Learning Chinese?

Sup /lang/. I see lots of threads on here about Japanese, Spanish etc but very few about chinese (Mandarin specifically.).

I want to learn chinese in my free time. I'mmat uni currently so with that mojey is an issue and i cannot enroll in a course. My question is, how many people here natively speam chinese/have learnt or attempted to learn it? What is the best way to learn it primarily online? I always see posts telling you to talk to native speakers on sites like livemocha.com but I always get embaressed about doing that...

So, whay can you recommend? Thanks.

bump, I too am interested.

bump

bump also.

my method worked pretty well
I just moved to China
working here as a biotech researcher for a few years
nailing bitches left and right
good times

>>5
>nailing bitches left and right
I've heard this a lot, is it seriously that easy?

I don't know a lot of Chinese, but it doesn't seem too difficult to learn.

I listen to Taiwan radio stations online, which is fun, because I get to hear Chinese music and people talking. The sounds are quite a bit different from English so I think it takes a bit getting used to it. I have a better idea what it's supposed to sound like by doing that.

Also, I like to practice writing hanzi in my spare time.

Also, this website is pretty awesome:
http://stroke-order.learningweb.moe.edu.tw/character.do

practice typing/reading: lang-8.com
practice characters: skritter.com
make practice sheets: hanlexon.com
watch video: tudou.com
read comics: 17kk.net
read adult comics: www03.eyny.com/forum-349-2.html

Use youtube to find stuff on from cctv and for tone examples.

Except skritter, the above are all free.  Live-mocha sucks, they don't bother building up basic vocabulary and grammar, they just try the antiquated technique that Rosetta Stone does, except without the benefit of speech recognition, so it's even less useful!

Find a cheap textbook if you can something like Chinese Link by Prentice Hall.  If you're clever, you can scrape the MP3s off the website: http://wps.prenhall.com/wl_wu_chineselink_1/  Then you can listen to all the exercises and chapter content.  Hell, even without the textbook that site's decent.  (If you're not so clever, I can post a script that will pull down those mp3s, too, but let me know what OS you're on).

Once you've got a feel for pinyin and can start to recognize radicals, you'll want a dictionary for looking stuff up by stroke or radical such as mdbg.net

If you have an iphone, turn on the pinyin and stroke input methods and then translate.google.com will be your best friend.  Android sucks donkey dick when it comes to stroke input.  There are free apps that can do it, but I haven't seen any that are as good as the iphone one.  Though you can use the voice input with a chinese keyboard on android to sort of practice your speech, but it's not ideal.

Dont try to learn tones from songs, they'll fuck you up.  The most consistent tone examples I found were in text books or accompanying audio.

Try not to learn more than 5 new characters a day and try not go to more than two days without practicing writing and recognizing characters you think you've just learned.  Try not to go more than a week without practicing old characters that you know.  When you get to your first 2-300 characters you wont have to practice the old ones quite as frequently, but don't stop practicing them because you think you know them.  Sites like anki.com are suppose to help in this, but they're just not a good fit for me.

If you reach 300 characters, consider looking at the Chinese Breeze series on amazon.  They dont suck and they're marginally interesting.

If you want to find a core set of vocabulary to start learning chinese, consider signing up for skritter for the free account and then you can download the text for the various textbooks they have.  Even if you cancel your subscription, you can always go back to skritter and download the vocabulary lists.  I like to do this and paste them in to hanlexon.com to create practice sheets that I fill out when sitting through a boring class.

Once you have some basic vocab, you'll need some basic sentence patterns in order to practice making sentences.  Textbooks are good for this.  Random online sites are okay, too.  Once you find a few patterns, you can head over to lang-8.com and try filling in random words for some new sentence patterns you've learned and people will let you know if you're doing it right.

Flashcards are a good way to get new characters into your short term memory.  Practice writing them from memory and it will help to get them into long term memory.  You'll be tempted to learn as many as possible in as short a time as possible.  Resist the temptation.  You're retention will be better long-term if you stick to no more than 5 a day.  If this seems like too few characters, consider that 5 a day is 25 a week (ignoring weekends), 100 a month, 1200 a year.

If you happen to wander into Chinese restaurants to practice listening, keep in mind they're probably not speaking mandarin to eachother.  Cantonese and Fukenese are more common than Mandarin near my campus.

I'm starting to ramble, so I'll stop here.

Damn, thanks for that post. Will help a lot.

Tried out Rosetta Stone a few days ago, just to see what it was like (torrented) - but really, what are they thinking? I got to lesson 2 and I'm suddenly being quizzed on things they hadn't even taught me yet. How am I meant to get something correct if I had never seen it before.

Do you know of any complete packages for learning a language?

Once again, thanks so much for that massively long post. It really helps.

Sadly, no.  I don't know of any complete package from learning Chinese.  If there's a local Chinese community, you might find that they've banded together to form some sort of school for teaching Chinese language and culture to their children.  These groups may also offer courses that are absurdly cheap for teaching Adults who may or may not have adopted babies from China.

Something I forgot to list above, "My Chinese Coach" for DS.  It sucks for speaking but it's good for self-quizzing.  There are quite a few different mini-games provided that are good tests of memory and decent character writing practice.

If you still have access to Rosetta Stone, I'd recommend using that for reading and speaking practice, lang-8.com for writing practice, the Nintendo DS for character writing practice and drilling (or skritter.com for drilling characters,) but you'll still lack a good resource for new sentence patterns and grammar.  For that... Let me know if you find anything good.