EPTDoes anyone have any suggestions or know a good site to get started at? I prefer to just learn how to speak it but i wouldn't mind learning how to read it as well.
[H] Learning how to speak chinese
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Ethelis
United States2400 Posts
Does anyone have any suggestions or know a good site to get started at? I prefer to just learn how to speak it but i wouldn't mind learning how to read it as well. | ||
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Ixas
930 Posts
http://jhorna.wordpress.com/2008/09/03/a-poem-shi-shi-shi-shi-shi-shi-shi-shi/ | ||
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ieatkids5
United States4628 Posts
also, yeah i don't recommend learning just how to speak. | ||
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lyAsakura
United States1414 Posts
On November 13 2010 11:15 Ixas wrote: I don't really think you can speak it without knowing how to read it. Refer to link below. http://jhorna.wordpress.com/2008/09/03/a-poem-shi-shi-shi-shi-shi-shi-shi-shi/ Homophones aren't bad at all once you use context, just like english! And yeah, you aren't going to be able to speak Chinese very well unless you put quite a bit of time in learning the entire language, reading and all. It is an extremely hard language to learn. | ||
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wooozy
3813 Posts
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tube
United States1475 Posts
On November 13 2010 11:47 wooozy wrote: mandarin or cantonese? its pretty safe to assume mandarin | ||
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HCastorp
United States388 Posts
I never really got past the beginning stages of learning Chinese, so take my advice with a grain of salt, but I think there is absolutely nothing wrong with "only" learning to speak, at least to begin with. I don't think the people who have posted so far have very strong arguments for the necessity of reading. The biggest initial obstacle in learning mandarin is the tonal system and the fact that many of the consonants are difficult to distinguish and accurately reproduce at first. I actually found the similarity of different consonants to be a much bigger probelm than the tones. (I never really got the hang of the differences between ch zh sh j and q) It is a very alien sounding language to one coming from English. Luckily, the grammar is ridiculously easy compared to English, which is why I think learning systems based on listening (like Pimsleur or Chinesepod)can actually be pretty good for Chinese. | ||
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Karliath
United States2214 Posts
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Ethelis
United States2400 Posts
On November 13 2010 11:27 ieatkids5 wrote: you sure you wanna learn another language? wouldnt it be better to get better at the other 2 rather than learn just the elementary stuff of another? not trying to criticize you, just wanna see what your goals are. also, yeah i don't recommend learning just how to speak. Im fluent in both English and Spanish. I would want to learn it just in case. Like i've been out of school and haven't gotten a job or anything yet so im going to go back to school next year. I studied a bit in the business field, like working towards being a CPA (Don't really have a career in mind but i've really considered being a translator but not sure for what or where). There's a lot of chinese people in my area so maybe it can be helpful. I know its not saying much but i have a TON of free time and i wanna learn a new language. If its much more reasonable to learn another one i wouldn't mind trying out Japanese or Korean but i don't know anyone personally who i can talk to about that. On November 13 2010 11:15 Ixas wrote: I don't really think you can speak it without knowing how to read it. Refer to link below. http://jhorna.wordpress.com/2008/09/03/a-poem-shi-shi-shi-shi-shi-shi-shi-shi/ Wouldn't one just be able to "go around that" by learning sentence structure and the like? edit: im falling asleep here, don't mind typing errors much | ||
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Zergneedsfood
United States10671 Posts
On November 13 2010 11:15 Ixas wrote: I don't really think you can speak it without knowing how to read it. Refer to link below. http://jhorna.wordpress.com/2008/09/03/a-poem-shi-shi-shi-shi-shi-shi-shi-shi/ My reading of Mandarin is pretty subpar. I speak it fluently. | ||
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Ixas
930 Posts
On November 13 2010 12:02 Zergneedsfood wrote: My reading of Mandarin is pretty subpar. I speak it fluently. Talking about non-existence of reading skills. | ||
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Karliath
