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How do I start learning Mandarin? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| jasoninchina Senior Member China Joined 5232 days ago 221 posts - 306 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin, Italian | Message 9 of 11 25 September 2010 at 6:48am | IP Logged | ||
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Whichever method you use, my advice would be to acquire a firm foundation in the basics. Learn the tones, phonetics, pronunciation, stokes, etc.. In terms of writings, I can't write Chinese worth a darn, but I can copy a character properly. As I see it, the ability to write Chinese is only for those who wish to work with the language in an academic setting. What reason would anyone have to hand-write Chinese? Maybe type, but not write.
I would definitely recommend learning the script. Trying to read in pinyin can get really frustrating for me. A word can have several meanings, even within one tone, so it can be a bit confusing to try and read without characters. My personal preference for a study method is to use something that contains a written text, new vocab, grammar, exercises, and an audio component. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Crassyo Diglot Groupie United States Joined 6116 days ago 92 posts - 92 votes Speaks: Spanish, English* Studies: Russian, French, German, Italian | Message 10 of 11 25 September 2010 at 8:25am | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks a lot guys for your replies :). I will check out some of the links you guys provided. So far I am thinking of
completing the Michel Thomas course first than move onto Assimil. It worked really well for me when I did that with German, so I hope to have the same success. I know it will be a challenge. Thanks again guys :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6583 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 11 of 11 25 September 2010 at 10:39am | IP Logged | ||
Honestly, after so all this time and all this study, reading lots of text written in Mandarin, I still find myself much more comfortable with pinyin. Reading pinyin is easy and I have no problems with the "multiple interpretations" people complain about, If I did, I wouldn't be able to understand spoken Mandarin, since there are no characters there. Only very formal texts and poetry, the sort of stuff you won't understand if it's read aloud to you but will have little problem with in written form, pose a problem. Of course, learning Mandarin without learning the script would be both unnecessarily difficult and crippling, as there are pretty much no materials in pinyin and memorizing words is a lot easier if you can understand the etymology that the characters represent. And memorizing vocabulary is 90% of the work in learning Mandarin. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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