The Story of Mr Shi Eating Lions, recited in Mandarin Chinese
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- Опубліковано 22 вер 2014
- Do you have a good command of the tones in Mandarin Chinese? Listen to it and recited again by yourself. For your reference, below is the English translation of this story.
In a stone den was a poet Mr Shi, who loved eating lions and determined to eat ten. He often went to the market to watch lions. One day at ten o'clock, ten lions just arrived at the market. At that time, Mr Shi just arrived at the market too. Seeing those ten lions, he killed them with arrows. He brought the corpses of the ten lions to the stone den. The stone den was damp. He had his servant wiping it. The stone den being wiped, only then did he try to eat those ten lions. While eating, he just realised that those ten lions were in fact ten stone-lion corpses. Try to explain this. - Комедії
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0:32 damn what a plot twist
😂😂
So this guy ordered his butler to clean the room, and found out the 10 lions are stone props. What a story.
Nice try. The actual plot twist is at 0:45.
I don't even know what I was expecting
ikrrrrrrrrr
man i was like "damn that should be a movie"
The librarian when someone speaks too loudly in the library
librarian must be far louder than one
You made me burst out laughing :D
Nah dude, i don't think librarians are using lions to keep them silent.
Minecraft villager librarian
L猫
A foreigner stubbs his toe
“Shit shit shit shit shit shit”
The Chinese passerby are amazed at his poetry
Lmaoooooo
Omg I just laughed so hard at this 😂😂😂😂
Me telling people: Oh dont worry about the words with same tones! we differentiate it with context!
The context:
Minecraft Villagers when you refuse to buy their bread for 10 Emeralds
🤣🤣🤣
JAJSJSJAJSJSJ
No more like "Hm? HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM"
You mean for *shí* emeralds
half eaten bread: 64 stacks of emeralds
When he said "shi shi shi" i really felt that
Nah man when he *done* said “shi shi shi”
Brought tear to my eyes. How emotional was it 😂
But did you try listening at him while reading the characters, that is the true experience of this poem. All the meaning is in the characters, that's so funny.
@Arturo Ochoa yea 😿
@bumbread Shut the hell up
“Yo I think we fucked up” - My ancestors who created the language.
As a Chinese-speaking person, I can certify that this is a brilliant passage, grammatically correct with logical context.
Bing Chilling
@@chrisdawson1776 social credit+100000000
@@chrisdawson1776zaoshanghao zhongguo
@chrisdawson1776 so funny
That's exactly how my printer sounded when i printed my master's thesis.
Must've been made in China.
This is the greatest comment everrrrrrrr 😂😂😂
Second that, wonderful comment! 😁
@YLR Entertainment zhongwen?
im learning chinese
The classwork: translate 你好
*The test:*
Hahaha 😂
This is not even the hardest one. At least it is written recently (about 100 years ago). Some poem were written 3000 years ago. Imagine trying to translate those ancient words and grammars…
@@kaifanduan8653 屬予作文以記之
@@kaifanduan8653 It's not that it's hard, it's like getting the same letter multiple times in a row on a multiple choice. It feels like you've done something wrong.
@@KaosFireMaker I am Chinese, and I can hardly understand Shi jing （诗经）without modern Chinese translation
Me going to the dentist: I hope they don't have to use the drill
The dentist:
Full translation:
There's a poet named Shi who lives in a stone house, he liked lions. He swore to eat ten lions. Shi sometimes sees lions in the town of Shi, at 10 o'clock, he set off for Shi, the city of ten lions. In time, Shi arrives at Shi. He sees ten lions, and set loose arrows, ten lions die. Shi picks up 10 lions corpses, and returns to his stone house. The stone house is wet, Shi gets a servant to wipe down the stone house. The stone house is wiped. Shi tries to eat the ten lion corpses. While he's eating, he notices the ten lion corpses is actually ten stone lion corpses. The fuck?
Ty
lol it's not town of shi. 市 means market i this context😂
@@peaceleague6514 what fuckin context? shi shi shi? lol
@@peaceleague6514 I guess it was a kill-your-own-lion booth. Nothing is said about purchasing the lions, however. Or would that be impossible with the shi motif, or destroy the poetic meter?
