Newbie pre-study tips.

[naked_seed]

Hi guys,

I'm a complete beginner coming to Tianjin from January next year to study the language at a private school. Any tips/suggestions on what I could be doing prior to getting there to assist in my language learning?

Cheers

[abcdefg]

Try a recorded listening/speaking course such as Pimsleur on your own. It starts from zero and goes slow without requiring any reading. It's low stress and all by ear. You may be able to find a used copy at an on-line store such as E-Bay which will be cheaper than buying the package new from the publisher.

[Gymnosopher]

How about watching some Chinese movies?

When the typical person without any exposure to studying the Chinese language hears it spoken as the sounds are so different it doesn't even sound like a language, so when you gradually start to get more exposed you begin to notice the differences in sounds and inflections/tones. So just listening to some Chinese even in the background may help train your ear to distinguish these different sounds.

The same could be achieved with music, tv shows or stalking the neighbourhood ex-pats - however films are more fun, baby steps and all that.

[Olle Linge]

All the advice above is good advice, especially watching films and listening to music. Basically, I would recommend anything that increases interest in the Chinese language and/or culture. It might also be useful to learn more about the language and/or culture by browsing the internet or reading books. Of course, you could start looking at textbooks and so on, but it might be even more useful to get acquainted with the language and enhance your urge to learn.

[rezaf]

There are many discussions about this topic on this website. My suggestion is to use one of those cheap tutors on italki.com and learn pinyin as well as some basic spoken Chinese, but there is no need to take it too seriously because chances are you will either give up or you will spend the next 5~10 years of your life trying to learn this language. So just relax and enjoy your time before you start.

[anonymoose]

Not wanting to contradict the well-meaning advice of those above, but in my humble opinion, I don't think watching movies or listening to music at this stage would be beneficial. If you have no foundation at all, you won't be able to make head or tail of anything. You would hear the sounds, but until you learn them systematically, they will be difficult to distinguish and of little didactic value.

In principle, following Pimsleur as already suggested would be a better option, although personally I dislike Pimsleur. Pimslear essentially teaches like teaching a parrot. You may learn to repeat some phrases, but the course doesn't provide any explanation, making it difficult to really understand the structure of the language and hence prohibiting flexible use of the language (not to mention severely limited vocabulary). Of course, some people would say that this approach is better, as children also learn by imitation, but I find the course extremely unstimulating and inefficient. However, there are other audio (or video) courses, some online, that you could try.

In addition, you may find it useful to get an initial understanding of grammar and the written language. There are many books that are good for beginners (for example A Basic Grammar and Workbook by Yip Po-Ching and Don Rimmington). Even if you don't wish to start studying too seriously before you go (although personally I would), I recommend that you consider buying a good grammar book and taking it with you, as foreign-published books are not easy to come by once in China, and in some respects are more suitable to foreign learners than Chinese-published books.

[xiaotao]

I would learn as much as I could at home before I took the dive. I would prefer to go to China at minimum at a high intermediate level.

You can learn as much as you can about the food, culture, language on youtube. Maybe a tutor can help you get precisely what you need in a short period of time before you go in January.

[renzhe]

I'd recommend not concentrating on language skills (such as understanding movies or achieving a basic level of conversation) because that's unlikely to happen in a few months.

Instead, I'd recommend learning basic things about the language and getting a basic set of skills, which will not necessarily make you understand the language right now, but could make a great foundation which allows you to progress faster once you start learning in Tianjin.

Things like:

- basic knowledge about pinyin, pronunciation, tones. There are good resources online

- basics about Chinese characters - knowing that they are composed of radicals and phonetics, and how they are built

- reading some good books about the language. A grammar book is a good recommendation, I'd also recommend DeFrancis' "The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy".

Once in Tianjin, you will (hopefully) have a competent teacher to guide you, but having a basic understanding of the building blocks will help you put some things in context.

[yersi]

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[Guest realmayo]

I kind of agree with Yersi, but not quite: yes, definitely practice pronunciation if you're sure that you will end up with good pronunciation that way. But without a native speaker listening all the time, I wonder if a complete beginner wouldn't end up drilling bad pronunciation every day, and end up "fossilising" these bad pronunciations into their speech?

When I've tried to help non-English friends improve their English pronunciation I've found that if they can't distinguish two sounds (eg the vowel sounds in bit and beat) when they hear them spoken, they'll never be able to pronounce them properly.

Better, then, to focus on listening to the sounds and learning to distinguish them.

So I would suggest (also echoing renzhe):

Read about pinyin and tones.

Listen to a (recording of a) native speaker pronouncing the different sounds and tones.

Read about how characters work, stroke order.

Try to learn or become familiar with the most useful radicals and character-components, ie the building blocks.

[yersi]

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[Guest realmayo]

Doesn't seem to address the possibility that a complete beginner will, absent a native speaker to correct him, mispronounce stuff.

[Olle Linge]

I just want to clarify that I recommended movies and music, not to study and understand, but to find aspects of Chinese culture that are interesting and might work as motivation when studying. It's of course pointless to study language in movies in just a few months at a beginner level, but it might increase motivation for learning and be enjoyable in itself, as well as helping familiarising oneself with the spoken language.

[yersi]

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[WestTexas]

Did you miss the part about "practicing with a microphone"? Obviously, what I mean by this is that he/she should record him/herself and then listen to it. Are you really that desperate to continue this derail?

I agree with Realmayo. Even if the learner records himself and compares to the native recording, it might be off. Speakers of different languages will process the phonemes differently. The learner could record himself and his recording might sound the same as the native recording to him, but actually to a native speaker it might sound wrong. For example, many Chinese students of English cannot distinguish the sounds in meat/mitt or heat/hit. So they might practice saying "mitt" over and over again, listening to the native English speaker recording, and thinking they are doing it right, but actually they are saying "meat", because many Chinese cannot hear the difference in the sounds.

