Starting to learn Chinese

[Iluvchinese]

Hi guys,

I grew up in Hong Kong and had an education in an International School where I was taught 1 or 2 mandarin lessons a week. I also had the privilege of having Chinese parents who gave me help whenever I needed it. However, when I was in International School in HK, everything was taught in English and this made me HATE chinese A LOT. It was at first "too easy" for me because my mom had taught me quite a bit by herself, so I made no effort to do the homework/readings the school set. However, I did not realize the importance of knowing the language of your own country, which I only came to realize when I started boarding school in England, then Canada.

Right now, I am in a boarding school in Canada and my uncle lives only 1 hour away, so when I go home on the weekends, I can ask him to help me to study Chinese. But since I am at Boarding School, I have to attend mandatory activities/sports every day and only have a bit of free time. Normally, I use this free time (before bed time) to read some chinese books that mom bought for me, but the one she bought was quite hard and It seems that I have to look up more than 10 words in just 1 short story. I told her this and she said that this is good, because I can learn a lot. But this just seems too difficult for me to remember so many characters.

Does anyone have a suggestion to help me improve my chinese? (I originally used the traditional text books in China and studied up to their grade 3 2nd part)

I really want to learn+improve my chinese again and hopefully be able to read newspapers or novels 2 or 3 years later.

[gato]

Sounds like you already have a conversational level of spoken Chinese. In your case, memorizing more characters is a top priority. I would recommend that you work with flashcards or even better get a smartphone and install Pleco (pleco.com) on it. Pleco, in addition to being the best electronic Chinese dictionary available that will save you lots of lookup time, also has a great flashcard program that you can take everywhere with you. Once you learn the most frequently used 2000 characters or so (which shouldn't take that long since you already know the basics), reading should become much easier.

See this post for some study tips for ABCs, which might also be helpful for you.

http://www.chinese-forums.com/showthread.php?p=59858#post59858

learning chinese for ABCs

[Iluvchinese]

Thanks for the reply.

I looked at the link for the "Chinese ABCs" thread and saw that you uploaded a file of the most popularly used words in Chinese. So I was wondering if there was a program of any sort (to use on my PC) that can use that .txt file and input all of the info in to a flash-card like program for me to use?

[Hofmann]

It seems that you're just illiterate, which is much better than being unable to speak at all.

In my opinion, it is much more effective to read real stuff than to study characters with flashcards. Therefore, I suggest continuing using the books your mom bought you. 10 words per story is normal.

Better, I think, is to read stuff online. You can use CantoFish or Chinese Perapera-kun to look up words you don't know. It's faster than using a conventional dictionary.

[Lu]

I suggest you make flashcards of the words in the stories that you don't know, and study them when you have time. You can take small paper flashcards anywhere, and learn a few when you have a few moments to spare. You can read and speak, so you have a great basis already. Good luck!

[mr.demoman]

10 new words a short story is really OK, buddy. Just keep going. The beginning is always very hard，万事开头难. And, to be honest, I always think language learning is like chinese medicine, hehe, the effect comes quite slow. Do have a bit patience.

I still remember years ago when I read original English books, sometimes I would meet 6or 7 new words in a sentence which was not long at all.

[gato]

So I was wondering if there was a program of any sort (to use on my PC) that can use that .txt file and input all of the info in to a flash-card like program for me to use?

Here are two flashcard programs that others around here have used

http://jmemorize.org/

http://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/screenshots.php

But I would strongly recommend Pleco if you have a chance.

[Hedge]

Also check out Anki, I have used both jMemorize and Mnemosyne and find it to be better. Check out the intro videos, it explains the Spaced Repetition System.