Learning Chinese

[el_tortugo]

What Books, PDFs or Programs have you who have learned or are learning Chinese found helpful, useful and good?

[peter falk]

without doubt, i have found the rosetta stone systemof cd-roms to be the best, and that is while living in china surrounded by native speakers to teach me. i unconditionally recommend it. it even critiques your pronunciation. people have really commented to me how much my chinese is improving since i got it.

[el_tortugo]

without doubt, i have found the rosetta stone systemof cd-roms to be the best, and that is while living in china surrounded by native speakers to teach me.  i unconditionally recommend it.  it even critiques your pronunciation.  people have really commented to me how much my chinese is improving since i got it.

7413[/snapback]

 

 

Though I would love to learn to actualy speak chinese I suppose It would be very difficult without immersion.

 

I have heard rosseta stone is very good for any language.

 

For now I want to learn to read and write Chinese to possibly read original texts one day and also to get into the mindset of that language/ alphabet..... so I guess its for acedemic reasons.

 

What is the difference between Chinese, Cantonese and Mandarin? Are they dialects? Same Alphabet? Whats the most widely used? Chinese?

[peter falk]

Though I would love to learn to actualy speak chinese I suppose It would be very difficult without immersion.

 

I have heard rosseta stone is very good for any language.

 

For now I want to learn to read and write Chinese to possibly read original texts one day and also to get into the mindset of that language/ alphabet..... so I guess its for acedemic reasons.

 

What is the difference between Chinese, Cantonese and Mandarin? Are they dialects? Same Alphabet? Whats the most widely used? Chinese?

7546[/snapback]

 

rosetta stone will teach you to read chinese, while at the same time speaking it. it will be easier to read if you know how it sounds. rosetta stone has both simplified (mainland china) and traditional (ancient, taiwan, hk, macau, and overseas chinese) characters. if you wnat to learn to write as well as read, good luck! it's hard. but there are books that will help you learn how to correctly draw the charcters and the proper stroke order.

 

cantonese and mandarin use the same writing system. in fct, the writing is identical, only the pronunciation differs. in mainland china, they use the modern simplified writing. elswhere they use the traditional writing. old texts are written in traditional, so you may wnat to learn that, but you can also find them in simplified characters. the two systems are probably 80-85% the same, and once you learn the system of changes, you can go back and forth between them with relative ease for over 90% of them.

 

for speaking, mandarin is easier to learn. for reading, it doesn't matter. they'll both be the same. there is no way to transliterate cantonese into english. Yale came up with a system but it only uses six of the up to 10 tones. it's perfectly functional, but you'll struggle a little with native speakers. the system they use in hk is only marginally useful. the mainland pinyin has become the international standard for romanizing chinese and i recommend you learn it. also because within your lifetiem mandarin will probably become the world's second language.

 

Rosetta stone will help youlearn to read faster than just a book with characters in it. trust me on this, i've got two and ahlf years of experience trying to learn the language. back up the rosetta stoen with writing. if you've got lots of money, hire a tutor or take a university class in mandarin.

[90_1494798740]

The "Birkenbihl-Approach to Language Learning" is my preferred way of learning languages right now. It takes much more effort and time in the beginning, but I think it's worth it - and it's much more fun if you learn on your own!

The problem might be that you need help of a native speaker sometimes to produce the correct pseudo-translation.

[scosmo]

As has been pointed out, some form of immersion is best. If there's no community of Chinese folks near you, then you could try multimedia cds and some chinese shows/movies in the context that you'd like. This is important so that you'd get some essense of the Chinese language.

 

Then you can proceed on to books. Peter Falk has given some great advice. If you're intending to go to China or Taiwan, learn Mandarin and you can use the hanyu pinyin system to assist in reading Chinese characters. There are books in the market which deal with technical Chinese as well ie if you'd want to read up stuff on TCM, accupunture theory etc,,,

 

HTH