Things you wish you had known when you started

[yersi]

.

[roddy]

Unless you happen to be an experienced language learner or some kind of linguistic genius, the only things you will 'pick up as you go along' will be the common cold and bad habits. Get a decent teacher and a decent textbook, and make full use of both.

[jbradfor]

OK, this sounds pretty stupid I know, but what I wish I had known was that most characters have many different meanings, and, even worse, many have different pronunciations depending on different meanings. I still remember how discouraged I was when I realized that for each character I thought I "knew", I would have to learn more potential meanings for it. And I still think it is SO TOTALLY WRONG that a character can have more than one pronunciation. It's totally fine for an English word to have more than one pronunciation, but it's not OK for a Chinese Character to have more than one pronunciation.

Oh yeah, and how hard it would be to get my tones correct.

[Gleaves]

Use a computer.

I've taken two stabs at Chinese. The previous one derailed about 7 years ago, and I didn't use a computer for studying (SRS, etc.), content, or anything Chinese-learning-related. Man, was that a mistake.

[wrbt]

Not to get anxious about forgetting words/characters that I had memorized and forgotten... if it's an important enough word it'll come back up enough times that it'll eventually stick.

[Hofmann]

My parents don't know how to teach Chinese at all.

[AlexBlackman]

lots of things

• The importance of learning the characters
  
• The importance of learning things in context
  
• The relative unimportance of perfect tones
  

[flameproof]

I wish I didn't listen to those people that say "you can't learn character after the age of 5" and "learning characters takes a lifetime". Difficult, yes, but really not that difficult.

It's really so stupid. I mean, how many people did you ever met that said: "I want to learn English, but just to speak, not to read and write"....

[gerri]

The importance of learning the proper tones (fortunately, I started so often at university - always doing something else as main course of studies - i "knew" that). Just wish to put it in here, after unimportance was mentioned. It's a big mistake to not talk at all because you're afraid of getting the wrong tones, but still, Chinese IS a tonal language...

I had been discouraged with multiple pronunciations, multiple meanings. Now, I'm getting fascinated by how many words I know, taking different characters (which I already learnt individually or in other words) in combination.

[character]

That hearing/remembering tones would be the hardest part of Chinese (for me, at least).

[querido]

The *meaning* of a character should be learned in context, but I was finally convinced that my original single-character-only approach was counterproductive when this principle became obvious:

The *sound* of a character should be learned as it occurs in the flow of real Chinese speech.

I had "learned" all of the characters in an elementary textbook, with their pinyin. Then for some reason turning my attention to real speech, I resolved to analyze the text's recording. I discovered too many deviations from what I thought I knew to categorize, to keep track of, shattering my "perfect system".

Common sense could have prevented this "false start", but unfortunately...

[renzhe]

That hearing/remembering tones would be the hardest part of Chinese (for me, at least).

Personally, I'm coming back to the opinion that this is, in fact, true. Remembering and hearing tones in isolation is very easy. Using them in fluent speech is extremely difficult.

[character]

Remembering and hearing tones in isolation is very easy.

Do you have a post where you describe your method for remembering tones? I don't want to derail this thread.

[renzhe]

Nah, I brute force them. They stick after a while and I can generally pronounce single characters correctly.

But free, fluent speech makes them all go to hell.

[character]

Nah, I brute force them.

That's too bad; I find it takes me an order of magnitude more effort to memorize tones for characters than it does to memorize the character's appearance, the meaning, and the pinyin (though a few come easy for some reason).

But free, fluent speech makes them all go to hell.

Try speaking only as fast as you can with proper tones for a few months?

[stelingo]

I knew that Japanese Kanji have several readings but I thought that Hanzi in general only had one. Is this not the case?

[linkailong]

I guess one thing that I wish I had known when I started learning Chinese is that there actually ARE some good reasons for learning traditional characters as well as simplified ones.

[imron]

Do you have a post where you describe your method for remembering tones?

The best advice I have for this is don't think of them as tones, but rather complete sounds in their own right. So, instead of thinking of 马 as ma + third tone, remember it as one complete distinct sound mǎ. If someone asks you what tone a given character is, you should have to first pronounce it and from that, work backwards to get the tone.

A sort of similar example in English, might be with long vowels and short vowels. When you see the words fit and feet, you don't think of them as fit + short vowel and fit + long vowel, as that would be confusing. You just think of them as fit and feet.

When you start to do the same thing with tones, they become significantly less troublesome.

[linkailong]

I agree with you, imron. I also think it's much easier if you learn tones from the VERY beginning. Having to go back and learn tones to characters you already know is a lot harder than learning the tone for every new character as you go.

[jbradfor]

I knew that Japanese Kanji have several readings but I thought that Hanzi in general only had one. Is this not the case?

Most do, at least commonly used pronunciations. However, there are certainly a number of characters that have commonly used multiple pronunciations. I can think of near a dozen off-hand, and I'm not that good. I'm sure this has been discussed other places? If not, here's a list. The original source is no longer available, so I can't vouch for it. http://forum.chinesepod.com/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=2393