Get the basics fast enough

[Kherith]

Hey guys,

 

Here is my particular situation. I moved to China one week ago, and all the people I live with/work with are ONLY chinese (I really mean, 100% of them). Only one speaks fluent english, others almost dont. Which means I never understand anything of what they are saying and so they dont.
This is (I believe ?) the perfect environment to improve my Chinese efficiently. However, to build my chinese, I need the base. Cause at the moment I cant say a thing. So my question is :

What is the fastest/most efficient way of getting the basics so that I can communicate with Chinese people to later improve by speaking with them ? I got advised the Pimsleur approach, but it takes one month to finish the 1st volume, so I dont know if it's the best way.

Also, Im looking for an app to learn Chinese. Any idea ?

 

So as you can see, my main focus for now would be speaking/listening and not writing/reading. TY

[stapler]

The fastest way? Dedication and discipline. Anything that claims to teach you Chinese quicker through some special method is a sales gimmick.

 

So what is dedication and discipline? This is a good example: http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/43939-independent-chinese-study-review/

[889]

You need a good textbook, one or more good teachers, and a lot of time to spend with both of them.

[Flickserve]

Dedication and discipline. Record your conversations and review.

[Shelley]

Have to agree with what everyone has said so far. Get a good textbook, maybe try New Practical Chinese Reader, this is quite good it you want to self study as you can get workbooks, audio and answer keys.

 

I would suggest Hello Chinese as a great app for beginners to more advanced. It will teach you reading,writing speaking and listening skills. Its free, ad free and has no in app purchases. Have a look here http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/49944-hellochinese-%E2%80%93-new-chinese-mandarin-learning-app-learn-chinese-speak-chinese/

 

You have made a good start by finding the forums, welcome, people here can be very helpful.

 

If you are at interested in more about study materials and methods have a look at my blog here http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/blog/108-my-chinese-learning-blog/

 

Hope it goes well

 

[Mouseneb]

Learn pinyin well to start. This is a tool you will need to master for basic pronunciation, looking up unfamiliar words in a dictionary, and typing Chinese online. Also, get Wechat and add all your co-workers. Although you will understand very little at first, the auto translate function will give you a general idea of what's going on and help you in your relationships with co-workers.

[eion_padraig]

You can really go down the rabbit hole here with advice, so be aware that everyone here has their own reason for studying Chinese which influences what they are going to recommend. It's not clear from your post what your purpose for living in China is, how long you'll be there, and whether it's something you will be working on for the long haul.

 

I do think Pimsleur is a good resource to use, but if you're worried about the first volume taking a month to get through I'd wonder if you're only in China for a short term. If a month seems a long time, it may not be worth doing more than learning set phrases that you need like, "Where is the bathroom?", "How much does that cost?", "Do you have a boyfriend/girlfriend?"

 

Pimsleur will get you pronouncing those phrases quite clearly if you work at it and it can help you build a sense of basic Chinese grammar in a passive way. But Mousenb is right that you need to learn pinyin probably with the assistance of a teacher. The teacher should also work on building your theoretical and application of tones with words.

I think it's great to keep a notebook of phrases that are high frequency that you want to learn. They may be specific to your work setting or things relevant to your life. Say your hobby is playing basketball, then learn language that helps you if you're going to play pickup basketball with people. "Good shot", "pass me the ball", "foul", etc. Have friends or a teacher teach you these things. 

Chinese textbooks can somewhat formal and how they present interaction is sometimes dated, but it can be good for adding grammatical knowledge and some framework for vocabulary and self-study.

I recommend people delay characters for a bit (several months, but less than a year) in favor of using that time for listening and speaking skills. Others disagree strongly with this idea.

Good luck.

 

Eion

[Kherith]

Thank you all for your replies. I thought that, given my environment, I could study in a specific way . Seems that it doesnt really change from a "classical" way of studying chinese then. I've downloaded HelloChinese which seems to be quite good yeah.
So at home, I already have NPCR vol 1 and Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar.