The fuck is the best translation I seen for the last line
As a chinese myself, i almost died listening and reading this.
That is one "shi" that is missing.
But "Death" is "si".
Did it make sense to you? 😂
U wander if would you be able to understand it with just the audio?:)
@@aris7233 it's a completely logical text, but they wrote in that way on purpose
@@prussianrocket2702 Chinese is the most bigger trolling in the world
This poem ended with “Try to explain this event.”
It's pretty much self aware lmao
lol
It was written by a linguist as a critique of his language
Explanation: Shi happens.
@@MrHodoAstartes oh my god Idk if you know Chinese but like shi can mean 事 as in event so this pun like like “stuff happens” in Chinese but “shit happens” in English. Sorry if it’s your point Idk if you know it lmao if you do then this is an explanation for others lol
It was a discussion, an argument, whether Chinese can abandon hanzi(characters), and can be romalized. Zhao was the author of this content, and the hanzist, the last sentence was a blame to the romalizist, 'Can you explain this passage easily and clearly by romalized chinese? If you cannot, how can Chinese be romalized?'
As a Chinese, the most terrifying part was that this actually made perfect sense. Killed my last surviving braincell successfully
Fun fact: This poem was written and is somewhat understandable in Classical Chinese, considering you don't have the text in front of you it may be somewhat understandable in Cantonese but in Mandarin, this poem is completely intelligible.
The relationship between classical Chinese and modern Chinese is more similar to the gap between Latin and Italian. AND the relationship between Cantonese and Mandarin may be closer to the relationship between Italian and Spanish
Wow a language 3000 years old is different than a modern descendant? Shocking!
wow it's almost as if this poem was written entirely for the singular point of making it not understandable when spoken in Mandarin. You can also make a poem that's completely unintelligible in Cantonese or another in Classical Chinese as well.
@@chiriko7335they were just informing god damn
As a cantonese speaker you can understand some of the poem in spoken cantonese.
我可以翻譯, 哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈XDD
The mean in English:
Mr. Shi, so called the cave poet, he enjoy eating lions.
he swear that he will try eating 10 lions at once.
He checks if there are lions in the market very often.
at 10, so lucky Mr. is, he found that there had been 10 lions there.
He stared at the lions.
In the next second, all of the lions were kill by his arrow because of his exctiement
The arrow let the lions died and Mr. Shi, as a result, got the lions.
He put the bodies of lions in the cave.
The cave is moist so he asked the servant to clean the cave.
After the cave is cleaned, he started to try eating the lions,
when he had a try, he found that all the 10-lion bodies are the bodies of Chinese traditional lion statue.
So the story is recorded at the end
PS. The poem is written in "classical" style
so it is hard for people nowaday to realize immediately.
原 Po 底下就已經有翻譯了啊！哈哈哈！
subharay chicken is jī so it would ruin the joke
劉少傑 wtf
Still doesn’t make sense of the story...
@@yl3766 the poem was written to show the linguistic nature rather than a meaningful poem
As a Chinese reading and listening to this, I think my brain just rebooted like a Windows XP
Oh god your name just split the Black Woman Wins Chinese Speech Contest *English Subtitles* video in my recommended in twain
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@@blemmyes bro you destroyed him with words
@@blemmyes *M-M-M-M-MONSTER KILL*
I could never explain to people, learning Mandarin myself, how confusing the tones for each word and the multiple words with the same tone with different definitions were. This video sums it up! :)
Yes the contrast between written and spoken language is amazing, but the story has something to it as well. For those who don't know chinese, it basically says some poet living in a stone chamber loves savouring lions and constantly goes to market to seek lions. One day he goes there and happens to meet ten lions, which he then kills with arrows and takes home to satisfy his peculiar appetite. Here the story especially emphasize the stone chamber being wet, and the poet has his servant wipe it dry. But when the poet is about to start eating, he suddenly realize all the lions are made of stone.
Quite surrealistic if you ask me.
Maybe the second reference to a stone chamber refers, not to Shi's living quarters, but his cooking vessel? And lion meat needs to be cooked in moist heat, otherwise it dries out and becomes hard as stone?
honestly this isn't even the weirdest folk story that i've heard in chinese
In Portuguese, "Shi-shi" means "piss"... my 7 y/o brother is having a laughter attack... he's been laughing for 6 minutes, rolling on the ground
@@eunpyohong4788 hmm, coincidence perhaps?
