this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
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Tonal is like:
詩 史 試 時 市 是
(Poem, History, Try, Time, Market, Yes)
All use the same Jyutping: si
But different tones. From left to right is tones 1 2 3 4 5 6
And the thing is, I'm a native Cantonese speaker and I'm having trouble differentiating between tones 2 and 5 because its so similar... I always thought it was pronounced the same, but apparantly its supposed ti be slightly different, but my parents never corrected me so 🤷♂️
People can understand so that's all it matters I guess...
Here's a video example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b38H_ySiTd4
@NorthWestWind@lemmy.world can you even tell the difference between tone 2 and tone 5? Cuz its almost the same to me. Like I always heard my parent say 歷史 and 超市 with the same "si"
And Logographic is just Chinese characters and idk any other Logographic ones... Hieroglyphs?
Basically the writing is separate from sounds. You can't just sound out your word and spell it approximately, I can speak Cantonese and Mandarin, but I can't "spell out" the characters, because its basically like a picture. I know what a cat looks like, for example, but I can't draw a cat myself (since I haven't written with pen and paper for like 15 years).
I can type it tho by the sound, and I can recognize the characters, just not use pen and paper to recall how to write it.
And that's how people who speak mutually unintelligible dialects of Chinese can communicate through writing. The word (sound) may be different, but the written character is the same.
The tone 2 and 5 difference is subtle. 5 goes not as high as 2. Most of the time people pronounce them lazily but I can figure it out from the context.
Every language has words that are almost the same sounds but not quite.
English speakers barely pronounce can and can't differently. If you're in a noisy place, or are not familiar with the accent of the speaker or got a flu and your ears are blocked or whatever else, you'll have an extra bad time telling them apart. That's normal. Just extra annoying that this particular example involves a particular meaning and the opposite of it, so context is not your friend.
HEY MATE, CAN YOU PLEASE COME TO THE PARTY?
I CA'!+-:-
OH COOL
I SAID I CA;(++;:-
OH SO YOU CAN'T? YEAH?
YEAH! THAT'S WHAT I SAID.
WELL YOUR LOSS
I SAID I WILL COME, DUDE
OH SHOOT. OK. SEE YOU THERE.
Use Affirmative and Negative like a bunch of soldiers lolz