Hey SkritterJake, would you guys ever considering making a deck with religious terminology? I’m a Christian living in America, and one of the reasons I started learning Mandarin was to be able to have intelligent conversations with international students without needing English. Thanks!
Dear 1119,
Try typing “Good News” in the “Browse Lists” search box (on the website) and you should get four relevant results.
These correspond to privately published instructional books, and the vocabulary lists are under Skritter’s “Textbooks” section. For user published lists you might try terms like “Christianity” or “religion.” There is a deck for the Apostle’s Creed that has the creed in the description.
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Website now has a “share link” option under the tool bar for individual decks (website only right now) which will provide a URL to open any public deck on the web or mobile apps. Should be easier to share stuff vs. our nasty search!
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Also I just wanted to let you know that Christianity or any religion can be quite tabu when talking to strangers in China. Especially when going abroad you dont want to get into troubles with the authorities
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Agree @sirati , for sure, these days that’s among a number of subjects to avoid discussing - as a foreigner - unless you really, really know the person well. (Mind you, that’s good advice in Canada too! Not from an authority point of view but we generally consider religion to be a private matter.)
Other topics to be careful about include discussing the Uighur situation, anything to do with human rights, Falungong, any criticism of Xi Jinping, Taiwan, Tibet, Hong Kong…its a long list, in recent years. These were not such sensitive topics, or at least foreigners were indulged in discussing them, up until just a few years ago.
That is very much a culture thing tho. While in America politics and religion are tabu topic for strangers and acquaintances, it is actually part of German culture to have debates over religion, politics and current state of affairs with strangers. In fact if you dont most Germans will see you with suspicion or just find you a plain boring person
I think if you like this type of discussion, you’d better use Facebook and not the Skritter forum, it has nothing to do with the original question and it only divides people.
Two weeks ago I already ask @SkritterJake to moderate but it look like they don’t care that these kinds of baseless anti-China sentiments entering their forum.
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How are these “anti-China” sentiments?
This is factual information and important to know when visiting China. There are actual laws in China prohibiting public speech that is disparaging or critical of China or that undermines stability. They are vaguely worded but are understood to include criticism of the government or its policies.
This includes proselytising, especially by foreigners, which seems to be tolerated in some areas of China and forbidden in others. A private conversation should not qualify as proselytising, but you do need to be careful, as it is a grey area.
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That’s because this kind of strange advice give people the impression that China is different from other countries. But every country has roughly the same rules and practices, nothing strange about that.
For instance when someone from some other (not necessarily non western) country visit Europe or America and start talking or preaching at the street to strangers about there religion and or criticise the local government they also will end up at the police station and for sure they will face a lot of trouble and can be (maybe even after blacklisted) expelled from that country. And I’m totally agree with that because that has to do with common sense and local laws.
If people get this advice when they come to your country, you will probably laugh but only when it comes to China people do think it’s normal that they should give other people this kind of advice. I think that is very stupid and it has nothing to do with real life, and to be honest it also makes me very sad, because we all have to realize that there is a very bad undertone in these types of messages. That only drifts people apart and causes unnecessary damage to mutual relationships.
@Roberto I think a key difference is that in the US (and Skritter is a US-based company) and on a forum that is (most likely) heavily dominated by US-citizens, that in the US, you will not get into governmental problems for criticizing society, government, social programs, etc.
In other countries, that is most definitely not the case. In other countries, doing this may be a national crime.
To people from the US, the whole concept of NOT being able to freely criticize governmental entities is a new realization that many people have not really discovered.
It’s important to have forums where people can clearly understand that cultural and political norms ARE NOT the same in every place across the world.
Otherwise, how would you find out?
Edit: becoming AWARE of a difference and understanding the boundaries of that difference is NOT the same as CRITICISM OF the difference. It seems to me that you are objecting to merely pointing out that there are differences and are then equating that to be the same as criticism of the difference.
(Awareness ≠ Criticism)
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