Yes but i didn't consider this as i was conditionated to listen as if wasn't portuguese
That's so funny. That happened to me once when I was a kid. My family and I went to Greece and my parents turned on the radio in our hotel room. Some band was singing and part of the chorus was this weird Greek onomatopoeia and it sounded like, "ca-ca-ca" so obviously my 5 year old brain thought they were singing about caca. I was writhing in laughter until the song ended.
Is he still laughing?
@@tcomizij5062 no, he ded.
imagine you're a Chinese student and this is the audio for your listening test
This would be the funniest prank ever.
I took chinese study at college. And my laoshi actually did gave this audio for listening test just to troll us.
@@MissGladiolus damn
bet everyone aced it lol
As a student in Hong Kong who had taken both Mandarin and Cantonese listening tests for many years, I can say, what they do is similar enough >:0
*grade* *7* *listening* *and* *reading* *test* *flashbacks* *intensifies*
I heard Chinese is a wonderful language for puns, now i get why. Clever bit of poetry.
Chinese is good for puns too, but there's this japanese poem that is the best pun I've ever seen: Taihei no / nemuri o samasu / jokisen / tatta shihai de / yoru o nemurezu
It was written when commodore perry's black ships (warships) went to Japan in the 19th century causing horror and forcing Japan to completely change and modernize;
on the surface, the poem is an innocent poem about calmly drinking 4 cups of jokisen tea and finding it hard to sleep at night but it also simultaneously means "A mere 4 black ships from across the pacific has awoken us and made us unable to sleep at night"
I love that it’s actually a coherent story 😂
the poem was written to satirize the idea of abolishing Chinese characters and using letters
imagine reading a paragraph filled with SHI SHI SHI SHI SHI SHI
that would imediately kill me
Not actually; the poem was written by a member of the group that create pinyin (romanized chinese). That man supported the usage of pinyin as a phonetic form of modern mandarin chinese only (remember that Chinese is a group of dialects, each one with it's own history and generally unintelligible each other) and thought that the usage of pinyin for other dialects or historical ways of Chinese was a mistake.
For demonstrate the last point, the man wrote the poem in Classical Chinese, which differ a lot from modern Mandarin, reason why, if the poem is read in Mandarin, it will sound "shi shi shi shi shi".
Bruh just use letters. And maybe the point should be why the fuck are y’all naming everything shi? 😂😂 we got punctuation marks now.
@@lamalamalex are you serious?
@@asodo9540 It's to fit this wierd idea of communication, you know, the thing language is supposed to be used to.
@@asodo9540 You can have a debate if it's the correct move but it's not a whim about modernization but of communication and different alphabets (and especially those with many characters) having more problems with being used in the digital age.
You can learn the language and from my limited experience resouces available are decent on getting the correct characters from pinyin to say something common but for that you needed the pinyin.
"Welcome to the amazing world of tonal languages"
God at the tower of Babel: "y'know what? Screw these people in particular! I want to hear them sing!"
Wait till u get Thai alphabet and u will see a kid draw zig zag line
Headaches in Agglutinate language
One of my top 10 fears. Not actually dangerous, but intimidating as hell.
georgian: so yeah god just spammed a bunch of random letters at the tower of babel and we ended up getting all of them
Years back, they had the international students in my Shanghai primary school recite this as part of a stage performance... Was quite fascinating.
日本語だと半分くらい「シ」ではなくなってしまうけれど、それでもサ行から始まる率が高すぎて言いにくそうw
Incidentally, this is why I only passed Mandarin in college in writing. Also I kept bringing up horses when I was trying to ask questions.
You mean the word "ma?"
哈哈哈
媽罵馬嗎?
HAHAHAH
So if the horse water is yellow how horse safe is it to horse drink?
The entire video: shī shí shǐ shì shí shī shì...
是
是 daska
last I checked if you type "shi shi shi" into Wikipedia search, it'll redirect to the article about this poem.
Got distracted by a second, and never found where he was reading again
Thats a Minecraft villager I swear....
