Learning Mandarin
Out of context: Reply #12
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- BuddhaHat0
They cover the structure of the language for everyone from beginners to advanced, because the structure is so important, but yes I'd say you should have some beginner's exercises and vocab to go along with it. There's a public college near me that has been using this book for its first year students for about 5 years, and it's this one:
http://www.amazon.com/Conversati…
And the other language schools near me use:
http://www.amazon.com/Practical-…
It will start you off with the basic
'你好‘
’你好吗？‘
’我很好，你呢？‘
hi, how are you sort of stuff, and take you from there.But I swear, from my experience it would benefit anyone to at least have all these grammar rules on hand, so you know why something is written the way it is. For example:
我在餐馆吃饭了 (Wǒ zài cānguǎn chīfànle)＝ I ate food at the restaurant
actually breaks down to: I + location modifier + restaurant + eat + action modifier to past tense
So the rules you need to know for even a simple sentence like this are:
- Location is usually placed after the subject and before the action
- The 了 (le) modifier at the end indicates that the action has been completed.
At the end of the day it comes down to how much of the language you want to learn. If you never want to read or write a word in chinese and have super basic conversations then you can stick with pinyin instead of characters, and just recite phrases you memorize without knowing what they really mean. If you do want to read and write, it takes a shitload of memorization of characters, and a lot of work.
- Is simplified easier to memorise than triditional? Some simplified character confuses me. Its like the structure of each symbols loses its character in simplifdpango
- It does lose some of its character, and some people think the trend is back to traditional, but still, 1.3 billion Chinese use simplified. Just not Taiwan & HKBuddhaHat
- theres no practical reason in learning traditionalgilgamush
- simplified is the equivalent of saying YOLO to me lol. I guess its easier to learn and write. but at the same time. it's ugly and lost it's meaning and art formpango
- Okaaaay, well if you are trying to communicate and read things traditional does you zero goodgilgamush
- Not exactly... simplified is confusing the shit out of me. 1 simplified character can be used as 2 different traditional character... whoa?!pango
- Well now you are talking about radicals which is a different thing. The radicals are simplified as well so traditional really has nothing to do with itgilgamush