#also Google translate is what I relied on here so idk if it’s accurate

[nico-di-genova]

do u ever think about a strollonso and lesstapen crossover? since max has mentioned multiple times how much respect he has for alonso i think they would definitely gossip about their french speaking bfs

I do think about it a lot, and there might eventually be hints of it in keep to the line. Maybe like one small mention, but absolutely nothing that has any bearing on the plot. Fernando knows some French, but quebecois has its differences, so it’s not a language he and Lance communicate in a ton. Max is picking up pieces of French, in the same way Charles picks up Dutch and Lance picks up Spanish. But they absolutely do gossip with each other when certain French words come up or certain things they don’t quite follow. Charles and Lance would probably have no idea.

I like to think conversations like this are relatively normal between Max and Fernando:

[meichenxi]

Hey, could I ask you how you do shadowing? Like the different ways you do it? You mentioned in your tag that shadowing is good and I'd love to hear how you do it! I do not attempt shadowing much so I don't really know what helps, etc. ToT (my studyblr is rigelmejo)

Hellooo! Thank you for the interesting question!

Tbh I think I do it fairly basically - I don’t use any particularly fancy software, but software like Language Learning with Netflix has certainly made it easier. There’s a whole video on how to get the most of it here: [on mobile, link didn't work - How to study Chinese with Netflix! by Chinese Zero To Hero] (I’d recommend checking out all of their videos actually, they’ve done a bunch of livestreams recently and they place a lot of emphasis on shadowing + the course they are trying to sell you is…actually phenomenally good)

(Also, I have to preface this by saying that I have been very lucky in terms of pronunciation: I learnt about 80% of my current vocabulary by ear without characters or pinyin. I have been in China for eight months in total, and while I didn’t speak Chinese for all of that, I was constantly soaking in info on natural sentence intonation. I still often don’t know officially what the tone of a vocabulary item is, especially if it changes tone like 教, 为 or 相, but I don’t get yelled at so I have definitely internalised a lot of those changes. I definitely would have more trouble with this if I hadn’t had that experience - my other areas are waaaay weaker because of this though- my reading SUCKS lmao and I can literally handwrite about ten characters)

Anyway. How I shadow:

1) Quite simply by playing the line, and repeating it with all the emotion it has!! I usually use Netflix or Viki for this. I try to do it as fast as possible, and if I can’t do the whole thing, I ‘chunk’ it: if I were doing the sentence 我们还不知道他会不会来, I would start from the end with 他会不会来, then 不知道他会不会来, and then the whole sentence. Notice that this isn’t breaking it down into words or even grammatical phrases, but intonational phrases: it would be perfectly sensible to just do 会不会来 without the 他 but realistically, since this is a question, it’s likely that a strong stress will be placed on the first 会, and you wouldn’t be able to replicate that without also included the more weakly stressed syllable before.

2) I locate (intentionally or subconsciously) the main locus of stress within the sentence, and I focus on that accordingly. Tones may become less extreme if they are not stressed, and may become more exaggerated if stressed. This is always a good exercise. I accompany this with physical actions - I throw my hands down, I sigh, I groan!

3) I put away the text, and don’t look at the tones or even my computer screen - more on this below.

4) Finally, when I think I’ve got it reasonably accurate, I’ll record them speaking the line into my phone with an appropriate pause for copying and play it back to myself at various points throughout the day.

5) I then go and find other words with the same tone contour to slot in, and copy it again. After that, I find words that are slightly different tonally and pop them in too.

6) I finally do fun things like hold a conversation with myself. This can be really simple phrases imbued with some kind of emotion - 这个女子到底是谁呀？为什么不认识我？应该是新手吧。You can do this either really informally, or very formally, or both - trying to speak in the latter way is very fun! So then it’d be idk something more like: 那位姑娘是何人，来自何处？This is fun because you can really slow down your speech and sound as elegant as you like!! (this will sound stilted if you do it for modern speech, but it’s a very fun exercise)

Choosing your media!!

1) Don’t use donghuas. Seriously. The voice actors usually speak at a ridiculous pace and not with the same range of ‘normal’ intonation

2) Your Chinese is definitely good enough to recognise when anyone is quoting poetry or speaking in a paricularly sexy literary way so, uh…don’t do that. That rules dramas like Nirvana in Fire OUT.

3) Modern dramas and reality TV shows CAN be great, but they can also be quite intimidatingly quick and almost too mushy at times. I’d recommend informal speech in guzhuang dramas more, because they have professional voice actors and extensive sound editing, meaning that although it might be fast and the vocabulary harder, it’s actually much more accessible and easier to copy. You don’t want to be stuck with the awfulness of 50% failed foreigner and 50% 12 year old boy who can’t enunciate properly!!

