I seldom hear these words spoken when I speak to strangers. But I do
hear them when I watch TV movies. Thanks for highlighting these words as I would pay more attention when I speak to strangers or friends.

Esto... entonces... ehmm... These are very common in Spanish, very useful blog! Greetings from Colombia!!

-Paaarce...
-Maricaaa...

And there's the central America "pues", with which many sentences are sprinkled and begun.

I always heard from my chinese friends those words, but i dont know what does it mean. Finally, i know what it means .....

Thank you. In listening to chinese speakers I often heard the sounds nei ge. I wondered what it meant. Mystery solved.

I used to hear it together "就是那个" all the time in Suzhou :)

Very interesting and helpful tips. Thank you

Russell Peters did a great routine on that - https://www.youtube.com/wat...

I can never get tired of Russel Peters' routine. He's so spot on Chinese accent.

I think I would like him a lot more if he actually spoke these languages, rather than just mock them. His characterizations seem to be only a little more enlightened than a typical low-brow comedian making "ching-chong" jokes.
Unfortunately, the category of "linguist / stand-up comic" seems to be very lightly populated :-) There's an opportunity for someone!

I taught Accounting in China, in English, for several years.
Teaching Accounting in English to Chinese university students wasn’t easy but for Chinese students learning Accounting in English was a lot harder.

Accounting is more about language, concepts and definitions than about numbers. Accountants use a subset of English I call “accountingspeak.” This is a set of convention phrases that make for clear, direct communication between accountants. I taught a lot of English, and accountingspeak, in my classes.

I had gotten the idea that 哪个 was a filler phrase so when I got an answer like this:

“Debit 哪个… 恩accounts 哪个receivable
哪个…哪个 恩 …and 哪个…恩credit 哪个…哪个哪个哪个哪个… 哪个… 恩sales.”

I would exclaim, “Good! But 会计没有哪个哪个哪个哪个哪个哪个！

As an aside, I strongly urge "subject teachers," and English teachers as well, to study Chinese. Understanding Chinese, even a little, will increase your student's understanding.

Und so! ....Ach so! A very good blog...my native German teacher gave us the German filler words early in our course. Thank you Julie I feel sure these words will be of use to me, when I start speaking Chinese for real!

You bet, Carl! Good luck!

I have more success speaking with people and using the same phrases they use. I have found that the daily routine doesn't change very much and I can communicate quite well using the words I know. every day I learn a new word and am able to incorporate that into my speach. I very rarely need to use nei ge or jiu shi....

I find, that thinking to use nei ge to pause, makes me forget what I'm trying to say and make a mess of the whole sentance....

Should be 嗯；not 恩。

I tend to use "rán hòu" a lot in my daily speech. :( I'm working on kicking the habit. :)

For 那个 , I would have said "na4 ge", rather than "nei4 ge". Are the two pronunciations interchangeable?

Yes. Nei4 ge is a dialect found in Beijing and other places.

I always use jiu shi when speaking mandarin. I can't get used to using nei ge even though i hear it all the time.

Ok, I gotta ask... two things caught my attention:
1) "不敢了" somehow means "I stopped working." here? I thought this had more of "dare not" meaning.
2) "不太喜欢吗" was the translation of "didn't really like it.", and seems to be a rhetorical question.

I have one comment too: 嗯 I've often heard pronounced as "mm", rather than an "uh". A closed-mouth sound, in other words. I wonder if I am just hearing things... :-)

That was a typo :) It's been changed to "不干了“.

哦，明白了，谢谢

The Cantonese Language Society of Hong Kong used to distribute a word-processor optimised for Hong Kong language.

It was said to contain 1,000 glyphs particular to Hong Kong, i.e. outside regular Putonghua and GuoYu.

Hundreds, well, uh, dozens, of them seemed to me to like, well, you know, 嗯҉҉ and close variants.

-dlj.

Wow, that glyph likes like 嗯 + some ink splatter. Maybe its main use is in 漫画.

Corey,

The vile Foobarlies of Arcturus Minor have my computer in the range of their Fanta Ray Projectors, and they zap me about twice a year.

In this particular case those ink splatters are a feature, not a bug, of my Pinyin system -- but it's stuck that way until I learn the HanZi necessary to reading the instructions to turn it off.

Buncha mud-grass horses out there!

(And yes, your 嗯 is one of the ones I wanted to use as an example. I got it there clean by copying yours instead of inserting the one on my machine.)

Cheers,

-dlj.

That code seems to be two characters instead of one. It is the Cyrillic "millions" character splatted on top of 嗯. I found that by copying and pasting your what-appeared-to-be-a-single-character characters to this site:
http://unicodelookup.com/

There is no depth to which the Foobarlies will not stoop.

-dlj.

Your disjointed Pinyin is an embarrassment to Chinese education and the millions of trained educators promoting the proper rules of Hanyu Pinyin. Irrespective of that travesty, your efforts here are full of errors.

The use of 过, guo as an experiential aspect marker is spoken and written in the neutral tone.

地方 when used as a noun and not an attributive is written and spoken thus, 地方,dìfang, n. ①place; space; room

旧金山, is a proper noun and must be capitalized, Jiùjīnshān p.w. San Francisco, same rule for 华盛顿 and 纽约, as should the first "word" in each example sentence.

You are your team are doing a great disservice to those that pay you and that you are trying to serve. All books available are written using proper Hanyu Pinyin. It is not easy for students to switch from your bastardized Pinyin to the proper format.

The minimum standards in education in presenting information is "correctness". This is a basic tenant of education. None of you are trained educators but rather "Mandarin enthusiasts". Your biggest risk is that someone will download all of your videos, correct the Pinyin and post them for free on Youtube, this is of course entirely legal and similar to say "YoYo" using "Friends" as a template to her teaching-English-to-Chinese series.

