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Comment by dtech | Hacker News Reader

How? Chinese folk don't hang around western internet sites, if they can even access them and read English.

Going there and spreading that message seems like a bad idea.

I can tell you there are plenty on HN, myself included. I mean if you wanna make a bigger impact you can learn Mandarin and maybe go to China to meet some more people. Actually there are plenty of Chinese in SFBA or Seattle already. Have you talked to some of them???

Have you learned Mandarin?? That seems like a large amount of time to devote to something, only to go to China and immediately get disappeared after contacting a plainclothes cop.

From your previous comment, you dare to stand in front of a tank, yet you wont put in the effort to learn Mandarin. I dont know about others but that's pretty irony to me.

What's more, you replied without read my comment (or misread?). I said I'm a Chinese in the first sentence. I would like to have conversations with people who are serious about the matter but even on HN where people are rational and logical in most other topics are not showing their best when it comes to topics about China.

Anyway here's one guy who learned chinese: https://www.youtube.com/user/jaredfaa (he's a bigger influencer on bilibili coz youtube is unfortunately blocked in China)

here's a guy went around the world and passed China without knowing Mandarin:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjI1O11S8KY (one of his several vidoes)

Anyway, ignorance promotes fear. Understand the problem first before propose solutions.

You ignored the next part of my comment. It's a large amount of time to waste, not effort, just to be disappeared the moment I got to China and revealed my intentions.

I mean no disrespect to Mandarin itself.

In what capacity you are sure learning it will be a certain waste of time?

Anyway here's a Chinese social media site with many people working in SFBA. I guess you can have more access to places like that if you know a bit Mandarin.

https://www.douban.com/group/sfbayarea/

Just in the capacity that I have a lot to learn that I deem essential and research already takes up the majority of my free time.

Not that I won't try again, but I know it's an ordeal for me which takes lots of time I already don't have right now. I've taken and failed two separate language courses, not due to a lack of trying.

Learning foreign languages seems quite hard for me due to the nature through which I learned to read. I taught myself to read between age 2-3 and kind of just coasted on that for a long time, since I had mostly subpar public education.

But failing at multiple foreign languages has taught me the need to step back and have a better understanding of language in general before tackling it again.

But Mandarin is so far left field from other popular languages. Learning the Greek and Cyrillic alphabet was hard enough. I have severe ADHD and memory problems. I have used Anki for a long time and spaced repetition alone takes up a lot of my time. And the amount of symbols to learn for Mandarin is staggering.

Last year I took up memory training after studying the techniques of a few memory masters. I'm doing everything I can to improve my memory but just skipping to Mandarin right now is not a smart or efficient use of my time.

You're the one who said they'd go stand in front of a tank. One hour of study a day for three years to learn somewhat decent Mandarin seems like a small sacrifice in comparison.

If you prefer to start right now, there are also plenty of Chinese people desperate for someone to practice their English with, e.g. on https://www.tandem.net/

I addressed this sentiment already in your sibling comment.

The risk of getting disappeared is low if you limit yourself to social media (as I said, Tandem is one way to find Chinese people willing to speak to you in English) or if you make sure to only talk about politics with people you've become friends with. At least I haven't disappeared so far.

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