Getting started with Mandarin when you know Japanese

[zgarbas]

Hello! I'm new here and in my first week of Chinese learning

 

First, a bit of background: I am fluent in Japanese, and am in grad school in Japan, surrounded by Chinese colleagues. Literally. I hear Mandarin every day, and for almost 1 year the main group chat was in Chinese so I just started sort of playing by ear and became able to read it. Other than that, the passive exposure hasn't really helped at all.

 

Reading and grammar are really easy, but what I do is I sort of 'read' the meaning, rather than the tones. So, for exaple, I know that 老師在這裡 means "teacher is here", but I can't for the life of me remember the actual sounds for everything. Instead, I keep expecting the sounds to just sort of be like in Japanese, so again, my brain takes shortcuts rather than actually memorise things. Currently I'm using iKnow, but things have yet to stick, and I'm still having huge problems with most letters. I was curious if people who studied Japanese before had this issue, and if they have any tips to get over it? My main goal for Chinese is to talk with my colleagues better, so speaking is something I really want to get decent at.

[vellocet]

I came from Japanese too, but not fluent.  If you want oral Mandarin, I'd suggest using pinyin only as seeing the characters is just going to cause interference for you.  You have to re-learn the sound of every character, and it takes a while.  At least there's only one.  Don't think of "lao" as having four different tones, think of the tones of "lao" as being four completely different syllables. Simplified characters are going to be weird, too, but you can usually see where and why they simplified them.  If you want to converse then learn like Chinese kids: speak first, read and write later.