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Jerk Douglas

Chinese stories are fucking bugnuts bonkers. The entire language and its implementation is fucking bonkers, too. You'd think there's some equivalent difficulty for chinese people learning English, too. But at least our narrative conventions in storytelling generally wills the writer to imply accomplishment of finality sometimes. Anything that doesn't fit our logical standard is usually labeled as, "avant garde". Which is French for "you're probably going to hate this if you're just trying to relax after work." On the other hand, dig up any random Chinese movie: "Len Shuo ate his peaches before his rice, and because of this (obvious cause and effect here) Xao Fu the turtle god was enraged. He reached into Len Shuo's bottom and yanked out his golden core, forcing him to recultivate it, or become a demon. His seven young children starved as he did not labor. The End." Is there a primer I can read to properly figure out all of their retarded folk history? Because it's so thick and poorly explained and injected into eeeeverything that I feel I'll never understand them as a people. This is a great reason to hate someone, by the way. Because they communicate in what appears to be an intentionally incomprehensible manner. My fat white American brain has been trained to be open and tolerant and honest. You wouldn't want me to think perhaps your entire people were collectively obfuscating your intentions, would you? Surely openness and tolerance wasn't some sort of massive mistake? "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra."

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@jerkdouglas@shitposter.world >You'd think there's some equivalent difficulty for chinese people learning English, too. I've observed that while learning written Japanese at an adult level requires learning ~2000 kanji, the complementary difficulty is English pronunciation. It's easy not to realize this, but English (being an amalgam of languages) has us creating ~1500 different sounds, and our pronunciation rules make no sense because everything's an exception. Japanese has maybe 15 consonants and five vowels which combine in an extremely finite number of ways. Chinese is probably only a little more complex, but I've never really studied that. >Is there a primer I can read to properly figure out all of their retarded folk history? The "golden core" is probably referring to a particular sort of Taoism focused on "cultivation" or using meditation and alchemy to become some kind of superman. Popular in fiction, but I reckon it otherwise holds the same place in Chinese culture as Biblical literalism— that is, if we were churning out untold numbers of comic books about Jesus. Not sure what you'd read to understand that. Probably not Alan Watts, since he was more interested philosophically than culturally or historically. Maybe an annotated Tao Te Ching? I don't know what the core books of Taoism or Confucianism are, but I think you'd want to head in that direction if you actually wanted to understand this stuff.