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extrapenguinSince there was interest on that friending post from phrenk and I had thought about making a post on all this anyway, here are my thoughts on all the media I've used in my study, free and otherwise.
Getting the basics
Language-learning is a tripartite process: pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. For "basics" I'm covering all of pronunciation (since Chinese has a very limited amount of possible syllable pronunciations), an intro to character composition (since this is the basis of the Chinese language as written, and all Chinese audiovisual media has Chinese-language hardsubs, so technically as a fan, the speaking/listening bit is superfluous), and how to get started with grammar.
The Chinese syllable has an initial, medial, and a final, plus a tone. These are transcribed into the Latin alphabet using Pinyin. If you scroll down, there's the correspondence between pinyin and international phonetic alphabet (IPA). Further down, there are comparisons with English-language sounds, and by googling one can surely find English Respelling pronunciation instructions à la "blyeaourghng" that make no sense. I've had success pronouncing the sh/ch/zh series as in English sh/ch/j (with the tip of the tongue making the sound) and the x/q/j series as IPA ç/cç/ɟʝ. (ç is the German ich-laut.) My Chinese teachers haven't corrected me, so it's at the very least an okay approximation. The r is hard; it sounds a lot like IPA ɮ to me, but I'm almost certainly wrong with it. Wikipedia also has a nice description of the tones.
Note that I find Pinyin not necessarily the most intuitive means of representing the sounds. It also holds a demonic lure to many a student who goes "but why can't we just use pinyin?" and develops mental blocks to learning the characters, i.e. the actual language. It's sort of okay as pronunciation instrictions, but mostly I'm paying attention to it because Chinese keyboard inputs are all pinyin-based.
Now that one is slightly less lost at sea, let's go into the basics of Chinese characters, aka hanzi! Hanzi consist of several lines – strokes – that should be drawn in the correct order. The correct order will become natural with practice, but in the meanwhile, everything I link you to will train the order, and there's also the trainchinese app you can install. Characters consist of a radical (eg: 口 虫) that usually relates to the meaning, and the rest, which might relate to the pronunciation. As an example, 口 (kǒu) is the mouth radical, and can be found in 名 (míng) "name, rank", 吗 (ma) "?", and 喝 (hē) "to drink". They are all pretty "standardized", and once one knows a bunch of them, it's pretty easy to break a character into its component parts. For learning it, I recommend installing the ChineseSkill app, then going to Challenge > Character Handwriting and doing a few of the modules.
Introductory Chinese grammar is pretty simple and English-like. Subject Verb Object, adjectives go before the nouns they modify, very modular. Note that all details about when and where the verbing is occurring must come before the verb. Oh, and measure words exist – one cannot say "one person", one has to say "one (measure word for people) person". Measure words might be context-dependent, but that's mostly based on whether the soup is being served in a bowl or a cup.
Actually learning the goddamn language
Okay, now that you have rolled your eyes at me and my priorities a lot, I'll go into how to learn actually useful vocabulary and grammar. The aforementioned ChineseSkill app is free and very useful and user-friendly. The basic section (up to the TestOut thing) covers approximately 90% of HSK1, and what's missing is mostly vocab that's easy to pick up. It's actually pretty good, and has speaking practice segments at the end of each grammar+vocab module. Pinyin is available, but I recommend turning it off, because reality has no pinyin floating atop the hanzi of the porny fanfic a kind fan uploaded to AO3.
If you have money and like books, I rec the New Practical Chinese Reader, which is constructed well. It's a six-part series of textbooks, and they iteratively teach vocabulary and grammar. The grammar is taught clearly, and at the end of each chapter, there's a hanzi writing section, where one is taught how to write basic hanzi (like 工) and then, based on those basic hanzi components one already knows, how to write the more complicated hanzi that are used in the vocabulary of the chapters. It also uses the grammatical terms, so one can google for additional explanations. The six books roughly correspond to the HSK levels. The texts used are actually interesting, and supplemental vocabulary is used to e.g. give the Chinese for different majors in university, so students can have actual conversations that go beyond "What is your favorite sport?" "My favorite sport is football (because I don't know the words for any other sports)." Note that I haven't looked at the workbook or teacher's book.