United States2214 Posts
On November 13 2010 12:01 xMiragex wrote: Im fluent in both English and Spanish. I would want to learn it just in case. Like i've been out of school and haven't gotten a job or anything yet so im going to go back to school next year. I studied a bit in the business field, like working towards being a CPA (Don't really have a career in mind but i've really considered being a translator but not sure for what or where). There's a lot of chinese people in my area so maybe it can be helpful. I know its not saying much but i have a TON of free time and i wanna learn a new language. If its much more reasonable to learn another one i wouldn't mind trying out Japanese or Korean but i don't know anyone personally who i can talk to about that. Wouldn't one just be able to "go around that" by learning sentence structure and the like? edit: im falling asleep here, don't mind typing errors much Spanish and English might as well be the same language as far as Chinese is concerned. You can basically learn Spanish by thinking in English, and then translating it into Spanish, even if sentence structure is different. Just switch around a few words and phrases. Chinese grammar is completely different. Also, Chinese uses characters unlike the greek letters of English or Spanish, or wtv they actually are. Unless you are content with just pinyin, learning the amount of characters necessary to read a newspaper will require serious dedication. Lastly, you need to learn tones. I don't want to discourage you from learning, but if it's just a, "oh, I think it would be good to learn another language" feeling, I would suggest you pick something easier. However, comparing the usage and difficulty of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, it would still be best to learn Chinese. This is coming from a native Chinese speaker who learned English starting from Kindergarten and Spanish from 6th grade. | ||
alffla
Hong Kong20321 Posts
On November 13 2010 12:16 Ixas wrote: Talking about non-existence of reading skills. i'm pretty illiterate with chinese too LOLOL | ||
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Ethelis
United States2400 Posts
On November 13 2010 12:33 Karliath wrote: Spanish and English might as well be the same language as far as Chinese is concerned. You can basically learn Spanish by thinking in English, and then translating it into Spanish, even if sentence structure is different. Just switch around a few words and phrases. Chinese grammar is completely different. Also, Chinese uses characters unlike the greek letters of English or Spanish, or wtv they actually are. Unless you are content with just pinyin, learning the amount of characters necessary to read a newspaper will require serious dedication. Lastly, you need to learn tones. I don't want to discourage you from learning, but if it's just a, "oh, I think it would be good to learn another language" feeling, I would suggest you pick something easier. However, comparing the usage and difficulty of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, it would still be best to learn Chinese. This is coming from a native Chinese speaker who learned English starting from Kindergarten and Spanish from 6th grade. I would be fine with minimal reading skills for now, then as i get the feeling for it to see if i like it or not, then it would depend if im fine with just pinyin or not. Tones don't really seem hard at all, its similar to accents in Spanish. Basically i'm not really scared of lack of fluency or being able to be understood phonetically. The thing that im unsure of is memorizing words, phrases and such, since i have practically no knowledge of chinese at all. Then again its pretty much the same thing for every language. | ||
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Disregard
China10252 Posts
edit: Whats the saying? You need to know about 10000 characters to read Chinese? | ||
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Versita
Canada1032 Posts
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Karliath
United States2214 Posts