I guess I will not use Pimsleur and go for NPCR as I was planning before. And HelloChinese with it ?

I dont know if I will have time to get a tutor though.

 

EDIT : Btw, studying with NPCR as a main ressource, what level can I expect to achieve after each volume ? It is not stated, or I missed it.

[Wurstmann]

The description says that the six volumes get you to an intermediate level, whatever that means. So HSK4 or 5 or 6?

 

From the company's website:

Upon completion of the Volume 1 Textbook, students will be able to greet people, talk about their family, make aquaintances, and participate in other common situations in Chinese.

Upon completion of the Volume 2 textbook, students will be able to compare different objects, describe events in the past, differentiate homophones, and much more, all while learning about China’s culture.

Upon completion of the Volume 3 Textbook, students will have learned how to behave and communicate in cultural situations such as addressing in-laws, accepting gifts, asking private questions, and much more.

Upon completion of the Volume 4 Textbook, students will be able to express themselves to a greater extent both verbally and in writing through paraphrasing, by complaining or praising, expressing something in indefinite amounts, and other means of expression.

Upon completion of the Volume 5 Textbook, students will be able to discuss social issues and lifestyle decisions with greater perception and depth.

Upon completion of the Volume 6 Textbook, students will be able to discuss social issues and lifestyle decisions with greater perception and depth.

[anonymoose]

I think firstly you need to be realistic with your expectations. With hard work, you could learn a fair bit in a month, but in the context of learning an entire language and becoming proficient at it, especially a hard language like Chinese, you will still just be scratching the surface.

 

I have not used Pimsleur myself, but as I understand it, the timeframe assumes you listen to one unit per day. If you want to accelerate your learning, why not just listen to more? Again, though, you have to be realisic - quality of learning (retention) will suffer if you go too fast. You have to find your own sustainable speed.

 

Try to find language exchange partners outside of work time, or better still, tutors if you don't mind paying. Language exchange may not be effective at your stage as you will likely be speaking 95% english. And you didn't even say whether english is your native language.

 

I wholeheartedly recommend a good grammar book, and work through it systematically. I'm not familiar with Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar. The one I used and I think is excellent to begin with is Basic Chinese: A Grammar and Workbook by Yip and Rimmington. The good thing about this book is that it assumes no prior knowledge, so vocabulary is built up from scratch, and it has exercises with answers so you can practice and test your chinese. In my opinion, getting a good basis in the grammar is probably the most important thing you could do at this stage - it won't get you conversational in a short time, but it will give you the tools to use and adapt the language in the longrun, rather than just being restricted to repeating set phrases parrot fashion which is the drawback of courses like Pimsleur.

[Angelina]

Try to find language exchange partners outside of work time, or better still, tutors if you don't mind paying. Language exchange may not be effective at your stage as you will likely be speaking 95% english. And you didn't even say whether english is your native language.

 

 

You already have your coworkers instead of language exchange partners. If you really need personalised instruction, you should find an experienced teacher, who will simplify their speech for you, understand your initially not-100%-comprehensible language, and most importantly, correct your mistakes. Also, be able to explain any questions you might have. You don't want to get used to speaking weird Mandarin. This does not have to be a paid, professional, teacher. Yet, it's like getting a haircut, it's not like any Chinese person will do, you can't see what the hairdresser is doing   

 

​I second what Mouseneb recommended: start with pinyin and WeChat!

 

When it comes to resources, chinese-forums.com 

 

First Chinese word you will probably learn: 这个 (zhège), while pointing at things. 

[Shelley]

NPCR and Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar.are a common combination, as you already have them I would use them. I use MMCG to check or clarify grammar points in NPCR.  Another excellent resource for grammar is the Grammar wiki https://resources.allsetlearning.com/chinese/grammar/

 

As you are in China I would expect and hope your progress should be good and steady, remember too much too soon will lead to confusion and burnout.