I will conclude this section with an anti-rec for the official HSK books, which are utter shit as language textbooks: every chapter has four completely unrelated short dialogues, in which the chapter's two grammar points are each illustrated twice. The words that are part of the HSK level are presented in completely random order; for example, the various sports are presented all in different chapters, instead of a Sports chapter that'd enable people to chat about which sports they enjoy. The exercises are laughably easy, and the only difficulty in them is "well, I know what the text says, but I can't figure out whether the picture is correct, because WTF is going on in the picture??"
Reference resources
For dictionary use, the best tool ever is MDBG. It can deal with longish strings of characters, and do lots of cool things. If you click on the character in the search results, it'll display the radical (eg 公 is 4画 4 strokes, and 八 + 2 ie the radical 八 plus 2 strokes), and the » beside it gives a larger menu, with character decomposition into radical + other bit, a way to search for other characters with that character as a component, and drawing instructions. It can deal with both traditional and simplified. Oh, and it's possible to search the pinyin, english, and hanzi with c:*车 p:zi* e:bi* will bring up 自行车 "bicycle". It also shows the measure words for each thing.
If scribbling is required, there's a phone app called Pleco, but MDBG is vastly superior to it in every other way. (Pleco's "search by radical/common component" is also easier to access, but that's about it.) Pleco also has example sentences. Lots of people love it. One can also use it for flashcards, but I have never found flashcards useful for learning anything ever, so I do not use this feature.
For grammar resources, Wikipedia is actually pretty good for documenting internet-popular languages! Its page on Chinese grammar is long and meaty. There's also this page that's more Chinese-focused and less dry, and also broken down by topic/construction. I'd recommend using the Allsetlearning page to check refs, and then at some point when you have a basic grasp of the language, go through the Wikipedia page and go "oh so that's why it works like that!"
If you want to type Chinese, you could install a input method ... or you could open Google Translate. (I wrote all my Russian homework with GTrans's latin to cyrillic typing function.) Click to translate from Chinese to English, click the 拼 at the bottom right to activate the input method, and type in pinyin. Copypaste to wherever you need it, and ignore the translation, it's wrong.
Note that the above is very much tailored to my (quite analytical) method of language-learning. If you learn by just being exposed to a bunch of sentences and their translations, it's likely useless. If you have other questions, like "best flashcards app", google is your friend. Have any of you any other resources to recommend for learning Chinese?
phrenk and I had thought about making a post on all this anyway, here are my thoughts on all the media I've used in my study, free and otherwise.Getting the basics
Language-learning is a tripartite process: pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. For "basics" I'm covering all of pronunciation (since Chinese has a very limited amount of possible syllable pronunciations), an intro to character composition (since this is the basis of the Chinese language as written, and all Chinese audiovisual media has Chinese-language hardsubs, so technically as a fan, the speaking/listening bit is superfluous), and how to get started with grammar.
The Chinese syllable has an initial, medial, and a final, plus a tone. These are transcribed into the Latin alphabet using Pinyin. If you scroll down, there's the correspondence between pinyin and international phonetic alphabet (IPA). Further down, there are comparisons with English-language sounds, and by googling one can surely find English Respelling pronunciation instructions à la "blyeaourghng" that make no sense. I've had success pronouncing the sh/ch/zh series as in English sh/ch/j (with the tip of the tongue making the sound) and the x/q/j series as IPA ç/cç/ɟʝ. (ç is the German ich-laut.) My Chinese teachers haven't corrected me, so it's at the very least an okay approximation. The r is hard; it sounds a lot like IPA ɮ to me, but I'm almost certainly wrong with it. Wikipedia also has a nice description of the tones.
Note that I find Pinyin not necessarily the most intuitive means of representing the sounds. It also holds a demonic lure to many a student who goes "but why can't we just use pinyin?" and develops mental blocks to learning the characters, i.e. the actual language. It's sort of okay as pronunciation instrictions, but mostly I'm paying attention to it because Chinese keyboard inputs are all pinyin-based.
Now that one is slightly less lost at sea, let's go into the basics of Chinese characters, aka hanzi! Hanzi consist of several lines – strokes – that should be drawn in the correct order. The correct order will become natural with practice, but in the meanwhile, everything I link you to will train the order, and there's also the trainchinese app you can install. Characters consist of a radical (eg: 口 虫) that usually relates to the meaning, and the rest, which might relate to the pronunciation. As an example, 口 (kǒu) is the mouth radical, and can be found in 名 (míng) "name, rank", 吗 (ma) "?", and 喝 (hē) "to drink". They are all pretty "standardized", and once one knows a bunch of them, it's pretty easy to break a character into its component parts. For learning it, I recommend installing the ChineseSkill app, then going to Challenge > Character Handwriting and doing a few of the modules.
