Hot answers tagged learning
19
You're right that most of the time, you use a computer or cell phone when "writing" Chinese characters. In fact, many Chinese will tell you that - beside their own name (used as a signature) - they almost never write any Chinese characters by hand.
Today, writing Chinese characters is more for memorization than for practical purposes. You might know a few ...
12
You can use a SRS (Spaced Repetition System) software, I personally use Anki to create a deck of study cards and I review them on my mobile phone.
I also recommend Memrise.
11
I think you are right in your desire to put as much time as possible into the speaking and listening aspects of Chinese. But there are various reasons why it's important to put in the effort to learn Chinese characters, even though the initial investment of time is quite large.
As others have explained, passive recognition is no substitute for active ...
11
I generated a bunch of files for some flashcard software that uses spaced repetition to help you learn efficiently. It's still a lot of work to memorize the flash cards, but I don't know of anything easier.
In total, I generated 32614 cards with 4166 characters and 18385 words. They are divided into separate files, each with about 100 cards in it. You can ...
10
It would be worthwhile for you to read over what people say in this question: Would it be bad to only speak to a child in a language in which you are not completely fluent?
It raises some interesting points.
The top answer from Javid Jamae provides the following points:
Spend as much time as you can around native speakers (family, friends, church, ...
10
I think it would be easier to learn Chinese after learning Japanese and vice versa, because too many Chinese characters are used in Japanese.I would like to talk about this from 3 points.
Pronunciations
Usually, in Japanese, one character has 2 types of pronunciations, "on yomi" and "kun yomi". The "on yomi" (in Chinese,音读) is similar to the pronuciation ...
8
Apart from the Kanji/Hanzi, that they (partly) have in common, concerning the written part, there is nothing that can really help you with the other language:
Chinese is pretty much SVO, Japanese is SOV;
Chinese has tones, Japanese has no tones. When speaking, sentences do have a certain "tone", but not phonemic, i.e. it doesn't totally change the meaning;
...
7
Generally,there are two types of characters.
"Compound character 合体" and "Single component Character 独体".
And there are four Character building method "pictogram 象形","ideogram 指事"、"indicatives 会意","phono-semantic 形声".
"Single component Character 独体" characters are derive from "pictogram 象形" and "ideogram 指事".
e.g:
pictogram: "人" means people "山" ...
7
There is nothing in the linguistic research that proves that writing the characters physically improves one's ability to recognize them in context (as in reading). If that were true, physically handicapped people who cannot write or speak would not be able to read or comprehend language, and clearly that is not the case.
Virtually all of the "evidence" ...
5
I found PART of the Japanese language easier to learn after studying Chinese.
Japanese has two basic strains, an "indigenous" strain, which its own hiragana and katagana script, and the "Chinese" based strain, in which the Japanese adopted the Chinese Hanzi as "Kanji" for many words, as well as a pronunciation similar to the Chinese for those words.
...
5
I would like to answer this question with an analogy to English. In English,
You may not learn how to spell the word, and you could only rememeber the pronunciation and the meanings for every word, so you can "speak" English,but you can't write them down or read them. I believe in old times, when few people could get well educated, this might happen (in ...
5
There is one main difference between children's books and adult foreign textbooks:
Adult foreign textbooks are designed to give foreigners the best chance to communicate in simple everyday circumstances.
Children's books start with the very basics and require longer to get to the same place, however they provide you a much more solid base and a far wider ...
5
This is a difficult questions, since most people are quite religious about this topic. For some reason they prefer one over the other and say this one is the best one to learn first.
Learning Chinese characters takes a huge effort and most need many years for that, however once you know one set learning the other one is relatively easy.
Wiki says that ...
4
I learned Chinese through children's books as a child.
I've suffered from NOT using children's books in other languages. What has happened in those languages is that I've learned a lot of "technical" terms, and can hold my own in "advanced" discussions. Then I trip over some grammar point or some every day phrase that every 10-year old native speaker knows.
...
4
The main difficulty is that Chinese, having a different linguistic root from English, does not have the shared vocabulary that European languages have.. for example:
English: telephone
French: téléphone
Spanish: teléfono
Portugese: telefone
German: Telefon
Dutch: telefoon
Danish: telefon
Italian: telefono
Hungarian: telefon
Estonian: telefon
Slovak: ...
