New to the Chinese language

[careysjohnston]

I've been slowly learning Chinese. Any tips for a new learner?

[Lu]

Welcome to the forums, and to learning Chinese! Your question is a bit broad though. Could you tell us more about how you're approaching your studies, how far along you are, and what kind of things you're having trouble with? And there is all kinds of advice for the new learner already on the forums, do browse around a bit and see if you find something useful to you.

[careysjohnston]

I am an absolute beginner. I want to visit China so I want to learn the language.

[inv]

Hi, just for being curious, May I ask your age?

may age is bigger than 30 and I still have not started yet for chinese because of other works. 

I want to hear that this was normal. By the way, I also want to visit china. 

In fact, I had started before 2018. it was very entertaining drawing scratches but as I knew chinese was tonal and I had had prerequisites or more important jobs,  I left to work for Chinese. And what do you think about being tonal? is not this risky ? as you may know, learning something in wrong way may cause very difficult things to amend later regarding language learning. 

keywords here: pronunciation, tonality, pinyin, romanization. 

[suMMit]

On 1/9/2024 at 4:58 AM, inv said:

And what do you think about being tonal? is not this risky ? as you may know, learning something in wrong way may cause very difficult things to amend later regarding language learning. 

keywords here: pronunciation, tonality, pinyin, romanization. 

In my personal opinion you need to spend hours with a teacher / native speaker from day one , working on pronunciation and tones. A must. Just my 看法 of course and I am only intermediate level. On the downside I speak pretty slowly and sometimes too conscious of pronunciation , though I’m getting better and better on this aspect. The upside is nobody ever doesn’t understand me, and if don’t get my meaning exactly it’s almost always due to bad grammar and weird word choice. This is also getting better as I go though.

[inv]

On 1/14/2024 at 9:36 AM, suMMit said:

In my personal opinion you need to spend hours with a teacher / native speaker from day one , working on pronunciation and tones. A must.

sorry but is this really believeable? I know some native Englishes (I presume they were from China) and they were saying, tonality work and familiarizing the tones would be quite difficult or even though I remember this point clearly, I am sure that the amount they mentioned was far more than hours. (Some people presumably and unfortunately were mentioning even "years").

But I hope the information you provided is right. Because it is really affordable. Even based on that, you will probably have tendency to say "hey why don't you take online courses from chinese universities?"

By the way, I know that Chinese grammar is really easy. The minimum amount of characters should approximately be ~5000 ,this is also known and probably this is the exact job what we learners should do. 

In my personal experience, learning just one language takes more than 4 years to reach at least B1-B2 level (CEFR) ,and I do not know whether Chinese is the exception. 

If you intimately make suggestion,IK think I can take online courses. This is of course more secure way, but not the entertaining way of learning and to my personal opinion, not realistic,too. 

 

Would you like to comment for short programs (3-6 months , might this be realistically favorable? If I knew that this would be sufficient only for accurate  learning tonality,then I would most probably made that selection without detailed thinking) 

 

 

 

[suMMit]

On 1/15/2024 at 3:34 AM, inv said:

I am sure that the amount they mentioned was far more than hours.

When I said "hours", what I meant was many hours. Many hours of tone, pinyin, contrasting sounds(ie. bo-po), tone combination drills with a teacher giving correction. 

[becky82]

On 1/5/2024 at 10:28 PM, careysjohnston said:

I've been slowly learning Chinese. Any tips for a new learner?

 