Introductory Chinese grammar is pretty simple and English-like. Subject Verb Object, adjectives go before the nouns they modify, very modular. Note that all details about when and where the verbing is occurring must come before the verb. Oh, and measure words exist – one cannot say "one person", one has to say "one (measure word for people) person". Measure words might be context-dependent, but that's mostly based on whether the soup is being served in a bowl or a cup.
Actually learning the goddamn language
Okay, now that you have rolled your eyes at me and my priorities a lot, I'll go into how to learn actually useful vocabulary and grammar. The aforementioned ChineseSkill app is free and very useful and user-friendly. The basic section (up to the TestOut thing) covers approximately 90% of HSK1, and what's missing is mostly vocab that's easy to pick up. It's actually pretty good, and has speaking practice segments at the end of each grammar+vocab module. Pinyin is available, but I recommend turning it off, because reality has no pinyin floating atop the hanzi of the porny fanfic a kind fan uploaded to AO3.
If you have money and like books, I rec the New Practical Chinese Reader, which is constructed well. It's a six-part series of textbooks, and they iteratively teach vocabulary and grammar. The grammar is taught clearly, and at the end of each chapter, there's a hanzi writing section, where one is taught how to write basic hanzi (like 工) and then, based on those basic hanzi components one already knows, how to write the more complicated hanzi that are used in the vocabulary of the chapters. It also uses the grammatical terms, so one can google for additional explanations. The six books roughly correspond to the HSK levels. The texts used are actually interesting, and supplemental vocabulary is used to e.g. give the Chinese for different majors in university, so students can have actual conversations that go beyond "What is your favorite sport?" "My favorite sport is football (because I don't know the words for any other sports)." Note that I haven't looked at the workbook or teacher's book.
I will conclude this section with an anti-rec for the official HSK books, which are utter shit as language textbooks: every chapter has four completely unrelated short dialogues, in which the chapter's two grammar points are each illustrated twice. The words that are part of the HSK level are presented in completely random order; for example, the various sports are presented all in different chapters, instead of a Sports chapter that'd enable people to chat about which sports they enjoy. The exercises are laughably easy, and the only difficulty in them is "well, I know what the text says, but I can't figure out whether the picture is correct, because WTF is going on in the picture??"
Reference resources
For dictionary use, the best tool ever is MDBG. It can deal with longish strings of characters, and do lots of cool things. If you click on the character in the search results, it'll display the radical (eg 公 is 4画 4 strokes, and 八 + 2 ie the radical 八 plus 2 strokes), and the » beside it gives a larger menu, with character decomposition into radical + other bit, a way to search for other characters with that character as a component, and drawing instructions. It can deal with both traditional and simplified. Oh, and it's possible to search the pinyin, english, and hanzi with c:*车 p:zi* e:bi* will bring up 自行车 "bicycle". It also shows the measure words for each thing.
If scribbling is required, there's a phone app called Pleco, but MDBG is vastly superior to it in every other way. (Pleco's "search by radical/common component" is also easier to access, but that's about it.) Pleco also has example sentences. Lots of people love it. One can also use it for flashcards, but I have never found flashcards useful for learning anything ever, so I do not use this feature.
For grammar resources, Wikipedia is actually pretty good for documenting internet-popular languages! Its page on Chinese grammar is long and meaty. There's also this page that's more Chinese-focused and less dry, and also broken down by topic/construction. I'd recommend using the Allsetlearning page to check refs, and then at some point when you have a basic grasp of the language, go through the Wikipedia page and go "oh so that's why it works like that!"
If you want to type Chinese, you could install a input method ... or you could open Google Translate. (I wrote all my Russian homework with GTrans's latin to cyrillic typing function.) Click to translate from Chinese to English, click the 拼 at the bottom right to activate the input method, and type in pinyin. Copypaste to wherever you need it, and ignore the translation, it's wrong.
Note that the above is very much tailored to my (quite analytical) method of language-learning. If you learn by just being exposed to a bunch of sentences and their translations, it's likely useless. If you have other questions, like "best flashcards app", google is your friend. Have any of you any other resources to recommend for learning Chinese?
no subject
Date: 2018-12-08 20:41 (UTC)