic grammar as a jumpstart. However, I think the more important thing was that when watching content, I would write down entire sentences which the content creator would say and put them through DeepL/google translate/GPT in order to get a translation which I could put into Anki. If you memorize enough whole sentences then the grammar will start to uncover itself quite naturally. As for pronunciation, I would consider myself lucky since my ear is apparently pretty good for this and I picked it up easily. Perhaps doing some iTalki lessons might be a good way to get pronunciation right.
If we're talking about cultural exports, then I would highlight the three body trilogy, which is a Sci-fi trilogy which actually did become quite popular in the west. China of course also has quite a big gaming industry (genshin).