For the record, I'm just going to say that the first sentence here is completely false 那个 *never* has a pause between the two syllables, and pausing before 个 in any context would be extremely odd and stiltedpic.twitter.com/sJVqaq82Wk
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For the record, I'm just going to say that the first sentence here is completely false 那个 *never* has a pause between the two syllables, and pausing before 个 in any context would be extremely odd and stiltedpic.twitter.com/sJVqaq82Wk
Mandarin speakers absolutely do sound like they are saying "n***a, n***a" constantly It is extremely common, it's the equivalent of "um" or "uh" ("erm" or "er" if you're British) and you'd have about as much luck banning it as banning "um" or "uh"
I kind of feel like we have to be blunt about this when talking about it because otherwise that just makes it worse when you meet a Mandarin speaker and hear it in real life for the first time
Imagine if there were a language in which "I dunno" or "it's like" or "I mean" sounded like a deeply offensive slur, and then someone from that country came here and heard us saying it all the time It's hard to think of an easy resolution to the situation
And what makes it worse is people saying blatantly untrue shit like "Oh, well, in English 'I mean' is two words, you put a pause between 'I' and 'mean', if someone says it like the racial slur 'aimeen' they're doing it on purpose"
This was the biggest unspoken question throughout my high school and college Mandarin classes
Funny thing that since mandarin is my first language, I never made that connection, and I have been living in the US for 25 years now!
Wait, what?
Literally this is the first time I'm hearing about this, so very informative.
I have a black friend who worked in a kitchen with a lot of Chinese speakers. There was... a period of confusion over this issue.
You should know this is the first sentence I've ever read that started with "I have a black friend" and I actually believe it.
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