4) CHOOSE YOUR WEAPON WISELY. I try to find characters that speak in a dramatic, whiny or childish way. This is so important! There’s literally no use copying Lan Wangji unless you want to be able to have that particular cadence and tone of voice you get reciting poetry. Childish/whiny/dramatic characters on the other hand stress some words very strongly, and rush others together - this is great for hearing what actual real speech sounds like. Whininess wins. In The Untamed, characters like Wei Wuxian (not yllz!wwx but just…regular wwx), 一问三不知 Nie Huaisang, Jin Ling, and Jingyi are all great. Also Jiggy, who is just very extra constantly and speaks much slower as well, which really helps. In SHL characters like Gu Xiang are good.

5) CHOOSE YOUR VOICE WISELY! If you are really aiming to copy them 100% (which you should try at least sometimes), you want somebody with your pitch range to sound normal. I have a sort of party trick in Chinese that because I’ve spent so much time listening to women in guzhuang dramas I can change my voice and sound like a) a scheming concubine with honeyed words, or b) the voice of the Beijing metro. My teacher found it hysterically funny. But it’s not my natural voice, and if I speak like that for too long it hurts. The women usually are too high for me, and the big burly manly men too low - so I’d recommend finding a man with a higher voice, or an older woman (like some of the female characters in Nirvana in Fire). Again, sorry that this is mostly the Untamed (I’m just most familiar with it) but the voice actors for Wei Wuxian and some of the juniors (+jiggy) has a higher voice. Likewise Chengling in Word of Honour.

On intonation in general:

- The thing is that whilst shadowing is useful it requires prior ability in a whole bunch of other skills that you can train - it relies on your ability to accurately mimic pitch, emotion and other contrasts. Training this in ANY language, including your native one, will help your ability to do this in Chinese - so I’d recommend spending a fair amount of time practicing shadowing (or speaking just after somebody whilst listening to a string of text, like monolingual simultaneous interpreting) in your native language too. Any training copying accents or mimicking other people is going to similarly help, regardless of the language.

So, with that in mind, further tips:

1) Hum / try to copy the intonation without any words. What this does is force you to pay attention to what the intonation actually is, versus what you may think it should be.

2) Don’t look at the text! Do! Not! Look! At! The! Text! If you look at the characters or pinyin you’re telling yourself ‘ok this is a third tone here’ etc, but you want to override the part of your brain that has gotten into bad habits and is supremely self-confident in how you’re pronouncing the third tone, and actually just go straight back to mimicking.

3) Don’t be afraid to do it with vocabulary that is way beyond your level. Actually, I find this can sometimes be helpful, because you don’t have a prior idea about how a particular tone pair should be useful - and you don’t know which tone you should be producing.

4) Learn vocabulary by ear - listen to a vocab podcast or even make one yourself (I often do this; I record my daily Anki and listen back to it through headphones copying throughout the day - if you’re not confident in your pronunciation you can get Google Translate to do it). Similarly, pick unknown vocabulary out of a longer segment and remember it, trying to internalise the tones instead of figuring out which tone it is.

5) Find emotional sentences, and copy them with emotion. This is SO CRUCIAL!!! We remember things when we relate to them, and when we imbue them with emotion - and it also helps in hearing exactly how an angry second tone sounds, for instance.

6) When you’re copying, look up, and imagine you are having an actual conversation. Carry yourself with conviction and poise!! Really try to whine like wwx or slime like jgy. After a couple of turns copying them, try to turn off the audio and keep delivering it in the same manner.

7) Swap individual words out. Once you have a line properly figured out, swap a word or two that has a different tone pair, and focus on delivering it with the same pattern of stress.

8) Finally, practice doing this in your native language too!! It’s a skill that we don’t use often, and it can be trained. Some people are terrible at it at first go even in their native language, but you can work on it!

About intonation in general:

1) I think a lot of pronunciation problems with people sounding unnatural or stiff ultimately come down to a fundamental misunderstanding of what intonation looks like across different languages. In English we mark it by pitch: and we are so used to the rhetoric that Chinese has ‘tone’ and not ‘intonation’ that we try and focus on blindly copying every single word textbook perfect without listening to how it actually sounds.

2) Chinese does have intonation!!! Except that, unlike English, when you stress a word, the pitch doesn’t change, but the tone contour is exaggerated - basically the only time you will ever hear a full third tone is in isolated or very exaggerated speech. If you have a Chinese friend, get them to record a sentence like the English ‘I didn’t ask her to steal his rucksack’, and put stress on the different elements of it - I didn’t ask, I didn’t ask, I didn’t ask, and so on. Notice and copy how the tones change. When shadowing, you should always be paying attention to where the stress is in the sentence: when you speak by yourself, practicing saying a sentence neutrally, and then with stress on one component, the next, and so on. If it feels unnatural, it’s because you might not have practicised like this before - it’ll get better!

Hope that’s somewhat helpful / interesting!

