Speaking Drills

[Guest]

Hello everyone,

I'm new here and just spend a lot of time lookimg theough this forum. I wanted to ask for some advice for me.

So I am a German living in Japan and can speak and write Japanese fluently.I also have been studying Chinese for about 3 years on my own. Sometimes more and sometimes less actively.

So since I know Japanese, getting into learning Hanzi is not hard for me at all, which allows me to be able to read basic Chinese. As proof I took HSK4 this year and had no problems passing.

My big problem is that I cannot speak at all (really only basic na shi shenme and so on haha)

 

So when I was studying English and Japanese I could find quite a lot of drills which let me practice building sentences. Does anyone have any idea how I can improve my speaking? Ideally with option to see correct answers or being correct... 

I hope you can help me! Thanks in advance

[gwr71]

I can't imagine that a person can pass HSK 4 and cannot speak Chinese.   The very fact you are multilingual will help of course.  I am in the opposite shoe to you.  I intend to learn Japanese but because Kanji is a big topic in Japanese I decided to learn Mandarin first then Japanese.  

The only website I can suggest for now without knowing any further details is www.yoyochinese.com . It is a part free website that has videos and audios you can download that will ease your transition into chinese mandarin.  It has a pinyin chart with audio and teaches the four tones very well.  I used this website as part of my mandarin foundation i.e 400 chinese syllables and tones.

However, there are many websites out there doing the same. You just need to find one that you are comfortable with.

 

I believe that in no time at all you will be speaking Mandarin like a pro.

Good luck.

[edelweis]

FSI chinese - that's an older course but it has hours and hours of exercises on tapes (well, mp3s now)

and it's available for free (and legally) on various websites so you lose nothing by trying it.

 

[mtokudome]

@sarudora Do you have the opportunity to take some classes or higher a tutor.  You can even hire a tutor on italk.com

 

If not, here's some resources to use by yourself:

I dunno for Android, but if you have iOS, you can get the SpeakChinese app. The speech recognition is not perfect, but it's not bad for a free app.

 

I dunno how you built up fluency in English and Japanese, but you should try to shadow (or record yourself) speak simple sentences.  Here are two websites that have recordings of simple sentence structures.  Try to work through each lesson by shadowing or recording yourself until you feel good about your pronunciation and tone.

Zhongwen Red

Zhongwen Blue

[永鈞]

if you don't mind paying i highly recommend the wai chinese app if it's still around.