Like learning any language, it won't happen overnight. You
have to put in a lot of time, effort and persistence.
In this section, I will concentrate on learning the official
Chinese language, Mandarin. It includes these 3 parts in order, i.e. speaking, recognizing and writing.
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a) Speaking - Is English your mother language?
If so, CONGRATULATIONS! You
definitely have advantages of learning it faster
and easier.
b) Recognizing - Visualization always helps you to memorize something easier.
c) Writing - Chinese writing is an ART. Even though you can "spell" a Chinese
symbol, there is a way to start and help you to pick it up.
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a) Speaking
You, being a westerner and English as
your mother language, will take the advantage of Mandarin allowing you to pronounce it with the English spelling.
Originally, there was no way to "spell" Chinese in order to help to memorize it. This is a new inventive
way. For instance, let's translate "How are you?" into Mandarin. It will spell like this "Ni
Hao Ma?"
In my opinion, starting out from learning some pronounciation basics and simple conversations will
make you feel the success of joy of learning. As a result, that will motivate you to keep moving forward.
a)
To learn the basic which is called "Pinyin" (click here to check it out). You can listen to the pronounciation by clicking on each "consonant letters".
b) You can learn
some commonly used words or phrases from here. Put your cursor on each phrase and turn up the volumn of the computer to start learning.
c) Local library
is another wonderful place to borrow some books and/or audio books.
d) If you really want to commit into learning
Chinese, getting a set of Rosetta Stone kit would be a good idea.
The concept behind it is great.
It is just like how you or I learnt talking when we were kids.
The setback would be the sensitivity of
the software. It may not pick up very well when you pronounce each word or phrase. So, you need to repeat
the same word or phrase over and over again or get stuck.
But it is a great way to make you learn it right.
e) Being more serious about learning Chinese, find a good teacher. Check out some Chinese stores in your
area that they may have the name cards of some Chinese teachers. |
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b) Recognizing
There are over 100,000 Chinese characters.
But normal Chinese people know around 8-10 thousands of them. In essence, it is difficult to expect a beginner to remember
or recognize even a hundred of them.
But if you had already learned some simple conversations, you can start to
learn some symbols.
A piece of advice....make sure to learn the traditional Chinese writing, instead of the
simplified ones, because it is the universal characters. Once you started, you can pick up the simplied Chinese symbols
easily that you don't need to spend any time to learn. You will able to relate them together when you see the simplied
symbols.
Also, the traditional Chinese characters are the ones that everybody uses when he/she needs to look up
in the dictionary and Chinese computer typing method.
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c) Writing
Written Chinese is the most interested and complicated
part of the whole learning process. It was the evolution of pictographs to the nowadays writing.
There were
a few significant evolutions throughout the history.
The latest one was 1945 after the Communist took over
China and simplified most of the Chinese characters.
To learn it right, I highly recommend you to buy some books
showing you the orders of the strokes of each Chinese symbols. This also applies even you have a great teacher already.
It is not becuase of showing any disrespect to your teacher. It is because every Chinese has their style of
writing Chinese. He/She could combine 2-3 strokes into one.
Also, a good book shows you the step-by-step
of completing a Chinese symbols which is much easier for you to memorize it.
Remember....if you are thinking of
writing or typing Chinese on a computer, the correct order of each stroke is greatly important. Otherwise, you could
not either find that word in the dictionary or type it correctly on the computer.
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