*tears well up in my eyes* that was beautiful
Wydrze wydrzę wydrze wydrze wydrze wydrzę.
@@feministkitozwierzeta.krow763 Whoa...
@@owlcat8896 Shi shi shi shi shi shi shi
SHISHISHISHISHISHISHISHSIHSIHSIHSIHSIHSIHSIHSISHISHISHI
Classical Chinese is already confusing as hell. This just takes it to another level. I have no bloody idea of what this is about without reading it.
That's the whole point, isn't it?
Not simply a tongue twister
Also brain twister
I translated this into Korean Hanja, and I have no idea what it's supposed to mean. I can understand the characters by themselves, but it definitely doesn't have anything about Mr. Shi eating onions, if anything, the title says he's eating lions.
@@lotgc someone gave a translation in the response
@@alloha7374 oooohhhhh he IS eating lions! I must have dyslexia or something, because I have no idea where "onions" came from 😅😅😅
My sense of humour is destroyed, I laughed so hard at this
This made me cry sobbing
People who've never tried to learn Mandarin: It must be hard to memorize all those complicated characters!
Mandarin:
The other 10,000 characters : are we a joke to you?
@@Artist_of_Imagination Only 1,000 characters that are accually using in texts: YES YOU ARE
Mandarin is easy then, everything is pronounced as "shi" 😂
Mom: Shi shi! Shi shi shi shi!
Son: Shi! Shi shi shi...
Mom: SHI? Shi shi shi shi shi, SHI SHI!
Mandarin isnt hard, the hard one is Cantonese
Laoshi: "learning Mandarin is not that bad and scary!"
also what their teach at beginner level:
Who is Laoshi?
@@5ucur it means teacher in chinese!
@@5ucur Pinyin for a teacher or a master in general, and it means a Mandarin teacher in this case. Just don't understand why Chinese like to use pinyin when they are already words with the same meaning in English, and pretending them to be English words.
@@ericzhu6620 I doubt if you really looked into my comments before replying. I was saying I don't appreciate the move that using Pinyin of Chinese words when speaking English, especially when there are words with same meaning or another commonly-used translation of the word.
*lǎoshī
Clicked “I’m feeling lucky”
Glad I did
It's interesting that although many people today use this story to emphasise how impossible it is to latinise Chinese, the author of the story, Chao Yuen-Ren himself endorsed latinisation... because he thought only in extreme cases(like Shishi Shi Shi Shi) can latinised Chinese be confusing.
In practice, the Chinese learn multiple languages, even though the result sometimes can look like Chinglish.
it is not that its impossible to be Latinized. Its that we aren't gonna do it. We're not abandoning our language for your Western language, not when ours is objectively better and more beautiful than English. I've written many poems in both languages and I can say with due confidence that it's much better to write poetry in Chinese. I can translate a poem from Chinese and the English variant will still be bad in comparison. Chinese is more denser and has better metrics than English.
crystalline wine contained, in a chalice of gold which sang, of a price worth more than a thousand taels.
there were platters of jade on which we ate -- not of food, but extravagant waste; a value beyond the simple taste.
or
Golden goblets and crystal wine, jadeite platters below fine dine.
or
金樽清酒斗十千，玉盘珍馐值万钱。
to See a world in a grain of sand,
or a Heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
or eternity within an hour. Auguries of Innocence, William Blake
一沙一世界，一叶一菩提。
@@qingxuanyue lol I'm native Chinese speaker too and I know Latinisation will have destructive consequences for our literature and culture. But I'm only clarifying that the author of 施氏食獅史 agreed with Latinisation, and it doesn't mean I myself entertain the same idea.
In the early 20th century, Some people declared that the Chinese characters should be romanized, replaced by Latin letters, 赵元任 wrote this poem, if it is romanized, it would be "shi shi shi.....".
Wouldn't you simply add marks to indicate tone and hope everyone learned them correctly?
@@Leikeze the meaning will still be lost because a lot of Chinese characters sound exactly same
There's a variety of Chinese called Dungan. It's written in Cyrillic script. They managed to represent Chinese with perfect accuracy.
@@ashwoodemiliy9555 Could alterations in spelling to indicate that difference in meaning not be added as well?
