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Starting Mandarin from scratch | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 3900 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes  Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 9 of 20 28 December 2013 at 5:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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mmhh... but I'm not sure about one thing:
why should I learn simplified Hanzi? I imagine that then I have also to learn the traditional Hanzi, so why start with the simplified? There is nothing like that but with traditional Hanzi and pronunciation? I don't mind to pay for a really good resource. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| pesahson Diglot Senior Member Poland Joined 5581 days ago 448 posts - 840 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: French, Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 10 of 20 28 December 2013 at 6:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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Simplified Hanzi is used in China and Singapore. Traditional is used in Taiwan, Macau and Hong Kong.
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| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 3900 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 11 of 20 28 December 2013 at 6:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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Aaaah ok! I had no idea about it! Sounds really cool then! Sorry for my ignorance :)
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| Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5812 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 12 of 20 28 December 2013 at 6:31pm | IP Logged | ||
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Assorted ideas....there is no "one perfect curriculum". Heisig has books for traditional Chinese characters as well as simplified. While most characters have only one pronunciation, there are characters with multiple pronunciations. Chinese communities outside of Asia deal with both simplified and traditional characters.
My suggestion for tones is to work the FSI resource module, plus do shadowing and chorusing. Good luck. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 3900 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 13 of 20 29 December 2013 at 1:40pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for the ideas @Snowflake :)
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 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5385 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 14 of 20 29 December 2013 at 2:07pm | IP Logged | ||
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I definitely hear very good things about Remembering the Hanzi and Remembering the Simplified Hanzi. I would have to loved to find books like that for Middle Egyptian.
I think I mentioned this in another thread, but I had good results using Khatzumoto's Lazy Kanji format to learn hieroglyphs. For a first pass through the hieroglyphs, it was enough to (1) recognize each symbol as "oh, yeah, that bird with the funny throat" and (2) have some vague idea of either its pronunciation or symbolic meaning. Basically, as long as each symbol was an old friend (or even an old nemesis), everything else got a lot easier, because my memory could work with symbol-sized "chunks." But each ideographic language presents its own wrinkles: Japanese characters have multiple readings depending on context, Chinese characters apparently have more predictable readings—and hieroglyphs are probably the easiest of the three, since there aren't nearly as many, and they're generally either semi-phonetic or fairly transparent ideograms. So for detailed advice on Chinese characters, consult somebody who has an actual clue (not me!). But if you get Anki and one of Heisig's books, and if you learn 3 new Lazy Kanji cards a day, you should definitely make some progress. :-) And somebody here can certainly suggest refinements. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4106 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian | Message 15 of 20 29 December 2013 at 2:40pm | IP Logged | ||
What I do is I just go here and take a character, draw it, write down the meaning and pronunciation and then write it by hand for 14 times. It takes like three minutes per character, but if you were to write each character down say only ten times, you could probably manage to pinch eight characters into 15-20 minutes. This can also be broken into parts; say if you could pitch ten minutes in the morning and ten minutes in the evening for the study of characters, that would be more than enough. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 3900 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 16 of 20 29 December 2013 at 6:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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I started to read the Heisig, and in its prologue it advocates the study of the different parts (mostly spoken and
writing) at different times. By marrying its set of advices seems correct to study the characters with the associated meanings (but without the pronunciation), building in that way the foundation of the comprehension of not only Mandarin, but also the whole set of Chinese languages. It appears also to make sense to use the FSI in parallel, treating it like it was a different language, and when I have a good base of spoken Mandarin and after knowing the 3000 characters (plus the methods to understand and create new words) to make them together with courses like Assimil, learning grammar and so on. Please correct me if what I said doesn't make any sense :) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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