Totally new to Chinese...

[Yukon Cornelius]

My goal is to take the HSK exams ultimately.

To keep myself marketable in this world the future is the Chinese langauge.

My local universities will not have Chinese classes until Fall 2010 and I do not want to wait that long to dive in.

What is some advice on an effective way of beginning chinese before the fall?

Online classes? if so, which one?

Specific Books?

1 on 1 training? or is this a scam?

Please advise...

Thanks

[trevelyan]

Hi Yukon,

I'm not an uninterested party, but I'd strongly suggest you start by looking online. There is a genuine revolution ongoing in the way Chinese can be learned. We have lots of free Chinese podcasts at Popup Chinese that we're proud of, along with other tools like HSK tests and lessons on how to write Chinese characters.

There are other materials of varying quality and in different dialects online. Find ones you like: enjoying yourself is key. One-on-one training isn't a scam (we offer it and it's far cheaper than university) but you should be careful it works for you. I'd only recommend telephone over face-to-face if you need the convenience of having someone hunt you down for class and/or need someone else to impose structure on the way you learn. If you're still a student you should be able to find conversation partners on campus.

Whatever you do, expecting your university to make you anything near fluent is a big mistake. Most institutional Chinese language programs are deeply flawed and structured to accommodate the needs of institutions rather than learners. You'll make much faster progress using other methods with everything except for possibly writing, and the problem there is mostly the feedback issue when you're working alone. If you do go the university route, take every opportunity you can to spend time with the teacher and teaching assistant out of class (go to as many of their office hours as possible) and exposure yourself to as much native media as possible. Otherwise - like many Sinologists - you will end up with a hard-fought theoretical understanding of the language but little ability to speak it.

[valikor]

To keep myself marketable in this world the future is the Chinese langauge.

Maybe there is some truth to this, but maybe not. You might find this thread interesting:

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/24136-will-americans-really-learn-chinese

You could also read this New York Times article first http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/will-americans-really-learn-chinese/

Personally I sometimes have to seriously consider if it's actually worth it, If I didn't enjoy it, the answer would probably be "no", but this is up for debate.

Seriously though, Chinese can be pretty fun

[taylor04]

Heres a good thread starting Chinese. http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/5007-some-advice-for-beginners Basically start with pinyin, master all the combos and pronounce them correctly. Go through them with a native speaker and have them correct your problems. Then you can move onto other things, but this will take a good month, I strongly advise you to get pronunciation close to perfect now...

[renzhe]

You will not be getting many replies because this has been discussed many times and people don't want to type the same things over and over.

Look up some previous threads, which have lots of advice because people put a lot of effort into writing them.

My personal tip is not to bother unless you are willing to invest several years of hard work. It is very rewarding, but will likely not do anything for your career. Virtually all people who end up being proficient have a strong interest in the culture, the language, and the people. See this thread for a discussion.

[buzhongren]

Snip: To keep myself marketable in this world the future is the Chinese langauge.

Since Chinese will soon eclipse English as the Internet lingua I would suggest concentrating on written communication like email or websites. Speaking skills arent needed when you buy or sell on the Internet. Youll soon learn Google translation is pathetic for Chinese. Every OS has an InputMethodEditor for pinyin. You can say what you want about it for speaking but for reading and writing it will eventually make sense. Chinese grammar with vocabulary isnt a give me. But you can learn it on your own. I watched Mr. Toyoda in front of our congressional hearings. He got an MBA in US. I can tell he understands the English questions but speaks Japanese and lets translator respond in English.

xiele,

Jim

[BrandeX]

Since Chinese will soon eclipse English as the Internet lingua I would suggest concentrating on written communication like email or websites.

Personally I find that even more of an outrageous claim than the ones (as mentioned by the OP) suggesting everyone will speak Chinese in the future. Global internet trends will stay away from anything requiring an IME. You can't even program, code sites, or do a majority of other things on computers without "A, B, C's" typically English language based as a general standard.

[xiaotao]

Learning as a hobby is a good. Many know that learning Chinese is difficult but they don't realize how hard until they graually learn how much they don't know after studying many years. Even for those who have Chinese spouses, don't even understand the language or culture to a great extent. That's just my opinion.

[gato]

If your goal is marketability, better look at getting a Harvard MBA or something.

[valikor]

If your goal is marketability, better look at getting a Harvard MBA or something

I personally know some who have done so, but who haven't been able to find a job in some time, given the economic climate in the US.

