ExtraPenguin

Since 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( Read more... )

Reference resources( Read more... )

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?