• ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mlOP
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    1 year ago

    Again, this is the most surreal conversation I’ve had in a while. Plenty of people discuss politics nowadays and China in particular given that it acts as the main counter to US led world order. You can go to Lemmygrad and see plenty of people discussing China all the time, I assure you we’re not getting paid for it.

    The reason I personally feel strongly about the subject is because I grew up in USSR, and saw my country destroyed through liberalism and western intervention. I personally suffered living through the collapse, and when my family moved to the west I was frankly shocked to see the insane things people believed about USSR here. I see a lot of the same smears being used against China today, and this is a personal subject for me.

    I have friends from China, I have a pretty good idea of what life there is actually like. China is by no means perfect, but it’s nothing like what western media paints it and what people living in the west believe about it.

    Finally, I certainly would like to move to China at some point. However, it’s not easy to just uproot yourself and move half way across the world. I have friends and family where I live, people depend on me. I can’t just up and move no matter how much I’d like to. Also, even learning the language is a challenge. I’ve been studying Mandarin for over a year now, and I’m just becoming minimally conversational in it.

    • AfricanExpansionist@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Yeah I’m sure that life under the USSR was definitely better than the bullshit that came next. Albanians are living with similar headaches now, but lucky enough to live in a place that’s largely inconsequential on the world stage.

      Anyway I’m not here to debate the merits of your worldview or reasons for supporting the CPC. I was genuinely curious whether you worked at state media and whether we may know some folks in common. This is my first time in such an online community

      Good luck with your Mandarin. I could never get the hang of it, but most of my friends seemed capable of basic conversation and they always told me how easy it is.

      • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mlOP
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        1 year ago

        I definitely don’t find it easy, but it is doable. The writing is the really hard part for me. If I actually did move to China, I want to be able to communicate with people fluently.

        • AfricanExpansionist@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          Most of the folks I know there who speak well never bother learning to read and write characters. I can’t blame them. It’s a huge commitment to learn a non-phonetic language. But it was funny to watch them be as clueless as me when we walk through a supermarket

          I do know one guy who became so fluent that he earned their equivalent of a green card (almost unheard of).

          Are you a Wechat user?

          • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mlOP
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            1 year ago

            It seems doable, I can probably recognize around a thousand characters or so at this point, and using pinyin as input means I can skip learning how to write the characters which seems to be the hardest part. And I’m not on Wechat.