Learning Mandarin
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- microkorg
Anyone got any good suggestions/links for learning Mandarin.
I've tried a few ways but think I've ended up having too many ways and don't know where to start now.ROSETTA STONE
Bought this off the back of "offer ending soon" trick. Drawbacks of this is that it's just the same lessons as any other language - but they are not the same as chinese. Also its not about written characters :(UDEMY
I've downloaded a few Udemy courses but these tend not to be created by experts and seem just to be joe bloggs who's made up some course that might/might not work but is selling it and making shitloads.PLECO
I've got the app on my phone etc but I guess this is something to get more into when you're really into the learning process.There's FLUENZ
Which just seems to be another option like Rosetta Stone (lot of money and need to invest a lot of time that could be better spent doing an alternative).
- set0
I don't know if it does Mandarin but I've been using Duolingo to learn French and it's great. I'm not sure you could learn to speak fluently with it but it's certainly a great start. It's fun and engaging...
- doesnotexist0
i'm learning cantonese and none of the apps really do it for me. i use digital flash cards and just ask friends.
- set3
I suggest kidnapping a small mandarin person to carry around with you
- paging pango.ApeRobot
- lolmoldero
- lolpinkfloyd
- hainstrmntl
- loliCanHazQBN
- "mandarin person" omfg setbklyndroobeki
- Yes yes, I'm perfectly aware it's a language not a people.set
- i know set. i know ;)bklyndroobeki
- t'was poetic.bklyndroobeki
- BuddhaHat0
If you are using iPhone, then imo the hands down best app for practicing writing, reading, tones and definitions is Skritter. It's a monthly subscription service for the full version, but completely worth it. Their developers haven't polished the Android version of it off yet, so I still use my iPhone 4S just for practicing with this app. They have shitloads of textbooks in their database with the vocabulary loaded so you can practice exactly the vocabulary you need, and also vocab lists that other people have curated related to specific topics.
Pleco operates better as a dictionary, and the full version with training packages is over US$100 right now. I haven't tried the extra packages, but I'm not sure it could be as good as Skritter on iOS. It is probably the best smartphone dictionary out there right now for the free version though, so get a copy.
The absolute best book I have found for understanding the weird grammatical structure of Chinese is:
and the Workbook for it:
Another really good one for explaining the minutiae of grammar is this one:
There are funny rules with Chinese that westerners aren't used to, like tonal changes in specific character patterns, different measure words used for different types of objects, etc and you just have to learn them by heart, along with the characters and pronunciation. These books provide some of the most succinct explanations, and the exercises in the workbook are straightforward.
As you practice with Skritter you get an audio playback of the character you are practicing, so you can learn how to pronounce them more accurately. After that, apply the knowledge of grammatical structure to whatever vocabulary you have built up, and off you go.
Mandarinposter.com also has some cool 1000 most commonly used character posters:
我祝你学习好运！
- yes 5 difrent tones that drastically change the meaning of a word. they are represented as one of these (im forgetting one i think) - / \ V above a vowel.gilgamush
- take for instance the word 'ma'. it can mean 3 difrent things depending on the intonation. woman, horse, or a participle used to signify a questiongilgamush
- check out this link. very helpfull site
http://www.chinese-t…gilgamush
- mekk0
- gilgamush0
learn the pinying first. than any number of free library books for vocab and sentence structure. don't worry about reading and writing, thats a whole nother can of worms. the mandarin i learned stuck with me and i haven't spoken it in over 15 years. ne hao ma? wo shi gilgamush
- antimotion0
I'm in the midst of learning Japanese.
I've tried all that stuff to no avail - The language just wouldn't stick.
After a many failed attempts, I've found that the best way to "get it" is to simply learn the alphabet, write as much as you can by hand every day and take a small class - 5-6 people so you can speak to one another.
I would also recommend downloading a chat app (Japanese use LINE) where you can text in the language.
It really helps you become quicker and if you don't know a word, you can look up fairly quickly online. Also pick up a good analog dictionary to keep on hand -
Right now, you just want to get the super basics down - don't worry about having great conversations or trying to impress -
I'm slow as hell, but over the past few months, I've really started to really hear words while watching Japanese films/TV shows.
Lastly - not sure if it's the same in Chinese comics, but in MANGA, they write the HIRAGANA (basic Japanese text) by the very difficult Chinese letters (Kanji). For people who can't read Kanji - it's a godsend - you can actually look stuff up and really understand the panels along with the visual drawings.
Good luck!
- thats a nice thought but there is no alphabet in chinese. none of that kanji shit. no phonetic correlation to what your reading. none. thats why i said pinyinggilgamush
- which is the romanization of spoken mandarin. forget the characters, just learn how to speak itgilgamush
- get a mandarin - english dictionary. just look up every words you don't know. do it long enough you will remember enough.pango
- pango0
... Don't really know any working system for people to learn mandarin as second language. I grew up with it for a short while. Now I speak mandarin like a gaijin. Instead of answering my questions people would just ask where I'm from. Assholes.
I would think the best way is to attend a class to get you started. Like someone mentioned here, you should learn ping Ying, how to pronounced and speak first. Worry about how to say and each character and symbol later. Unlike English, there's no sure way to tell how to pronounce each words just by its structure. Only by memory...
Good luck.P.s. No you can't kidnap me and carry around with you.
- pango0
Oh just found out that google translate mobile app shows you pinyin of each symbol. Handing for showing you how to pronounce each words if you know how to read pingyin. Which is very straightforward.
- microkorg0
Thanks for the suggestions!
My wife is Chinese and I'm making an effort to learn.
I can ask her words but want to study and learn on my own to try and crack it.Thanks BuddhaHat - I've downloaded Skritter, it looks really good and will start using it. I'm also going to try to get my hands on those books.
I've already got something like that Mandarin Poster - as a PDF. We are about to move work studio soon so I'm going to get posters of the PDF at the new place and try to learn a word a day or something like that.
Google translate is fine if you're not in China :P
It just doesnt work over there.
- microkorg0
BuddhaHat, just peeked at those books on amazon preview.They look petty hardcore - Are these for if you already have a good basic knowledge and not for an absolute beginner?
- 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