Hi Jesus Christ, thank you for your feedback. We really appreciate the time you took to let us know what you think!

We're fully aware of the points you've made. They've been brought up within our own team and with other experts as we developed our curriculum. In the end, after several lengthy discussions, we'd decided to teach purely based on practicality and real-world application.

You mentioned that guò (过) should be a neutral tone and that the fāng (方) in dì fāng (地方) should be a neutral tone, too. That's absolutely correct! :) But just as in English, there are different ways to pronounce the same word. Tomato, route, vase, just to name a few examples. Some people may say "tomayto" and some may say "tomahto". But I don't think anyone would make the argument that one of them is the correct one.

Well, it's the same with guò (过). While the neutral tone is used, many Chinese people say it with the fourth tone. So, in pursuit of practicality and real-world application (all without sacrificing accuracy, ever), we teach it with the fourth tone.

I hope it makes sense so far :)

As for capitalizing pinyin, pinyin is not itself a language, so it may be a little confusing for students to have to apply English grammatical rules like capitalization to an entirely Chinese concept. Pinyin is simply a phonetic transcription of Chinese sounds.

I hope I've clarified a few things for you. Thanks again for your feedback, Jesus Christ, and I just want to wish you an early "Happy Birthday" for the 25th. Have a great one! :)

the development of pinyins is not "an entirely Chinese concept" and they were all developed outside of China and almost entirely by "foreigner". Zhou Youguang although Chinese born was an American when Mao asked him to return to China to develop modern Hanyu Pinyin.If you read his book, 中國語文的時代演進, you will see that his very intent was to emulate English word compiling and capitalisation and paragraph construction. You do your paying customers a huge disservice by promoting this bastardisation of Pinyin as they will stumble using books and other sources that use Hanyu Pinyin.

"other experts" would be university trained linguists, not native born Mandarin speakers such as yourself. You are not an "expert", you are a online Chinese speaking person who wants to teach "Chinese". This is not China where every English teacher is a "foreign expert".

And after all the impressive efforts you have made with your youtube videos on pronunciation and tones, you are now saying that because some Chinese people "get it wrong" that that is okay and you will teach it incorrectly? really?, then why teach proper tone part time, why not just take it out of your program? wow!

And did I really read this? . "So, in pursuit of practicality and real-world application (all without sacrificing accuracy, ever), we teach it with the fourth tone." So you can use "accurate" to describe "inaccurate"?

So do your "experts" all get together and agree on what concessions you will make that are not proper "Chinese".

If you would like Zhou Youguang's phone number I can give it to you, he was alive last year, I think he is 107 now. His hearing is not very good but he could give you a deserved schooling in ethical teaching. Setting "wrong" as your standard in education is simply what education is not about. With your amazing online personality you could own online Mandarin teaching, or you could fade into the oblivion that all the others have faded into.

Anyways, thanks for the birthday wish, I will stick 3 sticks of incense into the sand pile and pray for delivery of your wicked Pinyin offending soul.

Wow. You are clearly a very pleasant and positive-centered person. The real Jesus Christ would be proud.

I have not yet paid for Yangyang's program, but will be next month. My wife and I are godparenting our Chinese friend's children for a while, and [almost] entirely using the free instruction that has been posted by Yangyang to YouTube, I have been able to meet these children halfway, communicating with them almost as much in Mandarin as in English, only once in a while to have the 7-year-old tell me, "That was not right. You should say 'len,' not 'shen.' (人)" Typically it is a difference in pronunciation of a consonant sound, not of tone.

I will gladly give my money to this "disservice" because that so-called disservice that has been made free to me is so tremendously helpful in my personal life. Even speaking bastardized Mandarin for the last year has brought me closer friendship and more respect than I ever had in nearly 10 years of knowing this family. My friend couldn't stop laughing the first time I picked up the phone and said "wéi," saying to me, "Why you say wéi? You sound just like Chinese person!"

If I wanted to be an interpreter for the U.S. Embassy, I would dedicate years in college to mastering formal foreign languages. This is a way to learn to have conversations with friends, make new acquaintances, and expand your horizons. God bless Yangyang and the team for that.

1) do you think I care about your little vignette of attempting to speak Mandarin?

2) 人 ¹rén*

3) like I care how you spend your money

Mr. Jesus Haploid Christ,

There is an art to helping to make something better. It is very simple and common to just throw rocks at something. The second act takes no talent at all. A simple child can do it.

Many points you state are simply incorrect, but when you stated 'promoting this bastardisation of Pinyin as they will stumble using books and other sources that use Hanyu Pinyin', you had a great opportunity to state examples and help to make something better. Why not do it?

In America some Americans do definitely get the language 'wrong'. So in China, (e.g. or any other country), I am sure some Chinese definitely get the language 'wrong'.

Provide some positive feedback along with a suggestion that has some merit to it that can be understood and acted upon, whether their staff or a student. In that way, you may be giving yourself some merit. You can even be helping someone.

And yes, I am a paid member. If someone is not trying to help here, they should read and not post. We members don't really want it.

Positive feed back is only appropriate when there is something positive to support. Singing a few rounds of Kumbaya and hugging does not make things right.

"Many points you state are simply incorrect, but when you stated 'promoting this bastardisation of Pinyin as they will stumble using books and other sources that use Hanyu Pinyin', you had a great opportunity to state examples and help to make something better. Why not do it?"

There is no point providing examples, there are thousands of Pinyin errors in the program, every word that is supposed to be compounded is done incorrectly. There is not a single point that I made that is "incorrect".

"China' has a government department that sets the standards for the "correct" way that the language is Romanized, spoken and written. The minimal standard of education is always "correctness".