What does this "买本书，跟着读。" means ?

[FrenchGuy]

Hi everyone,

 

i ask a chinese person to know if he had some advice in order to help me to learn chinese, he told me that"买本书，跟着读"

May someone can help me to what it means ? 

By the way, i'm french and i'm an absolute beginner in chinese !

 

Many thanks

 

 

[Demonic_Duck]

Buy a book, read along.

[boctulus]

Welcome @FrenchGuy

 

The first thing you should recognize in a sentence are nouns like 本书 (book) and the most simple grammar is SVO (subject-verb-object) so... 买本书 is  buy-book

 

跟着读  is with_it-read(ing) or re-ordering "read with it" (read it)

[Hofmann]

You can decide for yourself, but getting a good textbook and reading it is a decent way to start.

[Demonic_Duck]

The first thing you should recognize in a sentence are nouns like 本书 (book) and the most simple grammar is SVO (subject-verb-object) so... 买本书 is  buy-book

本书 is not a single noun, but a classifier (本) followed by a noun (书).

 

The structure is v. cl. n.

 

You can think of it as 买[一]本书。

[Christy]

Maybe he suggested you to buy a book with audio or MP3 then follow the pronunciation to learn Chinese. On my side, I advice you to think a while about the reason you learn Chinese (simple Chinese or Traditional Chinese). If you pay more importance on conversation, you can buy some books with conversation, but if you would like to know the depth of Chinese, you might need to think to take some classes to learn Chinese tones, strokes and grammars... 

[FrenchGuy]

I'm thinking about learning traditional, because, i may have an opportunity to go for an internship to taiwan for 3 months. So it will be in order to know basic stuff and i will learn more if i go there.

[boctulus]

Traditional characters are better in terms of study because it's easier to see the etymological origin and they are used (with some differences) also in Japan. The drawback for traditional scripts is they are difficult to write.

 

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BTW: of course Demonic_Duck was right in correct me (sorry) 

[somethingfunny]

I dunno, personally I feel like "buy a book and read it" is pretty lame advice for starting learning a language.  Have you thought about... taking lessons?

 

Also, if you're asking people for study advice then I recommend you don't ask someone who speaks that language natively.  I love it when Chinese people say to me, "Hey, Somethingfunny, you're British, do you have any study advice for me on how I can get really good at English?"

 

It's going to be much more useful if you find a French person, or someone with a similar academic background/personality to your own that speaks awesome Chinese and ask them for advice.