4
The great firewall being between you and the servers doesn't help, but the main reason is that they only have servers in China, not a distributed content network (CDN) like most of the sites you might regularly access (Google, Youtube, Facebook etc) so that the distance between you and the nearest server is quite great.
You should also be aware that they ...
3
I have read some children's books and found that they can be helpful. However, there is one drawback that I've seen, which doesn't apply to textbooks. Some children's books are designed to help children learn to read. However, the assumption is that the children already know how to speak. Thus, the book helps new readers learn characters but assumes they ...
3
I would recommend
思想与社会 (can't find a link, sold in Taiwan)
博雅汉语 （upper levels）
and I would also recommend preteen/teen books like Harry Potter and Twilight. The story isn't too complicated, and you get a chance to enhance your reading speed and smoothness level. I read Percy Jackson and Twilight. The story of Twilight was a little too cheesy for me, ...
3
For me, I found learning the meaning of all (or at least most) radicals (the parts that make up each character) the crux of it all.
Once I learned the meaning and could recognise the parts it made it a lot easier to remember them long term. For example, all metals seem to have the 金字旁, and every time I see a character that has this, e.g. 钢，铁等等, I can ...
3
I think the difficulties include:
The tones, while almost all western languages don't have such a conception.
Remember how to write a character. There are many characters that you have to learn and remember.
but the grammar is easier. In Chinese, you don't have to take care of gender, inflection,conjugation, number and particles.
3
One advantage of learning how to handwrite characters is that it makes it easier to distinguish similar-looking characters in unfamiliar contexts. If you can't handwrite you might still be able to correctly read known words like 快乐 and 决定, but if you encounter a new word such as 决心 it's sometimes hard to tell whether the first character is kuài or jué ...
3
• I have been studying Chinese for about three years total and I still find it difficult to remember Chinese people's names. There isn't a short cut to learning how to pronounce Chinese names; you need to learn pinyin, the Chinese phonetic system. Fortunately, it is not completely divorced from English phonetics, but there are enough differences that make ...
3
In my experience, taking a class, and watching/listening to Chinese media truly helps.
I have taken classes on Chinese, and Chinese media can test if you understand Chinese. Using media also helps you "exercise" your brain; much like taking a jog once in awhile.
In order to retain knowledge on the Chinese, you should practice saying the word, or at least ...
2
No.
Children's books are written -- not surprisingly -- for little native speakers. These are little people who have an astonishingly broad vocabulary at age three. And that vocabulary includes many words that foreign learners of the language never pick up (or need, really.) What kid doesn't know the sounds that every animal makes, or the words for a bunch ...
2
I had studied Japanese before I began Chinese (My father has lived in Japan for 15 years). In my experience, apart from the muscle memory in drawing characters, there was very little transferable knowledge / skills from Japanese to Chinese.
My Japanese was extremely limited however, so this may be different for someone with advanced Japanese.
2
Knowing Kanji can be both an advantage and otherwise.
Advantage: You get a good headstart in writing Chinese. If you have been studying Japanese for a while, you probably have a sense of the patterns of Kanji. Even more important is the patience you gained while learning them. (i.e. English speakers who had not enough exposure to Kanji find it more ...
2
How can I learn how to pronounce names of Chinese students?
Short of learning Chinese? Avery suggested learning how to read pinyin. However, this ignores the problem that there are sounds in Chinese that do not exist in English. For instance, following some consonants, pinyin "u" is pronounced like the German "ü". Pinyin "sh" and "x" are both pronounced ...
2
Full Disclosure: I haven't tried this for studying Chinese but in English it seems to work quite well. I haven't a Doctorate in Educational Sciences or the like but have been teaching grammar to all ages and many nationalities of close to 10 years.
The method is based on Cuisenaire rods(coloured rods of differing lengths, the smallest being 1cm long(white) ...
2
Language exchange. Look on classifieds sites and posters near universities to arrange a language exchange where you can practice with someone in Chinese and then help them with English or another language.
Do plenty of reading and practice by reading aloud. Get books that are at your level e.g. use children's books if you are at a beginners level so you ...
2
For the purpose of decorating a resumé, there are in my humble opinion three levels:
beginner - can say 你好, with heavy accent
fluent - can talk to a shopkeeper, expat level
advanced - can converse meaningfully about a film, do business purely in Chinese, pass HSK 6, and teach a university course on Chinese
native - unreachable
What to tell your friends ...
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