Still, gato's advice might be good, relatively speaking

[valikor]

Also, I don't know if this is off-topic, but xiaotao's comment has made me curious:

Many know that learning Chinese is difficult but they don't realize how hard until they graually learn how much they don't know after studying many years

Is this specific to Chinese? If so, why? Do other people agree with this?

I would guess that in many languages, there will simply *always* be much which you don't know (even for native speakers), since vocabulary, diction, etc., can all be very specialized. If most native speakers were to read scholarly literature about the protreptic character of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, there would be plenty of things which they wouldn't be able to understand, and would quickly be discouraged when they realized that the word "protreptic" isn't even in most dictionaries...

In order to write or speak about anything, there needs to be a topic. Knowledge of language will never be enough to understand something; knowledge of the topic will be required as well.

Maybe this is a bad example, but I think it communicates the point... and I'm not really purporting to have an answer (that is, I'm not trying to challenge your argument), rather I'm trying to understand your seemingly interesting claim.

[chrix]

Probably it's a combination of the distance between English and Chinese and the complexity of the Chinese script...

[xiaotao]

Learning Chinese a second language or even a third, is way behind learning Chinese as primary language. For example, Harry Potter and the Twilight series are very popular in the United States. Grades schoolers read them around 4th grade, more or less. I've asked what grade they read these books in China and Taiwan. It turns out they are able to read those books in Chinese at around the same age as American kids. Not only that, I have met grade schoolers from Taiwan that able to speak English well, where as Americans struggle to learn Chinese.

As far as culture difference, As you have seen on a recent post about a guy who has taught in China and is married to a Chinese woman, he doesn't understand his wife and her family's ways. I'm in a unique situation where have met others who have studied or worked in China. It's very difficult to crack the code and be "in."

[valikor]

I know there have been threads asking "How Hard is Chinese?", and if you think my questions have been answered there, please point me in the right direction. But, what I've seen here doesn't seem like enough.

I currently teach English to Chinese babies. In private kingergartens, the kids start learning English at around age 2. My students are around age 3-5. By the time they start regular school, these kids will have "studied" English for 4 years.

I also have also taught students who attend private English schools on weekends. Some of them (the older ones especially) study English in their normal schools as well, and thus have two English teachers and quite a few hours of English instruction every week (and they do homework every day).

I am sure this is not news to anyone here, and my point is not a new one: for better or worse, Chinese students seem to work much harder than students in the USA (I can't speak for European countries, though I do know some Europeans who certainly never worked quite this hard)

Not all students are the same, and I don't know if the students that xiaotao was referring to are average students or above-average students, but even if they were average, if some of my current students are able to read Harry Potter by the time they are 9, this would be excellent... but at the same time, also not incredibly surprising, since this would be after 7 years of instruction in English (for the earliest starters), as well as an incredible work ethic. Plus, reading is generally the easiest skill (Chinese people that I've met tend to be much better in reading than in speaking, and I am much better in reading Chinese than in speaking it)

Maybe I'm not really saying anything interesting at all (since a million people have already suggested that work ethic is key, etc., and chinese students work harder). Anyways, I am very interested in your idea xiaotao, but I don't think your example really shows anything, as it was presented.

And Chrix, can you explain your answer more? (Or point me to somewhere that will inform me?) I understand that the Hanzi are an immensely complex writing system, but I don't really view it as such an impossible obstacle to overcome. As we all know, there are hard things about any language. Passive recognition of Hanzi isn't that hard, and it's not like Chinese people can write thousands and thousands of Hanzi anyways (at least the ones I've talked to sometimes make errors in hand-writing relatively common characters like 微 or 攀) . Other anecdotal evidence suggests that this is fairly common, and it's not the case that the Chinese people I talk to are exceptionally dumb

[chrix]

Well, the hanzi are an immensely system and a lot of foreign learners struggle with them. Enough threads about this.

On top of that English and Chinese are not in the least related, making it very hard to begin with. And don't forget the tones.

[valikor]

But Chrix, it seems like you're just listing the difficult aspects of Chinese. Couldn't I do that for any other language, too? After all, I'm not denying that there are some incredibly difficult elements... personally, I struggle constantly!