- 梅晨曦

[oranaro]

@mercurysystem you wanted to be tagged, here ya go

How many works do you have on AO3?

52 if you include the ones on anon

How many fandoms have you written for and what are they?

Dream SMP, Hermitcraft, Doll Eye, that one HC fic inspired by 100 Gecs, and a couple originals

What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

(REDACTED), Dolls And Toys, Uncovered, Lucky, Skephalo Smut. All of these except Uncovered contain porn to some degree. 

Do you respond to comments, why or why not?

Ehhhhhhhhh not really? I used to try to respond to every comment I got, but I quickly learned I’m not good at doing that. I only really reply anymore on request books to let the person know I fulfilled their wish. 

What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

Hard to say since for a while I was fucking addicted to the angstiest shit possible. All my most brutal stuff is on anon though lol. I guess my most angsty fic that doesn’t dip into NSFL territory is All That Mattered. Basically a guy kills his friend in a past life and wakes up with all the memories of it. Meanwhile his friend has no idea what happened and acts like he’s still his bestie. The killer has to live with the guilt of what he did while pretending nothing happened for the sake of his friend’s happiness. 

Do you write crossovers? If so what’s the craziest one you’ve written?

No. IDK What to say, I just don’t enjoy writing or reading them. 

Have you ever received hate on a fic?

Considering what I like to do as well as the sort of stuff I used to specialize in, people have been surprisingly kind to me. Only fandom I’ve gotten any negativity from was Dream SMP. One person told me to starve myself. I’ve also gotten a few people tell me I made them vomit, and made them want to rip out their eyes and erase their memories. That was on my more brutal stuff though, so I just take that as a sign I had done my job right. 

Do you write smut? If so what kind?

Heeeeelllllllll yeah. Pretty much everything except underage, age play, scat, and farts. 

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

YEAH TWICE. The first time someone said they loved my fic and asked if they could “adapt” it. I said yes while not really knowing what this person had meant. When I checked their profile the next day they had copy-pasted my fic, its description, and all the tags word for word and changed out the names so that it would fit into a different fandom. At least they credited me in the notes at the end. My fic was waaaaaay more popular though, so I don’t care LOL. I also think it’s flattering that they thought my stuff was good enough to steal. 

The second time I had quickly typed up a oneshot which I would never consider my best work. A few hours later I saw a fic with the same title, description, tags, and general plot posted by someone on anon. I guess they read my fic and thought they could do better. Again, I don’t care since my fic got so much more attention. 

Have you ever had a fic translated?

Not that I know of. 

What’s your all time favorite ship?

All time favorite? I don’t know, there’s so many to love. That’s like asking “What’s your favorite food?”; it’s impossible to choose one. 

Whats a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

Happy Family Coraline AU. I had already written out the scene where the Beldam throws Coraline into that room with the ghosts in it. I had recieved some good feedback on that bit. I did some more world building, but could never figure everything out. It’s been months since I touched it, so I guess I’m gonna call it done forever. 

What are your writing strengths?

I like to think that I’m good at angst. 

What are your writing weaknesses?

Character descriptions T_T. Can I not just give them different pronouns so you know who’s talking and call it a day?

What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

This one’s complicated. 

Usually when it’s done it’s when a character only says a word or two in their native language, a sentence at most. Sometimes it’s to show personal relationships (Like an Arabic woman calling her boyfriend her habibi). Other times it’s to exaggerate how ‘exotic’ a character is (Like a Spanish character saying “MADRE DIOS” every time he’s in a scene). Or it’s to sound fancy (Like saying “Cafe de Merde pas Cher” instead of “Cheap shitty coffee”). 

I’m monolingual, so it’s not my business to police or critique how other people write language. But I have spoken to multilinguals, and from what I’ve heard writers rarely do a good job of accurately depicting this sort of thing. Things like having to translate stuff in your head so you seem less intelligent in your non-native language, or forgetting common words in every language you know, or saying things like “hand shoe” instead of “glove”. And sometimes this inaccurate writing can be harmful and enforce stereotypes as well as just not be fun to read. 

As a monolingual, I feel like most of the time it’s... unnecessary. Especially if it’s not accurate to how people of that language talk. Sometimes it works just fine to say “He whispered praises to him in his mother tongue”. Having words of a different language randomly in dialogue can be distracting. (The worst offenders are in movies where even the subtitles just say “Speaking in (language)”). 

We can all agree on one thing though, actually know what words mean before using them. Do some proper research on linguistics instead of relying on Google Translate to spare yourself from becoming a laughing stock. 

What was the first fandom you wrote for?

Hetalia LOL. Back in Jr. High. I’m not sharing that shit. 

What’s your favorite fic that you’ve written?

The Sun Always Came Up. Just a bit of hurt/comfort. 

I also like Sleep-E-E’s. A guy can’t get to sleep, so he pays his friend to kick him in the face until he passes out.