网络用语 Wǎngluò yòngyǔ — Chinese on the Internet

Why internet Chinese is worth reading and not writing

This lesson is deliberately asymmetric, like lesson 93 of this course's Spanish counterpart and for the same reason: you need to understand all of it and should produce very little. The case for reading it is simply that this is where Chinese is written. Something approaching a billion people are online in China, the platforms are WeChat, Weibo, Douyin, Bilibili, Xiaohongshu and Zhihu rather than their Western counterparts, and an enormous volume of ordinary written Chinese — comments, reviews, arguments, jokes, advice — exists nowhere else. If you want unlimited free reading material at a level between textbook and newspaper, it is there. The 弹幕 format is particularly worth knowing about: comments scroll across the video itself, timed to the moment they refer to, so you are reading a live audience reacting, which is simultaneously the hardest and the most addictive reading practice available. The case against writing it is register, and the risk is specific. Internet Chinese turns over very fast — a 梗 from two years ago is 老梗 and using it marks you as out of date rather than current — and almost all of it is keyed to a source you will not have. Worse, a foreigner deploying 老铁 or yyds in a work conversation produces the same effect as an adult using teenage slang in their own language: not offensive, but conspicuous. The subset that has genuinely entered the standard language is worth using, and 林悦's rule tells you which that is — if a newspaper would print it, you can say it. A note on how to learn it, since lists go stale. Read the comments under things you are already reading. When you meet something you cannot parse, search the phrase plus 什么意思 — Chinese users ask the same question constantly and the answers are everywhere. And ask people: 这个梗是什么意思？ is a question that delights anybody under thirty and will get you an explanation, the source video, and three more references. One last thing worth noticing. Several of the words in this lesson — 内卷, 躺平, 996, 翻车 — are not jokes at all. They are how a generation describes working conditions, competition and the gap between effort and reward, and they entered the language because people needed them. Reading them is one of the more direct ways a foreigner can hear what younger urban Chinese people actually think, which is a better reason to learn them than being able to make the reference.