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Any suggestions for some general tags to use? I was kind of stumped when I posted my first questions. I'll go check out the Japanese and some other sites and summarize here.

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I think classification of language subtype and dialect will probably become important as well and wish that answers supported tags just for this reason.

When we talk about Chinese I think it's important to assume that the language in question is Standard Chinese (Mandarin) unless tagged otherwise.

With such a large variety in the language, I'd propose we adopt at least some of these tags for clarifying the context (and answers) to the questions.

  • Mandarin
  • Wu
  • Yue (Cantonese)
  • Min
  • Xiang
  • Hakka (Kejia)
  • Gan
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    Makes a lot of sense. I guess the majority of users will only be interested in either Mandarin or Cantonese, so it would be useful if these tags were extensively used. That would be most helpful with the 'Favourite Tags' function
    – Cocowalla
    Dec 13, 2011 at 21:58
  • As an addition to this, I would like to see all questions that can be classified as relating to a particular dialect being tagged with the respective dialect(s), so any question asking about standard Chinese should have the mandarin tag.
    – brc
    Dec 15, 2011 at 6:39
  • When I have asked, it has been suggested not to use Mandarin since most questions are about that and use the other tags to distinguish. If you want you can post there too.
    – Alenanno
    Dec 24, 2011 at 10:51
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Here are the top 10 tags from the Japanese site, as of today:

  • grammar
  • word-choice
  • usage
  • vocabulary
  • nuances
  • translation
  • particles
  • verbs
  • kanji
  • meaning

I'm not sure about the difference between word-choice and nuances, but most of these seem like they would have equivalents for us. Particles and kanji would probably be replaced by something like measure-words and pinyin.

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    I've often seen words like 了，吗，呢，and 啊 described as particles so it seems like a valid category.
    – JIStone
    Dec 13, 2011 at 21:55
  • I think translation is a good one to promote. We're going to get a lot of questions along the lines of `how do I say X in Mandarin/Cantonese"
    – Cocowalla
    Dec 15, 2011 at 9:31
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I noticed that many questions are tagged as "culture", but they are really questions about "usage", e.g. how to use an expression. Perhaps "culture" and "usage" be tag synonyms.

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When asking questions related to materials and resources, I suggest that they be placed into 4 categories: e.g. beginner, intermediate, advanced, and academic. The first three levels are for students:

  • Beginner, being approximately for students knowing up to 1000 words and basic grammar.
  • Intermediate for students working toward fluency.
  • Advanced, for resources related to people who are already mostly fluent, but need more advanced information.
  • Academic, for resources needed by teachers or researchers, which would likely encompass all levels of Chinese, rather than dividing them into parts.

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