I think it is especially important to get the pronunciation right at the beginning by working with a native speaker, as if they aren't right or if they sound off the learner will form bad habits which will be very difficult to fix later on. He might be able to be understood by a native speaker, but he would have a thick accent which will be difficult to correct.

[Guest realmayo]

Sorry Yersi if you think I'm trying to derail this advice thread with, erm, advice. If you were a complete beginner and wanted to know if you were pronouncing a Chinese word right, would you trust a complete beginner to listen (ie you'd ask youself to listen to you yourself?) or would you ask a native speaker? If you're confident you wouldn't get into bad habits then sure, your suggestion makes a whole lot of sense. And anyone who has used something like Pimsleur on its own to develop good solid pronunciation would show that I'm worrying unnecessarily. But I think the concern about fossilisation is a geniune one, and certainly I've found while studying Vietnamese recently that there were sounds, both vowel sounds and consonants, which sounded so identical it wasn't funny -- I thought I'd have no chance! But after a lot of listening and then some delayed pratice speaking, I'm making progress. The OP only has a couple of months, why risk forming very bad habits now? And the point about fossilisation is that the bad habits a brand new learner will develop will be affecting the most frequent and common parts of the language (because those are the only parts of the language you'd be learning and repeating at that stage).

One piece of advice I'd add to the "listening" part: get, say, three or four short dialogues -- ie the ones you'd find in the opening chapter or two of a teach-yourself book. Listen to them while reading the pinyin. Match the sounds you hear to the pinyin. Use audio software (eg audacity) to break the dialogue into sentences, or even clauses, and listen to them on their own a few times. Do that (10 mins?) every day. You don't have to understand 100% why what means what.

[yersi]

I disagree with both of you, and I think your worries are overstated and unnecessary. Doubly so if the OP supplements this practice with reading material about the sounds themselves. And btw, the phonemic and tonal complexities of Vietnamese, which I have also studied, are objectively much greater than Mandarin.

And again, there's nothing stopping him/her from finding a native speaker near where he/she lives and getting them to give him/her feedback. Two months is too short a time to fossilize bad habits anyway. And if he/she is in a standard classroom environment down in Tianjin, I seriously doubt his/her pronunciation will get all that much attention. Before you know it, you're on to 你好 and pronunciation falls by the wayside. That's how it usually turns out and why I recommended this approach.

[Olle Linge]

I disagree with both of you, and I think your worries are overstated and unnecessary.

I disagree. I'm not at home and I don't have time to dig up actual research supporting this, but beginners in general cannot hear if they are pronouncing things correctly or not. Even if they hear that what they say is incorrect, they have no idea what the difference is or how to change their pronunciation to make it correct. I haven't taught many students yet (around 100 perhaps), but so far I've come across very few students who can hear what mistake they are making.

Of course, you might be able to hear this or might have been able to do it when you studied Vietnamese (what that has to do with this I don't know), but that is simply not true for most beginner students of Chinese, at least if we're talking of people who are native speakers of English (or similar) languages.

If we want to discuss this further, perhaps it's possible for an admin to separate this discussion from the thread somehow? I mean, the discussion has left the "advice" phase.

[Gharial]

There's no reason of course that the OP can't study by him or herself as well as try to find a native speaker to help out with the pronunciation. (Just make sure though that the [qualified?] native speaker, if they use things like tones in isolation or 'minimal pairs', at some point actually contextualizes them in short phrases in order to prove their utility or reveal tone changes etc, otherwise one can end up practising [to borrow an example quite often peddled by Japanese teachers of English] things like 'rice' versus 'lice', in the "sense" of 'I like rice' versus 'I like lice' (hmm, yummy! What are we, baboons grooming each other?! LOL)). And if native speakers are hard to come by in that neck of the woods, the OP will have to settle for self study (which is obviously better than nothing).

My recommendations for courses and books would be (roughly ordered "from most to least essential for a beginner"):

Teach Yourself Chinese/Complete Mandarin Chinese (book + 2 CD course) by Elizabeth Scurfield (covers everything from pronunciation, through essential grammar and vocabulary, to radicals, stroke order and a few hundred characters. Simplified characters only)

Oxford Beginner's Chinese Dictionary/Oxford Chinese Minidictionary by Yuan & Church (plenty of examples and explanations. Simplified characters only)

ABC ECCE Dictionary (includes traditional characters, a much wider range of vocabulary than the Yuan & Church, and some very useful appendices)

Reading & Writing Chinese (Traditional Character Edition) by McNaughton & Li (mainly a stroke-order guide, but a nice resource to have generally, and inexpensive enough)

Chinese: An Essential Grammar (Second Edition) by Yip & Rimmington (doesn't include exercises, but is a relatively self-contained single volume, as opposed to the somewhat "split-level" Basic then Intermediate grammar workbooks), or Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar: A Practical Guide by Ross & Ma (again, no exercises [though a workbook is sold separately], but very functional). IIRC the Y&R books include only simplified characters, whilst Ross's provide both simplified and traditional.

Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary by Rick Harbaugh (one of the best guides to character "etymology" and mnemonics. Available for free online at http://zhongwen.com ). Indexed by Kangxi/traditional characters, though simplified equivalents are provided in the actual dictionary entries.

I've written about most of the above resources before, but in greater detail (e.g. a review of the ABC ECCE), so do an Advanced Search if you want to find out what I (or indeed others) might've said about 'em.

[yersi]

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