Learning Mandarin/Chinese

[ashonfire]

Ni hao!

Has anyone studied Mandarin before? Anyone studying it now?

I start formal lessons in about a week and have been studying solo for the last few weeks. I'm really enjoying the challenge but the sounds are so unfamiliar it's proving quite a struggle! And the tones, don't get me started on the tones!

Anyone have any helpful tips on how to master this tricky language? There must be some Chinese cinema people can recommend, though it seems most of it's Cantonese.

 

[BeMused]

Yikes! Non-alphabetic written languages scare the hell out of me. My brain is happy to wrap around differing phonetic alphabets, but when you get into characters in Chinese or the non-alphabetic Japanese character sets you lose me.

Good luck! Lots of people speak Chinese, so I'm sure you'll get some good advice!

 

[BINOWGAYLATER]

Kung Hee Fat Choi (Tai)

It's extremely difficult for Westerners !!!
and dangerous too- MOST Chinese do not APPROVE of others speaking THEIR Language - at least not around here !! They will tolerate
Ni hao - and Xei Xei from me (or is it Xie Xie - ? ) but that's about it --
Do you have the Rosetta Stone CD's?

 

[freefall]

Learning Chinese language was a journey through the Nine Circles of Hell twenty years ago. Now since some of the words have been simplified, this has proven to be a lot relieving.

The newer method introduced about ten or fifteen years ago translates the reading phonetics into Latin words, thus making it easier to pronounce and memorise for Westerns. Hence learning to speak Chinese is not that difficult. You should start by learning how to read the phonetics rather than the words at once---like the differences of 'b' and 'p', 'd' and 't', etc.---and repeat yourself to get used to the four tones.

Movies are usually hard to digest except they have Chinese subtitles under the screen, which is rare nowadays. Try listening to Chinese music; you can learn by listening and reading the lyrics.

Xi wang nin hui jin bu geng jia hao.

 

[theblackajah]

Ni hao!

Has anyone studied Mandarin before? Anyone studying it now?

I start formal lessons in about a week and have been studying solo for the last few weeks. I'm really enjoying the challenge but the sounds are so unfamiliar it's proving quite a struggle! And the tones, don't get me started on the tones!

Anyone have any helpful tips on how to master this tricky language? There must be some Chinese cinema people can recommend, though it seems most of it's Cantonese.

As someone who's tried learning chinese formally through classes, let me say: save yourself some money, download the ahem... unofficial copy of rosetta stone, and learn it that way.

 

[BINOWGAYLATER]

Freefall: Not that difficult? srlsy !!

the OP is a white boy (I THINK) from AUSTRALIA -- FACTOR that in -and it's FUCKING HARD AS HELL !!

next thing you'll be having him trying to eat Kangaroo with chopsticks !

 

[ashonfire]

Well this hasn't turned out as I'd expected. Not very encouraging at all! I'm studing it at University level if that changes anything. I'll stick with it for a semester and see how it goes...

Thanks for your honesty guys.

 

[milktea]

i learned most of my chinese using pimsleur!! it works

 

[star-warrior]

Don't be disheartened ashonfire, it requires a little bit of hard dedication before you reap the rewards.

What you'll be learning is standard modern Chinese, and your university will have a tried and tested course to help all its students learn, so I'm sure you'll get all the support you ask for if you need it. On the other hand, you'll have to be patient.

Learning Chinese can be done in different ways, learning the spoken form first, then associating the spoken to the written at some date closely following it, or both spoken and written forms are introduced at once.

The writing is certainly a challenge, there's no denying that. Chinese has a lot of individual characters used in its writing, but, a structured course based on introducing words and vocabulary by frequency of use has great merits. No doubt the university is aware of the approach and it's course is designed that way.

In studies into the frequency of use of characters, 400 of the most frequently used ones make up about 67% of the corpus of text studied, running into millions of characters examined. When you learn about 1200 of the most common characters, this accounts for about 92% of texts. The last 8% of characters number about 3000 less frequently used characters.

A typical 3 year course (4 if you get a year abroad living in the target culture ) will reach that sort of level ~ 1200 chars. 400 chars is like just over 1 a day, which is a good rate, and increased if you're exposed to other stuff.

However, dwelling on individual characters is like dwelling on how many letters of the Russian cyrillic alphabet you know off by heart. It's the use of hanzi in combination to form compound words that is important. Several hundred characters potentiall opens up several tens of thousands potential compound words at your disposal.

The grammar is different from languages which rely on the change of word form to indicate nuances of meaning, that is, in Chinese, there is no number (with the exception of a few rare cases to do with person nouns) single and multiple aren't indicated like 's' or 'es' in English, boy and boys etc. Chinese verbs aren't conjugated, but use a system of mood words in combination as well as time prepositions to indicate past present future etc tenses.

The simplified versus traditional characters is perhaps in my opinion overated. Just see one as a variant of the other, and if possible learn both so you can access older texts in the course of your learning.

