Need to Learn Mandarin

[wannabeafreak]

I want to learn Mandarin but don't know where to start.

Just wondering if there are any websites that have 100% chinese mp3 dialogues that have pinyin and english to match the voices?

Preferably 2-3 minute dialogues that are structured and have no english in them. Hence, Chinesepod is not good since its filled with tons of English which is annoying to listen over and over.

My Cantonese is very fluent and can do business level with little problems but I can't read characters.

Thanks

[renzhe]

If you buy the cheapest Chinesepod subscription ($9 a month), you can download the dialogues without any extra stuff, and download the PDF transcripts, which is basically what you want.

I'm not aware of any good audio programmes that teach Mandarin from a beginner level but without any English whatsoever.

It has been my observation that Cantonese speakers tend to pick up Mandarin relatively quickly, so you could probably use more advanced material too, but such material rarely comes with pinyin transcripts -- most of the transcribing is done using Chinese characters at that level.

[davidj]

The amount of English in ChinesePod tends to drop when you get to the intermediate level.

Generally the tapes that are associated with mainland published text books are pure Mandarin. However, as has already been pointed out, once you get beyond the first text book in the series, you are expected to be able to read the characters, and even before then, you cannot fully use the text book without the characters.

The desire to learn Mandarin without using the characters amongst people with Cantonese as a first, or joint first, language was one of the things that I found limited the adult classes in UK weekend schools. It meant that they moved form one first book to another, because the second book would have needed them to learn the characters. This included people who could read Cantonese (or Hokkien) in traditional characters.

That said, they found listening to the language much easier than I did, and almost certainly had listening skills well beyond the level of the text books used.

[imron]

If you buy the cheapest Chinesepod subscription ($9 a month), you can download the dialogues without any extra stuff, and download the PDF transcripts, which is basically what you want.

Actually, there's a bug with the Chinesepod website that allows you to access the transcripts and dialogs for free also. It's both trivial to exploit and trivial to fix, however they don't seem to be that interested. I've contacted them twice about it, once when I first noticed it, and once again a year later when I checked back and found they still hadn't fixed it. It's been almost a year and a half since I first reported it, and just checking now, it seems it's still there.

[A life of study]

You could buy Boya Hanyu Elementary, volume 1 - it starts Chinese form the beginning. All the units have dialogue texts, with full pinyin transcription, and there are MP3s on the CD that comes with it.

[Guest realmayo]

Online and available are the audio recordings of "David and Helen in China" -- here's a link http://classes.yale.edu/chns130/Listening/index.html, this is also mentioned here http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/2-favourite-chinese-musician3465&highlight=helen+david.