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Post by Wolfgang on Jan 28, 2019 22:19:06 GMT -5
I'm trying to learn Mandarin Chinese. I tried last year and gave up. It was too time consuming and frikkin' difficult. I'm trying again. There's no reason why I'm trying to learn Chinese other than the fact that I wanted to pick a challenging language spoken by lots and lots of people. I'm making this hard on myself because I'm trying to learn reading, writing, and speaking. It's a nightmare. I think I may do this for the next 20 years and still not get past 3rd grade Chinese. LOL!
Anyway, share your best foreign language learning strategy and experience.
Maybe I can learn something from you. Well, some of you.
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Post by XAsstCoach on Jan 28, 2019 22:31:40 GMT -5
加油！
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Post by ironhammer on Jan 28, 2019 22:36:17 GMT -5
If you think Mandarin is hard, you haven't tried Japanese.  |
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Post by Wolfgang on Jan 28, 2019 22:38:38 GMT -5
My order of preference for languages that I would like to learn:
1. Mandarin Chinese
2. Arabic
3. Russian
4. American Sign Language
5. Morse Code
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Post by XAsstCoach on Jan 28, 2019 22:43:58 GMT -5
Perhaps enroll in some Chinese language class at Berkeley or a nearby college as a starter. Go for Traditional Chinese, since you have no plans on visiting China at all. Many in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore view Simplified Chinese as an aberration.
By the way, found the Rosetta Stone to be useless in trying to learn Chinese. I am always asking about the origin of the character, which the RS does not delve into much.
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Post by Phaedrus on Jan 29, 2019 10:05:20 GMT -5
If you live near a place with a large Chinese population, go to the local Chinese community center and see if they have Chinese lessons for the younger kids. That might help, if you don't mind hanging out with a bunch of little ones. You can start hanging out in the Chinese communities, go to the parks and start conversing with the people there.
The next best thing is immersion, move to China or Taiwan.
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Post by mln59 on Jan 29, 2019 10:54:31 GMT -5
i learned how to decode/translate ancient greek. very proud of that.
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Post by Wolfgang on Jan 29, 2019 12:27:16 GMT -5
If you live near a place with a large Chinese population, go to the local Chinese community center and see if they have Chinese lessons for the younger kids. That might help, if you don't mind hanging out with a bunch of little ones. You can start hanging out in the Chinese communities, go to the parks and start conversing with the people there. The next best thing is immersion, move to China or Taiwan. The Bay Area of CA is filled with Chinese people. Frankly, I don't even know where the Chinese Community (or Cultural) Center is. Have to look that up. Also, not moving to China or Taiwan. |
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Post by c4ndlelight on Jan 29, 2019 16:44:14 GMT -5
My order of preference for languages that I would like to learn: 1. Mandarin Chinese 2. Arabic 3. Russian 4. American Sign Language 5. Morse Code Those top two are about the two most difficult you could pick (you could add Korean and Japanese and make a real go of it) and Russian is more manageable but not a cakewalk. |
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Post by Wolfgang on Jan 29, 2019 17:17:19 GMT -5
Here's my daily schedule:
8:00 AM Walk the dog
9:00 Take care of errands and chores
11:30 Exercise
12:30 PM Lunch
1:00 - 3:30 Video games
3:30 - 5:00 Afternoon nap
5:00 - 6:00 Read a book (currently: Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood)
6:00 - 8:00 Study Mandarin Chinese (speaking); also, cook dinner
8:00 Walk doggy
9:00 DVD
11:00 Study Mandarin Chinese (reading, writing)
12:30 AM Video games
1:30 Sleep
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Post by XAsstCoach on Jan 29, 2019 18:29:15 GMT -5
If you live near a place with a large Chinese population, go to the local Chinese community center and see if they have Chinese lessons for the younger kids. That might help, if you don't mind hanging out with a bunch of little ones. You can start hanging out in the Chinese communities, go to the parks and start conversing with the people there. The next best thing is immersion, move to China or Taiwan. The Bay Area of CA is filled with Chinese people. Frankly, I don't even know where the Chinese Community (or Cultural) Center is. Have to look that up. Also, not moving to China or Taiwan. 750 Kearney St, 3rd Floor...in Chinatown |
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Post by Wolfgang on Jan 29, 2019 19:35:23 GMT -5
The Bay Area of CA is filled with Chinese people. Frankly, I don't even know where the Chinese Community (or Cultural) Center is. Have to look that up. Also, not moving to China or Taiwan. 750 Kearney St, 3rd Floor...in Chinatown I live closer to San Jose than San Francisco. Chinatown is a 1.5 hr drive from home. |
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Post by ironhammer on Jan 29, 2019 20:37:49 GMT -5
