It was honestly scary reading Lenin’s Imperialism, and then thinking of the current trends in geopolitics…

As Parenti said (in Democracy for the Few), US congress and generally lawmaking is only glacially slow when it’s about any law which benefits the working class, but when it benefits its oligarchy, then it’s lightning fast.

Imagine what they could do if they gave a shit about us.

They did? Thats insane because in my grad program almost every PI collabed with someone from china at some point.

Academia is dying anyway

people are so convinced by the media to go along with it

Yeah no… they aren’t convinced as much as they want to rationalize it, when they know {unconsciously at least} who butters their bread…

I am going to argue that this narrative is nonsense. It tries to pass off as universal and eternal something that in reality is particular and ephemeral. In short: Westerners aren’t helpless innocents whose minds are injected with atrocity propaganda, science fiction-style; they’re generally smug bourgeois proletarians who intelligently seek out as much racist propaganda as they can get their hands on. This is because it fundamentally makes them feel better about who they are and how they live {as part of the Global North, led by its hegemonic capitalists and allied foreign compradors, through the plunder of the Global South}. The psychic and material costs are rationally worth the benefits. As for those anti-imperialists who don’t participate in this festival of xenophobia — and here I include myself — we have our own elitist consolation: we accept the tragedy of masses of gullible sheeple falling for cunning propaganda because having overcome it flatters our own intelligence. The more we condemn society’s stupidity, the smarter we feel in comparison.

They’ll stage a terror attack there and blame it on the CCP so they have their 9/11 moment.

千里之行，始于足下

The hardest part is starting, because it’s hard to know where to begin (Grammar? Pronunciation? Characters?)

I would say just pick one and run with it, and you’ll naturally move into the other areas as you need.

So for example if you start by learning pinyin (the romanisation of the pronunciation), you’ll learn about how they represent tones, and then there may be a section about how the characters give ‘clues’ on how to pronounce them (the common example is 妈(吗)麻马骂 mā, má, ma3, mà) and before you know it you’ve learnt about radicals + components. Honestly it’s a good place to start.

The first few months are going to be oversimplified in any case so it’s largely a matter of getting the ball rolling, and you may have to ‘unlearn’ some things down the track* these may be deliberately glossed over so you don’t get discouraged.

Self study (free):

• Chinese grammar wiki to learn the structure
• italki for language partners online
• WeChat to add them if they’re actually cool and follow articles/content creators
• meetup or other event platforms to find IRL language practice events
• Anki to learn the first 250/500/1000 most basic characters by sight †

You should aim to learn with traditional materials until you get to HSK3 , then you’ll have more of a foundation for self-directed learning.

If you can afford it, getting a 1:1 online tutor, and trying out a few tutors until you find someone you gel with can be the difference between foundering around hopelessly and actually achieving something in your first year of study. I can’t share the platforms I used (one no longer exists, the other is too niche/local). Some may be students of Teaching Chinese as an Acquired Language and want to build up experience, so they’ll have good formal teaching techniques, others may just be looking for some money on the side and could offer things like ‘conversation class’ which could be more or less your speed depending on your budget/learning preferences.

If you want to practise hand writing, you can use manual spaced repetition:

• use a 田 block notebook to practise writing out the characters using a ‘guess and check’ method (write the correct character on one side with the pinykn then cover up either the character or the pinyin. Go down the list trying to write each character or meaning from memory and then when you get to the end of the column, compare and revise. Write in missing characters/strokes/components/definition with a red pen, circle the mistakes and then continue. If you get a character right three times in a row, you can put it aside and add a new one in its place. After one week, revise all the ones you successfully got three times. After one month do the same for all that month. I used this method before my HSK exam

I did some free online tutoring for beginner students, and I’ll have a look for them and if I find them and can anonymise it, I’ll try to share here if you’re interested.

`* (e.g. the b sound in pinyin isn’t actually the same as an English b, it’s an unaspirated p, the tongue placement for some consonants is different too, but honestly it’s no biggie, e.g. there are more than four tones because there’s neutral tone and sandhi where tones merge, e.g. not all characters are 型声 component sound characters)

† I say characters not words, because the aim here isn’t to learn 250/500/1000 words but the characters that make up words. Your vocabulary will be much larger because many Chinese words are made up of characters e.g. 手 shou hand + 机 ji machine = shouji cellphone/mobile phone. 飞 fei fly + 机 ji machine = aeroplane. If your approach were to treat shouji and feiji as discrete words, you’d miss out on recognising ji as the key for learning ‘machine’. Your deck should have words and their break down into characters and focus on combinations of the most commonly used 250/500/1000 to facilitate those ‘ah ha’ moments. It’s not quite exponential but as you learn more characters there’s gunna be more instances where you can guess the meaning of new words just by looking at what their components are.

Don’t try to use anki to learn phrases, it’s disingenuous because you learn to parrot sentences in their entirety without really digesting them i.e. imo it’s better to learn 你 ni you + 去 qu go + 哪里 nali where rather than 你去哪里 ‘where are you going’?

Buckle down and study