@@Leikeze There's only 4 tones in Mandarin but there are far more than 2 words which are pronunced with the same tone, for example:
皇, 黄 and 还 (emperor, yellow and give back), and many others
All of these words are pronunced exactly the same: "huáng" (second tone) and many other words are pronunced the same way, ie with the second tone. There are no way to distinguish them if we used only roman alphabet; perhaps it would be possible with context or in short sentences but obviously it would be a nightmare for long texte. This video largely shows my point ("shi" with only four tones but more than four different words in the poem, so necessarily some words share the same tones).
Except tones, there's no way to distinguish words in roman alphabet, but there are only four (six in cantonese) and there are *far more* than four words which are pronunced in short the same tone. The tones in roman alphabet (pinyin) just give the pronunciation, not the semantic idea behind each word.
Hence, the sinograms is the only relevant writing system for chinese.
A fun fact, you can also use only the pronunciation Shi to summary a plot from the Game of thrones. Shishishishishishi, shishishishi, shishishi 狮氏石室屎时，食矢逝世，始失势. The lion was taking a shit in a stone chamber, when he was shot by an arrow and passed away, then their lost of power and influence began.
💀
That's perfectly understandable to a Japanese speaker except for the character 屎, which is very rare in modern Japanese
@@amerain1729 ah yes the shit character
@@amerain1729 That means shit
This deserves more likes💀
This truly speaks to the soul, such a beautiful story.
i play this on repeat while doing planks. it’s torture because I never know when it’ll end
Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo: *Finally a worthy opponent! Our battle will be legendary!*
:3? What is this about, m
@@beahgg It's about a gramatically ambiguous sentence in english. "Buffalo" is an animal, a city or a verb meaning "to bully"
"Buffalo bully buffalo from buffalo who bully other buffalo from buffalo." Which, in other words, would be "Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo"
"Albany Bison [that] Albany Bison bully [in turn] bully Albany Bison" is another way to think about it.
Don't let it distract you from the fact that you can feasibly put 11 hads in a row, and it can technically be extended even further after that.
Had had had "had". Had Had had had "had had". "Had" had had "had", "Had had" had had "had had". "Had had" had had "had" had; Had Had had had Had had.
That, if you know how to read it, is _technically_ grammatically correct.
In terms of what it's actually saying:
"{Proper noun 1} had had {Improper noun 1}. {Proper noun 2} had had {Improper noun 2}. {Improper noun 1} had had {Improper noun 1}, {Improper noun 2} had had {Improper noun 2}. {Improper noun 2} had had {Improper noun 1} caught [therefore] {Proper noun 2} had had {Proper noun 1} caught."
Police police police police police police police
You need to put more space between fish and and and and and chips” and they write back, saying “in your request, you need to put quotation marks between ‘fish’ and ‘and’ and ‘and’ and ‘and’ and ‘and’ and ‘and’ and ‘and’ and ‘and’ and ‘and’ and ‘and’ and ‘and’ and ‘chips’”.
The fact that this is an advanced poem that demands tone perfection is crazy because this guys dominating it and all my small brain can do is "hehe shoe shoo shoe"
With just a little practice, it's not hard for native speakers. I can tell you because I'm a native speaker. That's the magic of "native".
@@user-wr8wf5nf4l yeah being a native speaker in a language is like getting default settings free, and then the rest you have to -suffer- spend time and effort to learn
“Sche sche shishishi she sche sche, shi shi shi sche!”
- You can't eat a lion.
- Don't worry, it tastes like chicken.
i love that the end of the story is literally "Try to explain this", like they're challenging the reader
As a Chinese, I try to translate this into English…
"There's a poet Shi living in a stone house. He looks forward to eating lions, swearing that he must eat ten.
He often searches lions at the market. At ten o'clock, there were ten lions appearing at the market. At this moment, Shi was also at the market. He saw these ten lions. Taking advantage of his arrows, he made these ten lions dead.
He then took the bodies of these ten lions back in his stone house. The stone house were humid, so he asked his servant to wipe it dry. After the house was wiped, he started trying tasting the ten lions' bodies. As he was eating he realized that these lions' bodies are actually stone-made lions' bodies. Please try to illustrate this story😉"
Oh I forgot the title: The story of Shi eating lions
Thanks a lot, but the translation has already provided in the description of this video.