• Find the fun in learning Chinese.
• Identify your goals, budget, and time-frame; how you study is greatly affected by what you're aiming for.
• You can make substantial progress without paying a cent; I suggest not spending too much money as a beginner as it can be hard to differentiate good/bad resources.
• When people on the Internet give study advice, try to understand their explanations (why are they making a certain recommendation) and check if it's applicable to you.
• Nobody can honestly promise you fluency in X months/years; if someone hints that it's possible, they likely just want your money.
• I suggest familiarizing yourself with multiple study resources.
• Measure your study time in "hours" (you can use LingoTrack to track study hours).
• I suggest getting a well-balanced diet: reading, writing, listening, speaking, vocabulary, grammar; if you neglect any one of these, you're just leaving the task to "future you".  (Listening is my clear weakness.)
• Vocabulary is an "accelerator"; the more words you know, the fewer dictionary lookups you need to make, and the faster you learn.
• Pay extra attention when studying verbs.
• To demystify Chinese characters, understand "character components".
• Don't learn handwriting by writing characters 100s of times over in one sitting.
• Choose simplified vs. traditional characters depending on which places you want to visit; once you get to a high enough level, it's not a big deal reading both.
• Pleco is the awesome-est ever dictionary.
• A browser popup dictionary (like this) can save much time on dictionary lookups.
• I suggest preferring tried-and-tested study methods (like the HSK Standard Course textbooks) over whatever is crash hot on the Internet right now.
• If you use the HSK Standard Course textbooks, or some other popular textbook, note there is a plethora of videos on YouTube giving additional explanation.
• If an app teaches French, it's likely poor at teaching Chinese (it may treat Chinese as a European language); prefer apps that only teach Chinese.
• Currently, ChatGPT is sometimes-to-regularly factually incorrect, but is seldom ungrammatical.

[Rajesh Koothrappali]

I tend to think that spending more gets you more. Perhaps because I was raised to be a consumer.   If I wasn't such a consumer, I'd want all this free and expect it to be free. It is knowledge afterall and the language is systematic and thousands of years old. 

 

I have tried many products and researched lots of learning methods and theories. Sometimes if you buy the bulk or full package of any product you may not enjoy it all the way through. You might get a discount but end up only using it 1/3 of the way. Instead of buying a whole series buy just 1 book. Instead of signing up for 3 years, sign up for 1 month. Also some video courses may be professional and well organized but you could find the same thing from a University course online (probably 100% in Chinese) and again save money.  

 

If you learned other foreign languages, what worked for you？ What was difficult? Apply those experiences to learning Chinese. 

[inv]

On 1/15/2024 at 5:34 PM, Rajesh Koothrappali said:

If you learned other foreign languages, what worked for you？ What was difficult? Apply those experiences to learning Chinese. 

I do not know Chinese people in this regard, but sometimes I blame Englishes regarding the general opinon across the people who are deemed to have psychological problems. This may be way interesting point and you might have even heard this point just from me for its first mention. But now, I think so. In the country where I live people are more strict across such people. Because they do not give a probability that they could have great achievements. Past experiences? Once you explain your illness, already almost all of your former accomplishments go under a deep story.    

Lets see the another explanation which I don't want anyone to think I jumped over that important point. Englishes, yes , I sometimes blame them. Because they created many descriptions regarding this issue. Not only scyzophrenia, obsessive compulsive disorder, delirium is available these days, but also many more than those keywords and circumstances available.

 

anyway, I am sure anyone (including you  ) have thought like "hey inv , but why did you tell all these , what is the relevance here or correlation?

if you thought so, well. The reason is in fact simple. I believe that I am knowledgeable one and do not want to transfer every information or whatever I want. No, I cannot do that.

 

the succint and the needed information here is that inv (me  ) is a Polyglot.   

What worked for me ?

I think , more than that personal characters are effective. Among the contexts, I can say that I needed to be patient, continuously eager and yes hardworking. The excellent view or feeling yourself as an excellent one is not a requirement but this sometimes particularly happened and the vice versa. 

 

What was difficult?

First you want to learn a language, you are so eager like a flaming fire. But the scope is huge. what you do need to do is generally more than you have already dones. This is for a reason why you also mentioned at somewhere but if I want to summarize the case ,I will probably say:

 

The more you learn the less  you feel yourself as knowledgeable.   (I do not generalize ,but this is in my personal experience, maybe I may be wrong, too.)

  

 

generally just one language took at least my 4 years to reach at least B1. 

 

 

 

A Specific notion:

I think I am not so much old. But ...mmm I enjoyed some of your posts. While I know that not at  everywhere in China whatsapp is being used, I think I may be willing to communicate with you on Such environments. (But currently only telegram and whatsapp) if you are also willing please pm me. This proposition is valid for just a week. 

 

[careysjohnston]

Thank you all for some great feedback!