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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?
somehwat rambly, sorry
Date: 2018-12-07 20:31 (UTC)It's interesting that you rec the New Practical Chinese Reader as having interesting texts, though. I guess the texts are somewhat less boring than most other textbooks' texts? I used the NPCR to study for my finals back in 2014 and I found it very boring. I started with #5, so maybe it's better in the first levels?
One advice I would give is that most apps have a lot of audio examples, and re-listening and repeating, as well as trying to read aloud any text is extremely useful for retaining vocabulary if, like me, you lean heavily towards an auditory learning style.
+1 on trying to get along without pinyin while reading. After a certain point, one attains a reading comprehension that can do without knowing what a word sounds like, simply from context and the radicals involved. I mean, that is how I read Guardian and parts of Modao Zushi even when my vocabulary is pretty basic.
Listening comprehension, reading comprehension, and speaking ability usually vary a lot for every learner of a language. I would advise to be prepared for the three to vary greatly when learning Chinese over a longer period.
Then there is the writing... If one really wants to get good at characters, practicing writing them is probably unavoidable. I've lost most of my writing ability though since typing via pinyin became so easily available :(
no subject
Date: 2018-12-07 20:54 (UTC)Oh, that's useful to know! I should have realised Google Translate would have something like this. Thank you for pointing it out. :)
(I'm not learning Chinese, but it's definitely helpful in Guardian fandom!)
Re: somehwat rambly, sorry
Date: 2018-12-07 21:07 (UTC)A: Do you know when xiao-Wang will come to school today?
B: He has already come.
A: How do you know?
B: I saw his bicycle outside the door.
...so, yeah, perhaps part of it is super low standards, but they never were offensively boring like all the official HSK textbook's ones are, and some were even interesting, though I only looked at books 1 and 2.
I understand that pinyin is necessary in some contexts, but a bunch of my classmates are unnecessarily hung up on it, and have acquired the misapprehension that they can just use pinyin forever. This is not the case. One should not become addicted to pinyin. The hanzi will give clues on what it's about, and you'll be able to distinguish "medicine" and "to want".
ChineseSkill and Pleco both have audio for their example sentences! People all find different methods of learning easy; given the prepondence of flashcards everywhere, surely someone must find them useful. (I never did.) The trick is to figure out what works best for you in particular. I learn by writing, so I'm really happy with just writing the hanzi. Hm, I should probably keep a journal of writing prompts, and try to handwrite assignments of my own motivation... Perhaps I should try to transcribe them to DW and see if anyone's willing to correct me? :D
no subject
Date: 2018-12-07 21:09 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-07 23:28 (UTC)I didn't know people get attached to pinyin like they do to romaji! Pin yin is definitely not the way to go, haha.
Google translate is definitely not good either. I was editing every other definition it came up with before I realized I was doing free work for google and I'm not doing that lol.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-08 16:59 (UTC)Oh yes, people get attached to pinyin! Then complain that the hanzi are ~too hard~, and if only China would give up the hanzi and switch over to pinyin 100%, Chinese would become a major global superpower language, like Korean! (Meanwhile, I've only heard people express desire to learn Korean due to kpop, while a fair amount of job ads I've read consider knowing Chinese a bonus.) I understand that the HSK institute wishes to make it as easy and approachable as possible, but even at HSK1 and HSK2, it'd be good to read some simple texts in only characters, and when I say "simple", I mean something about as complex as "一个人来了。" Ah well. Perhaps soon I can ditch the pinyin forever.
Re: somehwat rambly, sorry
Date: 2018-12-08 17:21 (UTC)That does sound much better in comparison...
I remember that during my first stay in China in 2008/2009, one textbook had a text about how helpful the Chinese 保安 (or was it 公安?) is. The one that's known for not exactly being nice to citizens >_<. Many texts were heavily moralised, iirc.
That'd be interesting! Can't say that I personally would be of much help, but it depends.
Re: somehwat rambly, sorry
Date: 2018-12-08 18:02 (UTC)Honestly, I think it's pointless to expect a textbook where the texts aren't heavily pro-[country], whether in theme selection or content. Chinese textbooks will never deal with Tibet in any capacity beyond "and now that we've gotten to Year 5 of study, we shall acknowledge that Tibet exists by teaching you the names of the provinces", for instance. No language textbook ever will deal with queer content. It's just one of those things I've accepted as a fact of life, so that if I am surprised, it is positively.
Re: somehwat rambly, sorry
Date: 2018-12-08 18:57 (UTC)I worked as a German teacher at a Chinese university a couple years ago and I know that there isn't a lot that's publicly permissible. But students will talk about homosexuality in smaller settings (there was one time when one student came out to us in a small group) and interesting texts are produced all the time --- they just don't make it into many textbooks :(
no subject
Date: 2018-12-08 19:02 (UTC)Btw, something I can attest to is that tones are sometimes even more important than the right pronunciation of consonants when one wants to be understood by locals. One simple example from my time in Shenyang, where quite a few people said "sh" instead of "s" and the other way around: If not for tones, I'd often have mistaken 十四 for 四十!
no subject
Date: 2018-12-08 19:55 (UTC)I really like Pleco because I write fairly fast, having been dealing with Japanese kanji for a good 17 years, but I'm glad to have a recommendation for a better dictionary!
no subject
Date: 2018-12-08 20:41 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-09 03:03 (UTC)I've been using the ChineseSkill app already and enjoying it. I am laughably bad at the speaking tests, and my listening (read: which tone are they saying practice) is also poor, but it's fun. ♥ My phone's in Japanese so the app is in Japanese, so sometimes I get questions where the question and answer are the same, which delights me. (I do try to listen to the questions before looking at the hanzi, though, since the pronunciations are almost always very different [but not always and I love that too].)
Thank you again. ♥
no subject
Date: 2018-12-09 15:15 (UTC)Kpop is extremely popular where I live - there's regular concerts, constant radio plays to the point that people who aren't into it still know some songs and groups - and even then I wouldn't call it a global language?!
That's true, the order in which I learnt chinese was kind of jumbled up. I only touched pinyin when I got to elementary school, and not gonna lie, to this day I still get some wrong lol.
iirc my elementary chinese textbooks removed pinyin from the words we were supposed to have learnt from the last chapter, so eventually the pinyin gets lesser and lesser so there's no more by the later half of elementary school, except for new words. Surprised to see that some chinese texbooks (for adults?) don't do that!
no subject
Date: 2018-12-09 15:24 (UTC)For the tones, 1st tone (一 yī，三 sān) is high and level and the pitch contour doesn't change: it's monotone. 2nd tone (年 nián，明 míng) has the focal point low and the tone is then lifted up. 3rd tone (我 wǒ，你 nǐ) actually has a significant, noticeable dip, where it first falls and then is lifted. 4th tone (二 èr，是 shì) has the voice held high and then the voice is let to fall by itself to its natural, lower position.