Beginning a Mandarin Adventure...

[TheSponge92]

Hello

My name is Roman, and I am beginning to slowly but surely teach myself Mandarin. I have been using the Before-you-know-it free version, as well as a Chinese-character-a-day notepad. However, I would like some advice before I begin studying in-depth. I am torn between using a comprehensive, computer software program (ex. Rosetta Stone, Pimsleur, etc.) or a textbook/workbook/audio tape package (ex. NPCR, Integrated Chinese, etc.) I can see the merits and drawbacks of both; I know that it is a rather vague question, but from those of you who are experienced at self-study in Mandarin, what do you believe is a better approach to follow? I would really appreciate any feedback.

Thanks very much,

Roman

[yellowpower]

lots of ideas and topics in this forum available to answer your questions, and experiences of past learners, current learners. Suggest that you spend some time browsing to see if the info is useful.

Welcome to the adventures of learning chinese!

[TheSponge92]

Ok, thanks for replying, I will do just that. Sorry if my topic was redundant.

[roddy]

There are some pinned topics in this forum which would be good starting places.

[Gharial]

Hiya Roman, and welcome to the forums! Rosetta Stone from what I've read (here and on Amazon) isn't worth the money (that is, RS just seems like a glorified phrasebook ultimately) - better to invest in a proper course that covers and explains not just vocabulary but grammar thoroughly. (Doing so will make needing to buy a separate grammar book much less likely, but if you do decide you need a grammar book too, then the following thread will be useful: http://www.chinese-f...post__p__237767 ; then, there are supplementary books such as Yong Ho's Chinese-English Frequency Dictionary that nicely blur the line between grammar and lexis, though for a true frequency dictionary, see http://www.amazon.co...12745065&sr=8-1 ). Whether that course should actually be Pimsleur though is another matter. For my money, something like Scurfield's Teach Yourself Chinese book & audio pack is very affordable and would provide a perfectly reasonable start in Mandarin, but I always recommend that people also try getting the excellent original (T'ung & Pollard) version of Colloquial Chinese (see here http://www.chinese-f...__1#comment-252891 for more on the CC course).

One thing to bear in mind is that courses that try to teach hanzi virtually from the start often consequently seem to do a relatively poorer job of covering more useful vocabulary and explaining grammar (I'm thinking of the original PCR course here), as if the hanzi squeeze out other stuff competing for space. So it's better IMHO to get more Pinyin-only, or primarily Pinyin, courses such as the aforementioned TYC and/or CC, and put the money you'll have saved (from not wasting it on things like Rosetta Stone) towards good, appropriate dictionaries. The best for a beginner is probably Yuan & Church's from Oxford*, but you'll soon be wanting more comprehensive works. About the most generally useful dictionary nowadays (especially for looking up both simplified and traditional characters, a task that previously would've fallen mainly to the Oxford Concise, Pocket, or Desk (see also http://www.chinese-f...ified-radicals/ )), for all levels of learner, must be the ABC ECCE** (see the detailed review I posted on the forums a while back: http://www.chinese-f...post__p__237924 ), but a dedicated C-E dictionary is probably also worth investing in, and the Far East (远东汉英大辞典(简明本)) is a very good one, with fine historical-cultural coverage, and the version that I have (printed in 1996) has Pinyin rather than bopomofo provided for not only head characters but also every compound subentry.*** Another indispensible yet very affordable C(-E, i.e. there is a C-E version available!) dictionary is the Xinhua Zidian (新华字典), a true character dictionary (as opposed to a cidian, 词典/辞典, "characters-as-words~compounds" dictionary) that contains around 13,000 character entries and is very useful for reading/look-up/translation work (see the following for some scans from various versions: http://www.chinese-f...post__p__203891 ). Then, there are the more "etymological"-mnemonic-phonetic approaches to listing and learning characters provided in the single-volume works (as opposed to presumably more lucrative multi-volume series by the likes of Heisig, or Alison & Laurence Matthews) by genuine Sinologists such as Wieger ( http://www.smarthanzi.net ), Karlgren, Harbaugh ( http://www.zhongwen.com ), T.K.Ann (etc?) that may prove very useful. Two final dictionaries that I feel I should mention are Fred Fangyu Wang's venerable C-E and E-C dictionaries, which were compiled to teach specifically the patterns of spoken Mandarin; these have been reprinted by Dover Publications, and should still be previewable on Google Books. (Note that they contain only traditional characters though, and that these are all handwritten, albeit very well! The rest of each dictionary was done on a manual typewriter - they were composed in the 1960s - but again very neatly and well). I've posted a few quotes from them here and there on the forums (do a search ). But given the number of reasonable alternatives now available online (dictionaries and resources such as nciku, MDBG, Collins dictionaries by way of http://dictionary.reverso.net/ , the aforementioned zhongwen.com, etc etc) you might personally feel there is no longer much need to get too many printed paper dictionaries.

Anyway, the above sorts of resources should provide you with more than enough guidance regarding the essentials of Mandarin pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, usage, and orthography. Note that I haven't touched on "reader"-like books and resources, as those really will often be more down to personal taste than general value and design, and there is so much freely available now on the internet anyhow.

If you are thinking of getting a survey-style book, then Ramsey's The Languages of China is one of the most readable yet detailed (and not just on Mandarin and other dialects of Chinese, but also the minority languages of China), though Norman's Chinese (Cambridge Language Surveys) has long been the linguist's standard reference, and Sun's Chinese: A Linguistic Introduction is quite useful in parts; then there are books such as DeFrancis's The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, part of which (see the 'Readings') is available at http://www.pinyin.info/ .

Finally, the following thread asking about the nature of (written) Chinese might be of interest:

http://www.chinese-f...post__p__251653

*Published under various titles, primarily the Oxford Beginner's Chinese Dictionary (which contains the most appendices), and the almost identical, vinyl-bound Oxford Chinese Minidictionary (which is the most hard-wearing and portable/dinkiest, though with still perfectly legible characters for its size); note however that the characters in both works are all simplified only, i.e. no traditional equivalents are provided anywhere in them.

**The ABC ECCE's indexes are excellent, and its one arranged by total stroke count and subordered by initial stroke according to the strokes in the character 札 will at a pinch resolve most stroke-order questions and thus be a sort of spartan stroke-order manual! (But one can of course also get supplementary manuals like the traditional character version of McNaughton's work from Tuttle, if one can afford to! I recommend getting traditional character versions of stroke order manuals because a) traditional is what you'll be needing the most stroke order guidance with and b) most if not all online stroke order guidance/animations seems to be in and for simplified characters only, which will obviously be a problem if~when you have questions regarding traditional forms).

***One drawback of the Far East is that the main body of the dictionary is arranged by (Kangxi) radicals rather than by Pinyin, so one has to consult an appendical Pinyin index if using Pinyin rather than Kangxi radical look-up to find out where (what entry number) any character is, which makes the Far East's alphabetical access a two- rather than the one-stage process it is in Chinese dictionaries produced in the West, but this drawback is sometimes actually an advantage, in that it gives one a semantic overview, page by page and entry by entry, of characters sharing the same radical, an overview that would be very laborious to undertake with Western, Pinyin-ordered dictionaries (in which one would be flipping between the Pinyin in the radical index and the entries/alphabetical locations the index refers one to in each instance, with semantically-related characters therefore spread throughout the dictionary by the apparent "vagaries" as it were of the Pinyin alphabet!).

[TheSponge92]

Thank you so much for such a thorough response! I will definitely look into some of the resources you have suggested.

[Gharial]

Heh, you're welcome, Roman! I enjoy sharing info about resources I've found useful. If you have any more questions, just ask!