The better question (I think?) is how the difficult and easy elements end up playing out in the long run, You say "many foreigners struggle with the Hanzi" (paraphrased) , but this seems like a somewhat arbitrary claim. Since we're both Americans, I will ask how many Americans are fluent in Arabic, or Swahili? Do they struggle with Chinese more than they struggle with these languages? I'd guess that not many Americans struggle with these languages since I expect fewer Americans try to learn them in the first place. (Again, these are not rhetorical questions, as I'm not purporting to have an answer)

There are easy aspects about Chinese, too... Hanzi may be hard to remember, but Chinese vocabulary can ofter be quite easy. It's probably much easier to remember 火鸡 than it is to remember "turkey", and much easier to remember 出来 than "emerge" .I learned these words in Chinese 1 time, and I don't think I *ever* had to review them after that in order to remember them...

As I said, if there are any especially interesting threads that you'd recommend I read, I'd appreciate the recommendation. Thanks! I don't want to be repetitive.

[chrix]

Yes, most languages don't have a difficult writing-system like Chinese, well except for Japanese, whose writing system is even more complex... (check out the threads in the characters subforum: http://www.chinese-forums.com/forumdisplay.php?f=49 there's even a thread entitled "I hate hanzi")

Before you can even claim that 火鳥 is easy to remember, you must have mastered 火 and 鳥, which don't sound anything like the English. If you were learning German, you'd see "Feuer" and "Vogel" and see that they're cognate to English "fire" and "fowl", and would already have a much easier time memorising them.

And turkey is not a compound, while 火鳥 is, any compound is easy to remember if you know its components.

I listed the difficulties of Chinese, because it's a bit hard to compare Chinese against a generic "foreign language". Maybe you'd give us some concrete other languages to compare it against?

[chrix]

Oh I saw, you gave some foreign languages, so about Arabic and Swahili:

this is market-driven and doesn't have too much to do with how difficult a language is.

Numbers of Americans studying Arabic have soared after 9/11, but nothing compared to Chinese. There's not much economic value in learning Swahili, but it's actually quite easy to learn, you should try it

Arabic has an unfamiliar writing-system and a complex grammar, but it's nothing compared with the intricacies of the Chinese script (and a lot of the complex grammar and morphology in Arabic can be overcome by rote memorisation, but I still don't think it comes close to learning thousands of characters). And I think the tones are outweighed by the impossible epiglottal and laryngeal sounds Arabic has to offer

[renzhe]

I agree that each language is difficult to truly master, and that you can spend a lifetime on it.

Still, I found that the plateau hit me far harder when learning Chinese than with any other language. There are several factors:

- similarity, like chrix said. When you get past the basic 2000-3000 words in any European language, it actually gets easier. The very high-level complex literature and scientific works tend to be based on Latin and Greek, and thus basically the same for all languages. With Chinese, it stays difficult forever.

- writing. It's not an unsurmountable problem, and a few years of dedicated effort can make you proficient enough to read stuff well, but it will take you a LONG time before you can match the speed you have when reading your native script. When you get past your first real book, and want to become advanced, read lots of material at near-native speeds, you will have 20 years of experience to catch up with

- tones. The principles are simple and can be learned in 20 minutes. It gets progressively more difficult from there, and many people struggle with tones many years after starting to learn (this includes listening to them, as they play a huge role in differentiating meaning). Very few people perfect the tones to the point where they don't make mistakes

- no stress. Well, there is stress in Mandarin, but not the classical stress known from Indo-European languages. Indo-European languages are very easy to segment into words, because most words carry a single stress. This makes it easier (for me, at least) to figure out the word boundaries and isolate the words I don't know. With Mandarin, it's a constant stream of syllables, and you really need to know the words already before you can understand them in complex speech. This part took forever with me, and was NEVER a problem with any other language. I was jotting down unknown German words from TV shows few months after starting to learn the language. With Chinese, I often still have no idea what I had just heard, because I don't know where the word boundaries are.

These are my sticking points, at least. People complain about, for example, German grammar and morphology, but you can learn all of it in 6 months. It will take a few years to internalise, but it's not a never-ending process. And the more difficult it gets, the more similar to Latin, and therefore easier, as long as you have a decent vocabulary in another European language.

[xiaotao]

Nothing is stronger than mother tongue. Lots of English speaking families have their kids learning Chinese but they are far far behind those who have a Mandarin or Cantonese speaking home. They never catch up, Valikor, study Chinese longer and you'll know.