Bob’s Guns is an excellent track by Ludique.
she/her
I concur and have the professional experience to do so (iykyk.) OP, if you actually wrote this yourself and actually want to sound less like an LLM, I recommend logging off of Claude Code and reading some books. Do a little recursive self-improvement if you know what I mean.
If your raads-r is high it is highly likely that you do. But it might be disadvantageous to have a diagnosis in some cases, like if you are planning to emigrate at some point. Please research potential impacts before proceeding.
Regardless you should still study hearing the tones. You can use Anki for tone pairs you find bothersome, help you draw a distinction between them. For initials and finals I found IPA helpful, although to be honest I didn’t find either of those especially troublesome. You could try the channel I linked about zh, sh, ch distinction, they may have videos that are helpful for improving understanding of the difference between these sounds.
A lot of the tones get elided or deemphasized in fast speech.
At this stage you should consume a lot of content made for learners. I recommend making a separate Google account for Chinese study and watch videos from the following accounts. You can also echo the speaker and pay attention to tones and pronunciation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=140DowW_FBs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCNjXBL6ZMQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SylMUnCgHDE
Videos about how to shape the mouth during pronunciation are also helpful. Many initials are subtlely different from how you would expect them to be pronounced based on the pinyin and English phonology.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpQ3IMd4AMg
You can also use Anki flashcards with phrase level context to aid memory. When you make a flashcard there should only be one word on it and you should prefer to make Chinese only flashcards. This is a relatively slow method but you can learn vocab reliably.
I’m studying Chinese and I plan to study Spanish next, then Japanese and Vietnamese, then maybe Greek. I studied Latin in high school but the learning system in place was bad. I’ve heard Language Transfer is a good free course for the languages it has, which Chinese is not among. https://www.languagetransfer.org/
For Chinese I find that the most difficult thing is coming up with something to say quickly and with fluency. I’m using an AI-based and vibe coded app that costs a ridiculous amount of money every month to improve my fluency, with good results so far. https://www.chunkingchinese.com/app/ <=the app. But I should really get some lessons from a teacher as well and try to make some friends in Chinese, since the app has gotten me to the point where I can just barely string a sentence together. It gives pronunciation feedback and when my pronunciation of a sentence is bad, I retry it once to make a little progress.
I also use Dong Chinese to get podcasts and videos generally targeted to an audience of learners that’s about on my level. You can use it to learn new characters as well, it has transcripts and quizzes and you can click on words you don’t know which it will have you review in context. What I like about this app is that it’s easy to target words you remember weakly. Dong Chinese is much cheaper, and I’d recommend it for just about anyone.
One of the best podcasts on Dong Chinese for lower intermediate learners is Teatime Chinese. The speaker, Nathan, is from Shanghai and talks clearly and slowly about a variety of topics. For words that are likely to be new, he gives a definition in Chinese and then English after using them a few times, which means you can listen without a dictionary. The podcasts are free on YouTube. I mostly find them too easy now, but I recommend them highly for Chinese learners.
I also study reading and listening using Little Fox. Right now I’m watching a series about an elementary school girl who flies around the city on rocket boots and shoots lasers out of her eyes. I don’t recommend trying too hard to learn every word the first time it shows up on this site as some of them are less common. What I do is copy the transcript of the episode I’m going to watch next to the Pleco reader (you can use something like Pleco file reader and Syncthing) and scan it quickly before watching the episode to find unfamiliar words that occur or have occurred frequently, that it seems I’m partially familiar with. I guess at the pronunciation and meaning of the words and the sentence they’re in and then puzzle it out quick like with the Pleco definitions. I do this a few times per episode to improve comprehension of the episode ahead of time, then I watch the episode and do the quiz.
I feel like I’m on the verge of a breakthrough with Chinese. It’s not easy to learn but I feel like the Chunking Chinese app is especially helping at this time, since it forces me to output at a level that’s achievable and the output is novel to me, and since it gives pronunciation feedback that is mostly pretty good. I find that I can put a sentence together more easily than a lot of other Chinese students, although I still have trouble speaking at length on a particular topic and I still struggle with fluency to an extent despite making some progress.
Overall my approach is to focus less on spaced repetition and focus more on encoding new memories and targeted input and output practice around my current level. The apps I use often have spaced repetition built in to some extent but it’s not as essential to use it in every context that you use the language.
Apple already thought of an idea like that to charge their devices, but it turns out to generate a huge amount of heat so it doesn’t work. I would expect this to be even worse in cars. At most you could implement wireless charging at stoplights, but the goal of stoplights is not really to stop there for a long time. In any case, a train or tram with electrified tracks or overhead wires is superior in throughput when compared to EVs.
First of all, I’m a woman. Second of all, I do have the professional experience to confidently identify AI-written or assisted text.