How to best use a tutor?

[newyorkeric]

I am a complete beginner who would like to start learning Mandarin with a tutor (I've found someone who is local). Does anyone have any advice on what things to work on together? I am not concerned with reading and writing, just conversation for now.

Thank you.

[DrZero]

My advice is to go through the pinyin table from start to finish with the tutor several times. Repeat after the tutor. You'll need to do that in order to get a handle on the pronunciation. Read some technical explanations of the sounds online first, so you have an idea of what you should be doing. For me the hard ones were j, q, x, and the "u" with the umlaut.

Then make tones your focus. Don't take any shortcuts -- attack these two elements from the beginning.

After you master the pronunciation and tones, the battle is half-won and there is no "magic" to the process after that -- jusat good old-fashioned study and practice.

P.S. I followed this method and I am proud to admit that I have occasionally been able to prank call my Chinese wife pretending to be a Chinese person, and actually fooled her for a sentence or two!

[simonlaing]

Dear NY Eric,

If you're planning on learning writing anytime later I strongly suggest you start learning it early. The issue with Tutors is that they are there to adapt the lesson to what you need so you need to ask the tutor to be strict and a bit tough with you.

If you don't pronounce the words well at the beginning it will be much harder later on. Ask your tutor to give you homework and to correct the homework or test you on it each class. There is quite a lot of memorization espicially at the beginning

Focus espicially tongue and lip positioning. words zhan, zang, can can be tricky for native english speakers.

I think having a text book helps, the New Practical Chinese reader is good one but you can choose for yourself.

If you ask the tutor to prepare lessons ask him or her to structure it so that words are repeated and reviewed as much as possible. For instance for greetings:

好 hao3 means good and it is repeated a lot.

你好 ni2hao3 hello 你好吗? ni2hao3 ma ? Are you ok? 我很好 wo3 hen2hao3 I am very well.

Or the word sport often uses the word ball 球 qiu2

棒球, bangqiu stick ball (baseball) , 网球 wangqiu(net ball sport, aka tennis) , 篮球 lanqiu BasketBall.

Work hard at the beginning and you will appreciate it later.

Good luck,

Simon

[sthubbar]

I would highly recommend Pimsleur. You can purchase it cheap many places online. I bought mine at www.lingoshop.com. They will also buy it back when you are finished.

My second recommendation would be using some sort of Space-repetition system, such as Supermemo or FullRecall.

As far as using the tutor, at the beginning I would just enjoy the time practicing things that you want to practice. You are in charge of the lesson not the tutor. You decided what interests you and study that. For example, studying the Pinyin table would bore me to tears and I would have run away from Mandarin as fast as possible if a tutor tried to get me to study that. Just my opinion.

[Ding Yiyi]

Depending on what you want you can (and probably should) follow the above advice. If you plan on studying until you're more or less fully fluent then somewhere along the way you're probably going to want to learn characters. If you just want to learn enough to travel throughout China then you can focus on learning just the spoken/pinyin of Chinese. In either case pronunciation is extremely important, so follow Simon's advice with the tutor.

If you plan on studying until you're more or less fluent then you're going to need to learn characters. There are just too many homonyms/words that sound extremely similar to avoid this, and the characters will help you see connections in the words as well. I'm personally more biased towards this because in the China they sometimes write pinyin under the characters, but if you're outside of Beijing (and probably Shanghai) they don't often do that, they'll just have a horrible, funny, or just completely wrong translation of the characters.

If you just want to get around while traveling, or know a few phrases to impress Chinese friends, you don't need to learn characters, just have the tutor help you with your pronunciation and have fun with it!

[david1978]

I agree with DrZero. The tones should be your major focus. I would go through the pinyin table systematically. Mastering it section by section. When you've got the individual tones down, now comes the real work: learning how to correctly utter words with 2 and 3 tones, and finally, whole sentences. Good luck.

PS. If you're not yet aware of the Chinese language's characteristics, I strongly advise you to do some research before you begin.

[newyorkeric]

Thanks for the advice.

Right now I don't think I have time to study characters because I am a full time student. Next year I am moving to Singapore where I can manage without being able to read Mandarin, but I would like to learn to speak a bit.

What do you think of using Pimsleur transcripts? I could read them out loud with the tutor and have him correct my pronunciation.

[DrZero]

newyorkeric, that will be fine for a time in the early stages. However, Pimsleur doesn't offer all that much vocabulary -- about 500 words, I think. You'll probably want 3,000 in order to handle everyday conversation, and more in order to handle TV news and things like that.