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Best way to learn Mandarin | ||
Tags: Mandarin | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Yoyo2o Diglot Newbie United States Joined 4537 days ago 5 posts - 5 votes Speaks: Polish, English* Studies: Spanish | Message 1 of 19 24 June 2012 at 10:42pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hey guys I just wanted to know if you all got any ideas on what is the best way to learn to speak Mandarin. I don't
care at all about learning to read and write it. I just want to be able to speak it fluently. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Maux Diglot Newbie Netherlands Joined 4626 days ago 37 posts - 51 votes  Speaks: Dutch*, English Studies: Mandarin | Message 2 of 19 25 June 2012 at 9:09pm | IP Logged | ||
To be clear: I'm nowhere near fluent in Mandarin myself yet. With that out of the way, even if you don't care much for writing characters, you might still want to learn to read Pinyin (a transcription into Latin alphabet). Mandarin has a lot of sound pairs that sound nearly alike to the western ear, but which appear as different as night and day to the native speaker, and which can make a difference in meaning. Learning Pinyin helps you to become aware of these minimal pairs, thus preventing future mistakes. As a warning, most explanations found on the internet only provide rough descriptions based on the closest sounds found in English, without regard for the actual differences between those sounds that to us seem alike. I would rather advise to find a book incorporating (layman) phonetic descriptions. I know of precisely such a book, but unfortunately it's in Dutch. (Uitspraak van het Mandarijn in 101 oefeningen) But you might also want to check out the introduction to Pinyin found in the FSI course (freely available online). Once you have a solid knowledge of the pronunciation of Mandarin, you could go on by studying an audio course like Pimsleur's, and/or work through a textbook that only uses Pinyin. Again, the FSI course comes to mind. Good luck! 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5960 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 3 of 19 26 June 2012 at 12:06am | IP Logged | ||
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Also take a look at the podcast sites. There a thread on that subject called "CLO vs. ChinesePod vs. PopUpChinese vs..." at
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=25322&PN=1 . Hopefully the link works. The thread is in the Links & Internet Resources room. The last post in that thread was 17 May 2011. Also somewhere there is a thread where Ari describes how he used ChinesePod which people have found helpful. Edited by Snowflake on 26 June 2012 at 12:07am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6910 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 19 26 June 2012 at 1:04am | IP Logged | ||
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Here it is:
Ari's Chinesepod method 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Yoyo2o Diglot Newbie United States Joined 4537 days ago 5 posts - 5 votes Speaks: Polish, English* Studies: Spanish | Message 5 of 19 27 June 2012 at 2:54am | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks. Very helpful
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| COF Senior Member United States Joined 5832 days ago 262 posts - 354 votes Speaks: English* | Message 6 of 19 27 June 2012 at 3:06am | IP Logged | ||
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Don't bother. Unless you're extremely good at learning language then you will never achieve anything near native ability and you will never produce tones at native ability.
The problem is until you achieve native ability then Chinese people probably won't want to listen to you and won't take your attempts seriously. The tones are hard enough to produce in isolation, let alone accurately producing them when trying to speak at anything close to native speed. Unless you really need to learn Chinese, I'd suggest you learn another language. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Yoyo2o Diglot Newbie United States Joined 4537 days ago 5 posts - 5 votes Speaks: Polish, English* Studies: Spanish | Message 7 of 19 27 June 2012 at 3:48am | IP Logged | ||
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I don't need to learn it but it's one of the options I'm considering. All I know for sure is that I will travel a lot in
Asia. I will learn at least one Asian language but I don't what yet. I'm considering Korean, Japanese, Mandarin, and Cantonese. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 newyorkeric Diglot Moderator Singapore Joined 6380 days ago 1598 posts - 2174 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Mandarin, Malay Personal Language Map | Message 8 of 19 27 June 2012 at 6:17am | IP Logged | ||
Utter nonsense. 26 persons have voted this message useful |
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