You can't be "only just" fluent, nor can you be "kind of" fluent.. you either are or aren't. No middle ground there ;) ... I'm not fluent but I can sustain a basic conversation with a girl my age in a nightclub in Berlin, that much I know. I laughed at her English as much as she did my French, and neither of us even tried German, so it's all good.

The point of translation is to give an unlearned person a sense of the parameters by which someone learned in another language is speaking in this case. I don't think that a translation can hardly ever convey the full meaning because different emotions and rhetorical devices are sometimes impossible to convey in other languages (or come across differently), as is the case here. It's like driving in the United States versus India: a flash of the headlights in the USA means you can go; in India, it means get the fuck out of the way.

Anyway, I would say that works as well as anything else, though it still feels like it could be improved a bit.

@philcore
I'm pretty sure that phrase isn't Mandarin, maybe Cantonese.

Yeah, I wouldn't know the difference. What do they speak in Hong Kong? Or is not a regional thing?

ehhh... fluency isn't an on/off switch. I'm more fluent in English than some fluent native-speakers, and there are others who are still more fluent than I.

My metric for whether you count as "fluent" is if you have the ability to think in the language without ever translating in your head as you go. Well, that and a certain level of vocab, grammar, and pronunciation skill as well, but the key is the ease of use more than the content itself.

And in this case I really do think that my translation is dead-on lol. The underlying meaning is the same.

Let me give you an example.

"Aujourd'hui est-ce que vous avez trouvé le bonheur?"

The direct translation, if there even is one, is: "Today, is it [true/the case] that you found a good time?"

More liberally: "Did you find a good time today?"

Even more liberally: "Did you have fun today?"

The more liberal it is, the better, because it ditches the meaningless contraints of the conventions of the other language and gets straight to the way you would say the same idea in the other language.

I would never say the first two things. But in the same way, you wanted to know how to ask somebody if they had fun today in French, I'll be damned if what I tell you for

"Did you have fun today?" is

"Avez-vous eu l'amusement aujourd'hui?"

I can think of like four or five reasons why that is a shite sentence, beyond just the fact that it wouldn't really even sound right to a native speaker.

Anyway.

#vathucyfairefoutre

@philcore: I don't recognize it, no. You might have the wrong dialect -- Cantonese is the more frequently spoken dialect of Chinese in the US, and there's virtually no phonetic relationship between it and Mandarin. Or it could be that I'm missing your diphthongs. For instance, you use "ay" to describe a vowel whereas the Pinyin transliteration system doesn't assign that to anything.

Also worth noting: Cantonese has a different number of tones than does Mandarin (or so I'm told), but it's not clear even to experts how many that is (which is an idea that bothers me a lot).

@cteno4, is that just a matter of there not being clear definition as to where one ends and another begins, or is there something else going on?

My understanding, which may be false, is this: Chinese dialects use the same written language (and same syntax) with different pronunciations of each character by region. These differences can be minor, such as the local tendency for Beijing speakers to color their vowels with Rs. Or they can be so large as to include, say, the use of "ng" as a beginning sound for many words in Cantonese whereas it's only used as an ending sound in Mandarin. Many expressions when spoken in Mandarin and Cantonese bear no clear relationship.

Bear in mind that I don't speak any Cantonese and I'm a bit out of practice with my Mandarin. Consult a real expert, not some quack on webdiplomacy ;)

Hong Kong is pretty much all Cantonese.

As a sidenote, calling Standard Chinese Mandarin is awkward.

ghug, is #fermetaguelethucy trending better than #parlesamamainthucy?

*parle, #fuckimperative

Now I have to admit that I've forgotten almost all of my French, SEDLINGUALATINABENELOQUOR

I should take some time to learn some languages that are actually useful.

ghug n'est même pas cool

@Thucy .. yeah, makes sense. There are things that are wrong in any language for no other reason than that they sound bad. French just has an excessive amount of them...

@ghug .. I've forgotten just about all of my Latin, so don't feel bad. Evidently all of my Hebrew too.

bo_sox me rappelle d'un grenouille qui semble de ne pas pouvoir se taire. mais je voudrais pas insulter les grenouilles qui peuvent de temps en temps faire des beaux sons.

un peu de glace pour ton brûlage, mon petit grenouille?

Nique ta mère.

In all fairness, ulytau, Mandarin could be reasonably called the "standard" dialect of Chinese even though to do so would elicit the same sort of harsh responses that you get when people call only classical music "art music". What is true of that dialect is that it's the one taught in schools, used in government, and in the media. It's the dialect that will allow you to communicate throughout China much like how Russian will get you through any of the former Soviet republics.

bosox n'a même pas une mère.

oui j'y suis allé

>_>

cteno4, you are missing my point. Mandarin is a bad name for Standard Chinese. Mandarins didn't spoken this Mandarin. It's like calling current English Shakespearesque just because Shakespeare spoken a similar language. The guy who named it Mandarin was drunk and should have gone home instead of inventing names. Not to mention some people use Mandarin both for Northern Chinese dialects and Standard Chinese as well. Too many drunken linguists in this world.

Personally, I think he should just fuck his brown dog, and if anyone objects, he can fuck them too