@@chen1923 I didn't see it 😵
@@tranlewlinign9592 Just above all the comments. Click "SHOW MORE" under the first two lines of the description for this video.
@@tranlewlinign9592 get rolled
Somebody make a 10 hour version of that
Funny, 10 hours can be translated to 十時, which is in the poem.
@@lampoilropebombs0640 let me guess, it is pronounced shi shi
@@sebastianfeneser8543 oh boy, you really knows your Mandarin well
We need a TYPE BEAT
this was a worthy comment 😤
I had to memorise this when I was a kid, I had a bad memory of this
The Minecraft villager inventing their own language:
i was thinking the same thing lol
truly, one of the great languages of the world
No. The fact that it's all the same basic sound just demonstrates that modern mandarin is greatly changed and simplifed from the classical chinese this poem was originally written in. Read out loud in mandarin, it is unintelligible. No chinese person listening would understand. Only if you read it in classical chinese or other dialects like cantonese would it actually make some sense because the sounds are NOT all the same.
j o k e
During the regime of Chairman Mao, there was once a proposal for a new set of Chinese writing: to get rid of those ideograms and to get on board the developed world by using Roman letters.
However, Chinese is a language with a high degree of homophony (each of two or more characters having the same pronunciation but different meanings), and the sound of every Chinese character carries a specific tone, or pitch movement, which is an integral part of a word and used to distinguish its lexical meaning.
It doesn't matter written in the classical compact style or modern spoken form. This prose is meant to show that it is impossible to abandom Chinese characters in favour of romanisation.
@@GosuTenshi "...classical chinese or other dialects like cantonese..."
Cantonese is not a dialect; it is a different language. Dialects assume that speakers understand each other. Mandarin and Cantonese speakers do not, as they are different languages. No one would dare say that Italian and Spanish (Castilan) are dialects, even though those two languages are far more similar than Mandarin and Cantonese.
@@akantorman1 My goodness. You just answered your own question but don't even realize it. How sad. Clearly, you don't actually know linguistics so stop pretending.
需要白话文解译！！
【翻译】《施氏吃狮子的故事》
石室里住着一位诗人姓施，爱吃狮子，决心要吃十只狮子。
他常常去市场看狮子。
十点钟，刚好有十只狮子到了市场。
那时候，刚好施氏也到了市场。
他看见那十只狮子，便放箭，把那十只狮子杀死了。
他拾起那十只狮子的尸体，带到石室。
石室湿了水，施氏叫侍从把石室擦干。
石室擦干了，他才试试吃那十只狮子。
吃的时候，才发现那十只狮子，原来是十只石头的狮子尸体。
试试解释这件事吧。
Wow such a touching story deserves to be told to everyone on the internet
I magically understand it! When listening, I can never understand, but by reading and recognising the characters, I can understand them
Without the characters, no Chinese understands this recording at all! This highly artificial passage was composed by Yuen Ren Chao, a talented linguist and polyglot. He was to show how magic the tones could be, at least technically. None of the words in this passage is fake, but the problem is that no Chinese actually speaks or writes in that crazy way!!!
even with words.
still have hard time trying to understand
Poets get away with it, right?
Normally they don't either, but there are oddballs in every group. 😆@@SeekingTheLoveThatGodMeans7648
this poem is more likely to show that Chinese cannot replace with tones ..... always Chinese characters..... since the ancient time, the tones has changed so many times, only the character with traditional or simplified ,which is not much different.......
The original shi-tpost
Good!
This is like when pokemon can only say their names but have full on conversations in the anime
I liked when he said "shi"
For brazilian people he's literally just saying "piss" over and over again
All jokes aside, the fact this is an actual story just shows how interesting languages can be.
Kind of. The poem is written in Classical Chinese, but each character is pronounced with its modern Mandarin reading. This level of oligophony would not be heard if a Chinese speaker 2000 years ago read aloud this poem. The text is not Mandarin, but read as if it was.