Perhaps enroll in some Chinese language class at Berkeley or a nearby college as a starter. Go for Traditional Chinese, since you have no plans on visiting China at all. Many in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore view Simplified Chinese as an aberration. By the way, found the Rosetta Stone to be useless in trying to learn Chinese. I am always asking about the origin of the character, which the RS does not delve into much. Learning to speak Mandarin is manageable, as with any foreign language, it won't be a cakewalk, but learning the basic grammar and speaking a few common phrases can be handled. Learn the pinyin and it will help you grasp the pronounciation a lot. Learning to write Chinese is a lot harder, because it is not a Latin alphabet of a b or c. The written Chinese language is derived from logograms, with each character denoting a word or phrase, and there are many thousands of these Chinese characters to master if you want to able to write in a fluent manner. And it's not just memorizing these characters, the way you write it must also be correct, with each stroke of each character written in a particular order. So it would be harder than learning Arabic or Greek, which is still based on an alphabet. Mind you, mandarin is the national language of China, but not the native language of many regions of China. The written language is the same all over China, at least for ethnic Chinese (there are ethnic minorities like Tibetans and Uighurs who have their own spoken and written language, but that's another story) but the way it is spoken is far different depending on region. Only the North China Plain provinces and Shanxi and Shaanxi do you have confidence that the majority of the population speaks standard Mandarin as their native tongue. But go to Fujian for example, and you will be confronted with a maddening variety of dialects of Min, including Hokkien, or Minnan, which is also spoken in Taiwan across the Straits. Shanghai has Shanghainese, and in Guangdong and especially Hong Kong, the native dialect is Cantonese, which is mutually non-intelligble with Mandarin. If you speak mandarin to a native Hong Konger, they will treat you in the same way as if you are speaking a foreign language to them. They will understand you, but treat you like a foreigner just the same. On the other hand, if you speak Cantonese with them, they might treat you better. Japanese is even harder, it has been influenced a lot by Chinese vocabulary, but it is very much it's own unique language, in some ways, a language isolate, with unclear relations to other language groups. Because of the Japanese emphasis on politeness based on the Confucian hierarchy, there is a whole set of grammar for saying essentially the same thing, but is spoken differently according to the rank of the person you are speaking to. Written Japanese is even harder, elements of it is copied originally from classical Chinese, but today it is it's own language, with not one, but THREE components to the writing system, Kanji (borrowed Chinese characters), hiragana and katakana. Hiragana arose from the need to describe and name things not covered in Chinese and for grammatical inflections. In contrast, katakana is used often for loan words, to translate an originally foreign term into Japanese. And did I mention Korean? Like Japanese, the original written language, hanga, was derived from classical Chinese, but with growing nationalism in the 19th century, this led to adoption of Hangul, the Korean alphabet. A bit easier to learn than Japanese in my opinion, but then I did minor in Asian Studies in college, so I took lessons in all three language as well as some extra private tutoring over the years to have some grasp of it. And I am still far from fluent. |
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Post by XAsstCoach on Jan 30, 2019 9:34:19 GMT -5
Perhaps enroll in some Chinese language class at Berkeley or a nearby college as a starter. Go for Traditional Chinese, since you have no plans on visiting China at all. Many in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore view Simplified Chinese as an aberration. By the way, found the Rosetta Stone to be useless in trying to learn Chinese. I am always asking about the origin of the character, which the RS does not delve into much. Learning to speak Mandarin is manageable, as with any foreign language, it won't be a cakewalk, but learning the basic grammar and speaking a few common phrases can be handled. Learn the pinyin and it will help you grasp the pronounciation a lot. Learning to write Chinese is a lot harder, because it is not a Latin alphabet of a b or c. The written Chinese language is derived from logograms, with each character denoting a word or phrase, and there are many thousands of these Chinese characters to master if you want to able to write in a fluent manner. And it's not just memorizing these characters, the way you write it must also be correct, with each stroke of each character written in a particular order. So it would be harder than learning Arabic or Greek, which is still based on an alphabet. Mind you, mandarin is the national language of China, but not the native language of many regions of China. The written language is the same all over China, at least for ethnic Chinese (there are ethnic minorities like Tibetans and Uighurs with have their own spoken and written language, but that's another story) but the way it is spoken is far different depending on region. Only the North China Plain provinces and Shanxi and Shaanxi do you have confidence that the majority of the population speaks standard Mandarin as their native tongue. But go to Fujian for example, and you will be confronted with a maddening variety of dialects of Min, including Hokkien, or Minnan, which is also spoken in Taiwan across the Straits. Shanghai has Shanghainese, and in Guangdong and especially Hong Kong, the native dialect is Cantonese, which is mutually non-intelligble with Mandarin. If you speak mandarin to a native Hong Konger, they will treat you in the same way as if you are speaking a foreign language to them. They will understand you, but treat you like a foreigner just the same. On the other hand, if you speak Cantonese with them, they might treat you better. Japanese is even harder, it has been influenced a lot by Chinese vocabulary, but it is very much it's own unique language, in some ways, a language isolate, with unclear relations to other language groups. Because of the Japanese emphasis on politeness based on the Confucian hierarchy, there is a whole set of grammar for saying essentially the same thing, but is spoken differently according to the rank of the person you are speaking to. Written Japanese is even harder, elements of it is copied originally from classical Chinese, but today it is it's own