 

I use HelloChinese alongside all the other things I do, as a very good way to get me speaking and listening, and I enjoy learning to read and write characters. Its good on your phone as you can take it with you and you can do ten minutes here and there when you are on the bus, waiting in a queue etc.

 

Hope it goes well and that you enjoy it.

 

[Kherith]

My English is that good that you didnt get that Im not native ? :v Im French. And Im speaking 95% English because I have no other language to speak, but it's mostly like 95% "what the fck is he trying to say", 4% English, 1% chinese haha.

Thank you guys for the advices. At the moment Im using HelloChinese, as advised by Shelley. It is so good that I wonder if Im not gonna use this only until I finish it. I dont know how far it is supposed to take you, but it seems to be a very good basis. Because Im scared of being confused if I use NPCR at the same time u_u

[Shelley]

I can understand your worries about being confused, so why not use HelloChinese only for a while. After you become a bit more comfortable with Chinese I suggest you do move on to NPCR to round things out.

 

And yes your English is good if its not your native tongue. Having being born in Montreal, Canada I am used to people speaking both English and French well. I consider French my second language and it would probably have got better than it is if I hadn't left Canada when i was 15.

 

Keep up the good work and remember any questions just ask.

[Gharial]

If time is of the essence I'd forget any textbook series like NPCR that is now apparently stretching essentials over half a dozen volumes (used to be just two, "thinner" though they admittedly were back then) and plodding~baby-stepping along with stuff like Lesson 1: Ni hao, Lesson 2: Hi hao ma? blah blah yawn blah. Plus it's wasting a fair bit of space on characters, right?

 

For my money you can't beat the original Colloquial Chinese course by T'ung and Pollard (review here http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/46593-our-favourite-textbooks/?p=353297 , note the audio has now been made available for free [see link within that post] and includes a snappy but thorough guide to The Sounds of Mandarin Chinese). Really, that's all you need. Supplementary grammars will be dry (even drier than NPCR) and not contextualize the language nearly as well as the very lively, enjoyable and pretty comprehensive classic course that the original CC is.

 

For example, in the first lesson of CC you aren't just intoning Ni hao (ma) to acquaintances, but also commenting on the weather, asking them if they've been busy, expressing surprise (that they aren't hot or cold), and so on. In other words, the particle ma is doing a fair bit more work in relation to a wider range of adjective-like items, the particles ne and a are welcome extras, and you're learning appreciably more vocabulary and functional phrases in the process. (FWIW here is a list of the vocabulary from lesson one: tianqi, jintian, zuotian, wo, ni, nin, ta, -men, hao, leng, re, mang, zao, hen, bu, zhen, ye, dou, ma, ne, a, qing, zuo, zaijian).

 

Later on you can get the accompanying Character Text to painlessly master the corresponding characters (around 1000 are covered), I'd suggest getting the blue (traditional-form) volume as that will give you the necessary familiarity with those more complex forms while also providing the simplified stroke orders too (and it's easy enough to then write out the simplified equivalents of the texts).

 

If you need a supplementary dictionary, just get a smartphone and download Pleco (even the free version is amazing) - this will also help answer a fair number of the detailed orthography-related "But why...?" questions you may come to have, though I'd suggest at some point investing in an actual printed dictionary like the ABC ECCE for its useful appendices, frequency info etc (not quite sure how much of said appendices are included in the Pleco paid add-ons). Note also that the strict alphabetical ordering of entries in the ABC dictionaries according to their Pinyin rather than their characters is a boon to oral/aural look-ups. Stuff like the Oxford beginner's dictionary by Yuan & Church, or Fred Fangyu Wang's venerable C-E dictionary (Dover Publications reprint) are also very valuable, but ultimately aren't absolutely essential additions to the above CC course's contents.