@@markmayonnaise1163 You'd be surprised to find out how similar 白话 (vernacular chinese) in the past is to the sound of modern Mandarin. If someone in Qing dynasty were to read it, it probably sounded like this more or less
@@_timelike Classical Chinese is a written language and not a spoken one, it has been a written lingua franca for a very long time among the literate. I guess it's kind of analogous to Latin's function for the past millennia. You've got to remember spoken languages always develop in a way that supports understanding - if you wanted to express the meaning of this story using mandarin you would not say this. Yes, Qing dynasty court mandarin was very close to modern mandarin seeing it's the same language with only a few hundred years of difference. (When you stepped outside the capital a lot of regional dialects were unintelligible.) However, The original pronunciation of these characters in old Chinese (I.e. 2000 years ago) would be completely foreign and exotic to native speakers of mandarin today - it was a completely different language. Even the modern Cantonese reading of this story would not have the same effect.
@@_timelikeOlder dialects of Chinese actually had more tones than the current 4 in modern Mandarin. Cantonese, which isn’t mutually intelligible by Mandarin speakers, is more related to ancient Chinese than modern Mandarin is. So even a Qing dynasty scholar would struggle to understand Classical Chinese.
@@zack2804Well, Classical Chinese had 4 (actually 3 with 1 pseudo-tone), and Old Chinese had none. The split from four tones into 陰/陽 pairs happened later. Tones themselves developed from Old Chinese ending consonants leniting and eliding (Old Chinese was a conjugated language where suffixes like *-s existed).
i love how it sounds like dio
The villager when i stole his bed:
As a Chinese，i want to say that i can understand the meaning of the essay easily.But it is difficult for me to read the essay😂
After listening to this, I don’t think I’m Chinese anymore.
How
@@soybeann_wwx8921 😂
Are the pronunciation correct or it's just a joke, memes or something?
@@anonymousstout4759 the pronunciation is correct. It’s just that the entire story is made up of the sounds “shi” but in different tones. When you read the story, it kinda makes sense (?) but when you hear it you won’t understand the story at all since “shi” have many different meaning. I think the story is meant to be a joke.
brain: "do you want more dopamine?"
me, in spanish:
would apply to chinese as yes is "shi"
Sì!
Es sí, no "shi", wey (o güey, para los gringos) :/
@@vi0let831 "shi" es una manera casual de decirlo wey tal vez donde tu vives no se usa pero donde yo vivo si
You doesn't need to say it in Spanish
Currently learning Mandarin and this is so encouraging lmao
I liked how he pronounced 'shi', excellent story
doctor: you only have 51 seconds to live
me:
After seeing this, I don’t think I’m a Chinese anymore.
Damn! The tone and the rhythm are PERFECT!
For any Portuguese speakers, this man is repeatedly saying “piss”
I love the bit in which he says shishi, so beautiful
*shîshì
@@SetuwoKecik *shǐ... “î” does not exist in pinyin
@@ChristianJiang i stand corrected 🤣
But i don't have it in my keyboard
@@SetuwoKecik Haha true it’s a rare diacritic... I had to use my pinyin keyboard to type it out
About one hundred years ago, some people in China proposed to use phonetic characters instead of Chinese characters, and then someone wrote this article to oppose it.
Thank you for the poem. Shi shi.
Just reading the thumbnail alone, I had a stroke
The man who wrote this is Yuen Ren Chao. One of the greatest linguist of all time.
多谢 ！
@@user-wd8wx5md5zthat better be pronounced "shi shi"
As a person who speaks Chinese I am trying to control my laughter reading the screen out loud. If you think it’s funny when you can’t speak Chinese, I wish you could see what it’s like when you can. Hilarious.
Who speaks mandarin*
@@emiles8871 any kind of Chinese dialects will do I swear
@@emiles8871🤓
@@emiles8871it basically sounds like: shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit.....
@@zeflute4586Nah it doesn't work with Cantonese, already "shi" has already been divided into see, sek, suht, sick, seeh, suhp, sieh, and some others
This article was writen to prove that Chinese Charcters(Kanji) can't be simply replaced by or transformed to letter.Once there was an ideological trend that if China want to be modern,Pinyin(a kind of letter language,like alphabet,what you listen is what you write) should replace Kanji
厉害
I imagine someone trying to learn Mandarin watching this and crying in a corner.
I understand Mandarin and AM crying in a corner because I can't keep up without looking at the passage transcription.