language, with not one, but THREE components to the writing system, Kanji (borrowed Chinese characters), hiragana and katakana. Hiragana arose from the need to describe and name things not covered in Chinese and for grammatical inflections. In contrast, katakana is used often for loan words, to translate an originally foreign term into Japanese. And did I mention Korean? Like Japanese, the original written language, hanga, was derived from classical Chinese, but growing nationalism in the 19th century, led to adoption of Hangul, the Korean alphabet. A bit easier to learn than Japanese in my opinion, but then I did minor in Asian Studies in college, so I took lessons in all three language as well as some extra private tutoring over the years to have some grasp of it. And I am still far from fluent. Took an intro to Chinese language class before coming here to work. I knew it was difficult before even starting and I knew a little bit just from speaking it, but I was put off when the professor said to be considered literate you must know at least 4,000 characters. Tried the Rosetta Stone route but got frustrated...yeah I know they pronounced 球 (qiu) in the lesson is a ball and I can identify the picture, but how was I suppose to know the character 球 means ball. After taking a few classes decided to just wing it and learn as I go by moving over here. Right now my written Chinese is only by using the computer or cellphone, speaking is ok but vocabulary is still quite limited. I also use an app called Pleco Chinese that helps with interpretation. Google translate does a good job too! |
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Post by ironhammer on Jan 30, 2019 10:02:52 GMT -5
Learning to speak Mandarin is manageable, as with any foreign language, it won't be a cakewalk, but learning the basic grammar and speaking a few common phrases can be handled. Learn the pinyin and it will help you grasp the pronounciation a lot. Learning to write Chinese is a lot harder, because it is not a Latin alphabet of a b or c. The written Chinese language is derived from logograms, with each character denoting a word or phrase, and there are many thousands of these Chinese characters to master if you want to able to write in a fluent manner. And it's not just memorizing these characters, the way you write it must also be correct, with each stroke of each character written in a particular order. So it would be harder than learning Arabic or Greek, which is still based on an alphabet. Mind you, mandarin is the national language of China, but not the native language of many regions of China. The written language is the same all over China, at least for ethnic Chinese (there are ethnic minorities like Tibetans and Uighurs with have their own spoken and written language, but that's another story) but the way it is spoken is far different depending on region. Only the North China Plain provinces and Shanxi and Shaanxi do you have confidence that the majority of the population speaks standard Mandarin as their native tongue. But go to Fujian for example, and you will be confronted with a maddening variety of dialects of Min, including Hokkien, or Minnan, which is also spoken in Taiwan across the Straits. Shanghai has Shanghainese, and in Guangdong and especially Hong Kong, the native dialect is Cantonese, which is mutually non-intelligble with Mandarin. If you speak mandarin to a native Hong Konger, they will treat you in the same way as if you are speaking a foreign language to them. They will understand you, but treat you like a foreigner just the same. On the other hand, if you speak Cantonese with them, they might treat you better. Japanese is even harder, it has been influenced a lot by Chinese vocabulary, but it is very much it's own unique language, in some ways, a language isolate, with unclear relations to other language groups. Because of the Japanese emphasis on politeness based on the Confucian hierarchy, there is a whole set of grammar for saying essentially the same thing, but is spoken differently according to the rank of the person you are speaking to. Written Japanese is even harder, elements of it is copied originally from classical Chinese, but today it is it's own language, with not one, but THREE components to the writing system, Kanji (borrowed Chinese characters), hiragana and katakana. Hiragana arose from the need to describe and name things not covered in Chinese and for grammatical inflections. In contrast, katakana is used often for loan words, to translate an originally foreign term into Japanese. And did I mention Korean? Like Japanese, the original written language, hanga, was derived from classical Chinese, but growing nationalism in the 19th century, led to adoption of Hangul, the Korean alphabet. A bit easier to learn than Japanese in my opinion, but then I did minor in Asian Studies in college, so I took lessons in all three language as well as some extra private tutoring over the years to have some grasp of it. And I am still far from fluent. Took an intro to Chinese language class before coming here to work. I knew it was difficult before even starting and I knew a little bit just from speaking it, but I was put off when the professor said to be considered literate you must know at least 4,000 characters. Tried the Rosetta Stone route but got frustrated...yeah I know they pronounced 球 (qiu) in the lesson is a ball and I can identify the picture, but how was I suppose to know the character 球 means ball. After taking a few classes decided to just wing it and learn as I go by moving over here. Right now my written Chinese is only by using the computer or cellphone, speaking is ok but vocabulary is still quite limited. I also use an app called Pleco Chinese that helps with interpretation. Google translate does a good job too! As you can understand some of it and can speak some everyday common terms to get by, that's fine. I don't think most Chinese are like the French snobs who will criticize you for mispronouncing their precious French. Kidding of course. |
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