 

Lastly (and for later), you may be able to get by or away with quite fuzzy handwriting input when looking characters up electronically, but it helps to have a reasonably thorough understanding of the strokes, counts, and stroke orders involved in writing and ordering characters, and sometimes all that's on hand is a paper dictionary rather than online or offline electronic ones. Again, the ABC ECCE explains and indexes things very well (and a very similar organization is used in the Pleco radical index), but you may find the following of some use and interest: http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/35274-dictionary-look-up-skills-a-crash-course/

 

BTW, depending on which edition of the Ross (MMCG) grammar you have, you may want to take note of the following post: http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/10932-best-chinese-grammar-book/?p=339494

[Kherith]

@Gharial Ok so your religion is called Colloquial Chinese, right ? I've not heard much about it. Why is it so good but not as popular as other series like NPCR ? + I dont really see myself buying CC if I already have NPCR.... Is it really worth it ?

 

@Shelley You should hear my terrible French accent, my writing abilities are much better. I was in a special section of English in High School so it helped me a lot (even though I was almost the worst student of all, I would have been first in any normal section French people are bad with English).

So yeah, at the moment, I'd rather only use HelloChinese until the end. I"ve completed more than the first section already but mostly without sound so I should go over it again with the sound, cause at the moment I can say "wo you liang zhi xiangmao" (is it even correct ?) but if I try to pronounce it, no one will understand, haha.

[Shelley]

Interesting you think you have a bad French accent, hows that possible from a native speaker?

 

Yes definitely, 100% start again with the audio, do the speaking and listening exercises. To make sure you use it fully have a look at my review of HelloChinese for some tips and pointers.

 

Review here http://www.livethelanguage.cn/review-hello-chinese/

[Kherith]

Haha, no I mean I have a bad French accent when speaking English.

Ok ty then, I'll start like this and see how it goes.

[Shelley]

Haha oh I see

 

Hope it goes well.

[Gharial]

@Kherith: There are a number of reasons why NPCR is more widely used if not popular. It's cheap, it's certainly available in China and in bulk, it presents if not teaches characters from more or less the get go (fine for students with a bit more time to spare), and institutes there probably prefer or have to use stuff produced in China. And even back in the UK, (N)PCR became the course of "choice" at the place I did my (mere) dip in Mandarin, as DeFrancis's stuff had become too expensive, and something different to what SOAS (where the original CC course was developed) was using was apparently required. But none of these are reasons that actually relate to the content of the courses.

 

I'm not saying that NPCR is a bad course, just that it may be a bit slow and plodding and thin (stretched out), especially when time is of the essence. I would be surprised however if it is as good a course as the original CC one still is, and I've given plenty of reasons in my above post, and in that review I wrote, as to why I think CC is the bee's knees. (And here's another tidbit: I just had a quick tot up of all the sentences in just Lesson 1, and there must be nearing a hundred, or at least a hundred variations on the several themes presented. So that's a ton of example and consolidation right there). One thing to especially bear in mind is that the explanations in CC are very well-written (detailed yet succinct), and that courses produced in China will very likely not have nearly as much (native) English-speaker/actual author input.

 

But yeah you've invested in NPCR and Ross now so no way should you consider buying a single other book so you can compare and possibly switch LOL. (If at some point however you do get the chance to compare, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised and impressed). Anyway I've posted a few bits and pieces from CC here and there so maybe try a search of the forums if interested. Dare I say it but I think courses that are perceived as "too detailed" or "harder work" have fallen out of fashion somewhat nowadays (not that more plodding, stretched-out courses have necessarily dumbed things down, provided that they eventually get there in the end also).

 

Lastly, plenty of people say "Oh you should just buy NPCR or whatever", but (and correct me if I'm wrong) they rarely if ever seem to give any detailed reasons as to why (other presumably than mere availability or supposed "value for money" (that is, cheapness)). But hey it's all input for the learner. Anyway, this thread and the various recommendations in it will help others besides us plan and tunnel their own rabbit holes, so...