Modern standard Chinese is different from classical and literary Chinese, so whilst you're learning modern Mandarin, it the old stuff will be a challenge. If you have the dedication you can make it work for yourself.

 

[star-warrior]

If you use a word editor, not all of them saves chinese characters properly, you can really screw up and loose work if you're not mindful of this. If I'm using notepad, I always have to set the encoding to UTF8 first.

This applies to any script that uses characters outside the usual ascii range.

If you're using rich text or other methods which automatically encodes the characters properly, you might not have to bother. So, this is something to be aware of...

 

[MrEleven]

Good luck studying mandarin!

I went travelling through mainland China and Taiwan and learned quite a bit that way. I've started studying a little bit on my own through books, at my own pace.

I met a girl that lived in Shanghai who is studying Chinese and she is having a very difficult time reading the language, but is doing well speaking. I won't attempt reading it for awhile until I have a better understanding of speaking or conversational mandarin. Still a long ways off, more focused on reading/writing Korean.

Studying it at the university level would scare me though. I studied French in university and the thought that I would have to keep up with the rest of the class rather than at my own pace, and to be graded on my level of proficiency in the language is scary.

Good luck man!

 

[drake69]

all you need is a friend or someone who you can speak the language fluently. books arent very helpful because youll forget easily.

 

[Royal Heart]

I studied Mandarin in University for a year. It was pretty cool. I found Japanese easier to study, I have to be honest. Although, as of today 我会说一点儿汉语。

 

[swerve]

YIGHTZ!!!

My mother spent 2 years over in China as a medical missionary -- and she can SPEAK it -- I'm not sure if she can write it though...

One of my older brothers can do both -- but he had the benefit of knowing both Korean and Japanese before tackling it -- he also spent a lot of years over in that part of the world...

ALL I know is that it is BRUTALLY HARD!!!

I think that the same word can have MANY different meanings -- and its all in the vocalization -- kind of like the Native American languages...

BEST OF LUCK to you!!!

 

[giftart]

I can speak it and recognized most characters but I can't really write it.

My teacher just say like any language, just read more books in that particular language.

 

[sexsomniac]

YIGHTZ!!!

My mother spent 2 years over in China as a medical missionary -- and she can SPEAK it -- I'm not sure if she can write it though...

One of my older brothers can do both -- but he had the benefit of knowing both Korean and Japanese before tackling it -- he also spent a lot of years over in that part of the world...

ALL I know is that it is BRUTALLY HARD!!!

I think that the same word can have MANY different meanings -- and its all in the vocalization -- kind of like the Native American languages...

BEST OF LUCK to you!!!

That applies to english as well.. For instance, ass as an animal, ass as a body part, cock as an animal, cock as a penis and the list goes on.

 

[swerve]

^It SEEMS a little different when its explained to me -- more like how your mouth is shaped -- or how the air comes out when you speak...

But MAYBE its the same -- and because English is my native tongue -- I'm just used to it...

Hmmmm...

 

[BINOWGAYLATER]

Uh, what? Care to explain the reasoning behind 'a white boy from Australia' having difficulty with Chinese?

certainly !

FREEFALL said it's "not that difficult" and I was pointing out the differenc between them -- FREEFALL has a much more "asian" background - and THE AUSSIE BOY does not !!

and i do know things about him -- we've talked offline - if you must know -
and I don't think anybody here was trying to make him fail - or feel like a failure - the majority of the comments were pointing out the well known difficulty in learning a language like Chinese.
I had hardly any playmates after school let out - because nearly all the kids 85% were ASIAN - and the Japanese kids had to go to Japanese school - after AmericanSchool - and the same for the Chinese kids -- and the writing - took YEARS AND YEARS.
they had an edge - because they had already been speaking some chinese/Japanese at home to talk to the grandparents -- AUSSIEBOY does not have that either.
so it is significantly more difficult for me to learn than it is for a lot of peeps born on "the other side" of the date line. That's all I'm saying .
I have every confidence that my Aussie friend can and will do very well in his language endeavors.
and he will call me if he wants to work on his HAWAIIAN, k/ Mahalo y'all.

 

[deserter85]

I'm Chinese, and have a very good command of Mandarin (I'm originally from Singapore and both Mandarin and English were my first languages in school).

Would be more than willing to help any members of JUB if you need help with Mandarin.

I feel that if a foreigner wants to learn Mandarin as a foreign language, the first thing they should learn is Han Yu Pin Yin. Basically, it is to learn how to pronounce the words as it is converted to English alphabets. I've been teaching my bf Mandarin in this manner and he's picking it up quite easily and he finds it useful when impressing his Chinese clients with the accurate pronunciation of Chinese terms.

Learning how to write in Mandarin is a little more difficult to explain in cyberspace though... There are some techniques you can use to help but it's too complex to explain in a short post.

 

[ashonfire]

So it turns out that it's fucking hard, you guys were right! I have a test on Wednesday where my Laoshi will read out ten words and I will have to write their characters. I've been studying but I just can't correlate the sounds to the characters. Erghhh. I should have studied Spanish...