learning chinese

Hey everyone,

apart from talking to people who know chinese, what's the best way to learn it?  Would any of you recommend the Rossetta Stone series?  I'm talking about Mandarin btw

For greater success of Anon!

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>>1
Um, watching Mandarin movies, and reading Chinese Wikipedia?

Listen to mandarin songs and watch mandarin shows. Kinda like a weeaboo except the language is Chinese.

>>4
Songs don't help much usually.

Any good mandarin movie suggestions?

>>1
IMO you're better of getting yourself a proper book. There's a lot of people learning Chinese so you'll probably find there's a few decent books out there. Maybe the Rosetta stone stuff would be good for helping with some basic pronunciation but I don't think they teach beyond fairly basic stuff.

>>3
Impossible if you don't already know a fair bit of Chinese.

so a book is the way to go then?  which character set should I start with?

>>8
I'm learning Japanese not Chinese so take this with an appropriately large grain of salt but I'd say that you should be able to pickup Pinyin at the same time as you're learning the basics of Chinese phonology. After that though, I'd start trying to learn the Hanzi as soon as possible because if they're anywhere near as difficult as the Kanji they're going to be a *MAJOR* barrier to overcome. The good news is that as far as I know Hanzi are nowhere near as convoluted as Kanji and tend to have only one reading :).

Yes Chinese is pretty hard to start unlike Japanese and English, since very f**king new word is an obstacle, for English it's just learning the full set of upper and lower case alphabets, for Japanese it's learning the hiragana and katakana just to get started, so English and Japanese are more easily to get started.

Getting a proper book and possibly attending lessons is mandatory, to get better you'll have to rely on yourself, which means self-learning from movies and books. Read and listen like mad.

I've heard that hanzi characters are each individual words and that they symbolize what they mean.  Is this true, or is it more that the symbols are each syllables?

Number 9 here again, so keep that grain of salt handy.

I thought I should mention that learning a language on your own is fucking hard ;) I tried learning Japanese on my own but didn't get far. I only started to pickup it up when I took it as a major. If you're going to learn on your own, then you're going to need to force yourself to maintain consistent study patterns. You'll also need to simply accept that it's going to take a very long time to get to the stage where you can even start to comprehend something like a Chinese Wiki article or a Chinese Song. Anyway make sure whatever book you buy has a healthy amount of listening practice and a lot of exercises.

>>11
There are far less characters than there are words So sometimes a single character will represent a word. Sometimes several characters will represent a word.

Self-teaching is waaaaaaaaay more effective than a classroom when it comes to languages. I recommend the forum of the website www.how-to-learn-any-language.com/ if you are looking for some place to start. There are tons of free material (some of it is even legal!) available on the internet.

>>13
I've gotta disagree. Learning in a class room environment, at least initially, has a number of advantages, especially when it's your first time learning a new language. It gives you the chance to ask questions when you're unsure. It means that when you make a mistake there'll be someone there to correct you. Also more importantly it can be hard to maintain discipline when you're starting out with a language. A formal class room situation forces you to be there learning. Oh and when you start to learn more advanced grammar it can be hard to find good self study materials.

Anyway if I was going to start learning a 3rd language I think I would find it just as easy to learn on my own as in a class room, assuming I could find someone to practice with :).

The classroom stuff can help a lot with the pronunciation, with the stroke order, and even the way you draw that hanzi. It also takes the burden of finding out what set of characters to learn. :)

Find a proper Chinese course if possible.

>>13

how long have you been learning chinese?  has it really only been 6 months?

Self teaching > classes, but it's better to do both

A little bit more than 6 months. I had almost no knowledge of the language prior to that. The material I used was mostly acquired from torrent websites and P2P softwares, I only paid for a few books that were available on the internet for free anyway, but it was cheaper for me to buy the books than to print them.

My father forced me to take German classes a while ago and I don't feel I learned anything in 2 months, and I went there 3h a day. These classes were completely boring and the way of teaching was primitive and innefective. Many researches are done in the field of linguistics, yet classrooms don't seem to apply these and instead keep using the same method over and over, without evolving.

Self-teaching is better because you can choose what fits your needs the best and you can choose what kind of material you want to listen to instead of being imposed boring material.

In a classroom, you will keep hearing other non-native speakers trying to speak in the target language. With self-teaching, you will hear edited recordings of native speakers, which will help you speak with a better accent.

I could go on and on. To sum it up, I think classes are ineffective methods if you compare the ratio time spent / things learned learned and also money spent / things learned/

How about private tuition?

>>18
It's unfortunate that you've had the experience you have had with classes. However if you're in a situation where you have never seriously learned a foreign language before then I think self study would be much harder than if you were in a class environment. I've had the good fortune of teachers who try to keep the classes interesting and frequently give a lot of cultural information. Something that you won't get to anywhere near the same degree with self study materials. Obviously though whether you're in a class room or not a lot of learning a language is going to be self directed. You have to learn vocabulary for yourself and so on. You simply can't effectively teach any significant amount of vocab in a class room environment.

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