Yup that's me :)
SHISHISHI
Me
a perfect response for when someone asks what a tonal language is
Yes
He has such a way with words...
the way it still manages to sound so poetic
it sounds like me mocking my mom under my breath
This kind of shit makes you realize how capable we are as humans to filter and categorize sounds, language is just a form of expression and context means everything.
Over analysis, or finding "deep" meanings is infuriating in cases like these.
@@meflea3675 no, this isn't an over analyzation, it's a pretty basic and truthful one. I think maybe, you don't understand the comment and so you think he's just spouting out gibberish? I'm not trying to be a prick, it just seems very clear to me. Language is a form of expression, and language wouldn't mean anything if there were no context to the words. This video is a proof of how adept we are at the categorization of sounds.
What's so complicated about that? It's an extremely basic idea. It's not even particularly deep. I get where you're coming from because I see the type of comments you're talking about often, and they irritate me too.
Fun fact “shi” means shit in chinese
@@JohnRBIV The problem with that analysis is that even to Chinese people this poem makes no sense phonetically. The whole point of its creation is to show why Chinese can’t be romanized, or in a more general sense, completely changed to a phonetic alphabet. Most of these words are exactly the same in sound, the meaning comes not from pronunciation but from the actual writing itself.
Tl;dr: That conclusion can’t be made from this poem as it’s showing a quirk of Classical Chinese writing vs phonetic pronunciation.
Normally it's true that Chinese can accurately guess identical sounding words based on the context, but not really in this particular case. Because the context here is quite artificial and not at all common; it's very difficult (in this particular case) to guess what's being said based on the sound alone.
This is the most recommended tab shit I’ve watched ever lmao
When Chinese people hear this poem, do they really imagine mr. Shi while his eating the lions or is it just a bunch of earscratching shi shi shi combination like we hear too?
This is a prose purposely written in the classical literary format, in order to show that Chinese is a language with a high degree of homophony, and it's impossible to abandon Chinese characters for romanisation . As a native Chinese speaker, I have to say that without reading the text, I understand nothing at all.
> pronounces one word wrong
> accidentally summons archaic demon
yes.
we do deal with a lot of demon here
The Best Dualingo Ad Ever!!
he has such a way with words
This poem is especially challenging to understand as someone who doesn't speak any Chinese.
in my native language shi shi just means peeing, so I spent almost a minute listening to a someone talking piss piss piss piss nonstop
The story of Mr. Shi Eating lions is a truly monumental story on how we view the world. Even though this is an ancient text it correlates with today's society. Mr. Shi fall into the trap of looking at the lions and thinking they are edible but in the end he realizes that they are made out of stone. This shows how we as a society look at the things and think that since they are good and look good we shouldn't consider the consequences. That is the mistake we make as an society and if we are able to fix this mistake then we will be able overcome any obstacles we encounter. In conclusion, Mr. Shi showed the problem with society and showed that we can fix the problem if we just put our minds to it.
This was actually written in the 1930s tho
An insightful analysis indeed!
Just because it looks like a lion it isn't a lion? I see
@@shinji5217 jfjdjfdkfjdkfk did you know there are many fake crabs?
English teachers be like
That is perfectly done!
thank you!
Sounds like my car trying to start with a dead battery.
Chinese: "All these different characters are pronounced in exactly the same way."
English: "Through, thorough, though, and thought are pronounced completely differently."
@@thedamntrain They are pronounced the same way for an english speaker since words don't carry tones in the english language.
Also Chinese: Multiple pronunciations for a single character
@@thedamntrain No, in mandarin most characters have one, but in other Chinese languages like Teochew, Cantonese, Hokkien, Etc, they have different sounds. But mandarin also has this, like the character 的 is sometimes pronouced as "di" instead of "de"
if you think it's hard learning mandarin, try Cantonese. Mandarin has four tones, Cantonese has seven.
@@nemoshu7119 that's Japanese
stubbed my toe one time, almost recited this whole poem.
Fun fact:this passage was created during the 1930s, aiming to opposite other literature learners' advice of changing Chinese characters into alphabetical letters like English. And it really works.
A very similar passage like this is 稷姬击鸡记, also very interesting