Twitter feeds, blogs in Mandarin appropriate for beginners

[gabbklein]

Hello!

 

I've been studying Mandarin on my own for just under a year now (Rosetta Stone). I'm still very much a beginner, but I'd like to stretch my abilities. I'm looking for resources with the following requirements:

 

• I'm learning Mandarin in order to communicate exclusively through digital media (website, social media) for a bus agency in Southern California. Most of the communication will be written. Also, most of my studying is done at work. Therefore, I want to find text-based resources only (not podcasts or videos).
• Most sites in Mandarin still look like an impenetrable wall of text to me. I'd like something where the text is broken into small chunks, like on Twitter.
• I'd like something that provides a lot of context clues, and I want the topic to be something I already know a lot about. I was thinking a food / cooking blog would be good. Something local would be great -- I'm in the San Gabriel Valley near LA (Alhambra, Rosemead, Temple City, Arcadia). There's a large Chinese-speaking population here, although a good portion of it speaks Cantonese rather than Mandarin.

 

So, in short, if you know of any Twitter accounts or blogs in Mandarin that talk about something rather universal like food / cooking, and ideally are local to LA, I'd really appreciate your recommendations!

 

My apologies if this topic has already been addressed; I couldn't find what I was looking for after searching.

[bande]

Do you have weibo, we chat, and qq accounts? In professional social media, you will need all three to serve chinese language users. Anyway, a site called chihuo.org seems to cover these topics. This is link is for an article that talks about the best Sichuan restaurants in Los Angeles: http://chihuo.org/2013-best-voted-sichuan-restaurant-in-los-angeles/. The biggest site in China is dianping.org, which is well worth reading. Still, do you have a professional interest in food? If not, the food world has a lot of specialized vocabulary that doesn't carry over to other areas.

[LiMo]

I would just use Twitter for your self-study. Weibo is exactly the same but being entirely in Chinese (as far as I've seen) it might be off putting at this point. Blogs like "All about Chinese", "Written Chinese.Com" and similar things are good. They often post short pieces (about a sentence or two often of the motivational or philosophical kind) with relevant grammar points but maybe that's not your thing.

Being nowhere in the area I'm afraid I can't be helpful regarding local stuff but it might be a good idea to find out the Chinese name of your area (if there is one) and search for it with some relevant words in Chinese. If you don't already have it then the "Zhongwen Chinese Popup dictionary" is pretty awesome, it'll get you through those tough times in the beginning.

 

Also, don't underestimate the utility of TV shows, since a lot of them have subtitles I've managed to pick up a lot of new characters and useful vocab, my listening skills are far below my reading skills but that's not a problem, I just get more reading practice and pretty pictures besides. Once you advance to intermediate and if you can find something you like then kicking back to watch a bit of Chinese melodrama in your spare time can be quite relaxing, most of the TV I watch now is in Chinese, I barely noticed but now I'm swamped in the stuff

 

Goodluck 

[gabbklein]

Thanks for your help, @bande and @LiMo! I've now got weibo and we chat accounts. The qq app is downloaded on my phone for me to check out, and I'm following chihuo.org on weibo and Facebook! That was a great find. Part of my job is sharing great places to eat that people can get to on our buses, so it should be helpful both to help me learn and once I'm ready to interact with my customers in Chinese. I also set up a Twitter search on hootsuite geolocated to my area and set to Chinese.

 

This was just what I needed. Thanks to both of you!

[James3]

gabbklein, this may be a bit off topic, but you mentioned Rosetta Stone. I'm curious to know your feedback on the product.

 

Edit: I remembered that the admins may prefer that I ask that in a separate thread. So, if you're ever of a mind to...maybe you could tell people here - perhaps in a separate thread - about your experience with Rosetta Stone. Thanks!

[roddy]

If you'd like to comment on Rosetta Stone, we'd love to hear what you think - please post!

 

Edit: Sorry, just noticed you've already posted in that topic. Well, feel free to update ;-)

[Angelina]

I definitely recommend WeChat over Weibo, it has better user experience design. You can connect it with your LinkedIn account as well. 

 

Good luck! 

[gabbklein]

I'll go over an update my Rosetta Stone experience to date at the previous thread: http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/44498-what-is-your-experience-with-rosetta-stone-language-learning-software/.