On November 13 2010 12:41 xMiragex wrote: I would be fine with minimal reading skills for now, then as i get the feeling for it to see if i like it or not, then it would depend if im fine with just pinyin or not. Tones don't really seem hard at all, its similar to accents in Spanish. Basically i'm not really scared of lack of fluency or being able to be understood phonetically. The thing that im unsure of is memorizing words, phrases and such, since i have practically no knowledge of chinese at all. Then again its pretty much the same thing for every language. I can't really comment on memorizing words and phrases, cause I learned those naturally. One thing that I have thought about is how some chinese words are made up of multiple characters, but if you take a character away, the meaning is still held, sometimes making it more formal. For example, 'sun' is 'tai yang,' but it can also be 'zhi,' which I guess is more proper in a way. "Yue Liang" means 'moon,' but 'yue' alone to moon would be the equivalent of 'zhi' to sun. Idk. How do I explain this? Tones are COMPLETELY different from Spanish accents. What do you have in Spanish? The normal stress mark, the ~ that goes above an 'n' , and the .. above a letter. That's all I can think of. In Chinese, every character is stressed. There are 5 possible tones, idk what they are called in English. I've found that this is unanimously the hardest part of Chinese for non-native speakers. Each pinying word, "shi" for example, can have 5 tones. Each tone of shi can correlate to multiple characters that are all pronounced the same way. Each character can have multiple meanings, all though this is much less of a case than it is in English. What results is that what you see, 'shi,' can mean a whole ton of things, as shown in poem someone posted above. Edit: I don't actually know pinying. Apparently, sun should be "ri" But it isn't pronounced 'ri' like in the word redo in any way whatsoever. It's actually closest to 'zz'. Figure that out. Even after you know that it's 'zz' there are still four ways of possibly pronouncing it wrong. :\ | ||
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Ethelis
United States2400 Posts
On November 13 2010 13:12 Karliath wrote: I can't really comment on memorizing words and phrases, cause I learned those naturally. One thing that I have thought about is how some chinese words are made up of multiple characters, but if you take a character away, the meaning is still held, sometimes making it more formal. For example, 'sun' is 'tai yang,' but it can also be 'zhi,' which I guess is more proper in a way. "Yue Liang" means 'moon,' but 'yue' alone to moon would be the equivalent of 'zhi' to sun. Idk. How do I explain this? Tones are COMPLETELY different from Spanish accents. What do you have in Spanish? The normal stress mark, the ~ that goes above an 'n' , and the .. above a letter. That's all I can think of. In Chinese, every character is stressed. There are 5 possible tones, idk what they are called in English. I've found that this is unanimously the hardest part of Chinese for non-native speakers. Each pinying word, "shi" for example, can have 5 tones. Each tone of shi can correlate to multiple characters that are all pronounced the same way. Each character can have multiple meanings, all though this is much less of a case than it is in English. What results is that what you see, 'shi,' can mean a whole ton of things, as shown in poem someone posted above. Edit: I don't actually know pinying. Apparently, sun should be "ri" But it isn't pronounced 'ri' like in the word redo in any way whatsoever. It's actually closest to 'zz'. Figure that out. Even after you know that it's 'zz' there are still four ways of possibly pronouncing it wrong. :\ Yes i know about the 5 tones, again its like an accent except there is more than one, if i remember right, the spanish accent is compareable to 1 tone, asking a question in english is equivalent to another and so forth. | ||
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Karliath
United States2214 Posts
On November 13 2010 13:21 xMiragex wrote: Yes i know about the 5 tones, again its like an accent except there is more than one, if i remember right, the spanish accent is compareable to 1 tone, asking a question in english is equivalent to another and so forth. No the Spanish thing is just a stress, not really a tone. the "accent" is the physical mark above the letter, I think. Or wtv, but still. Spanish is like this: my nAme is kArliath. me llAmo kArliath. cOmo te llAmas? The accent/stress is simply what you stress, not a tone for the word. Just like in English, where you stress the O in doorstep instead of the E. I honestly don't know how to explain Chinese tones, but it is nothing similar. Unless I'm not understanding what you said correctly, you can't really equate things like that. First of all, in a sentence, it would be ridiculous to think, "oh yeah, so characters 3 5 and 8 I have to pronounce as if I were asking a question, and characters 4 7 and 9 I have to pronounce as if I were angry, and character 10 I have to pronounce like I'm shocked." EVEN if you can belt it out this way fluently, it will sound wrong because you will think it sounds right as long as you hold a 'questioning tone.' I guess talking to a friend would help this matter. | ||
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Ethelis
United States2400 Posts
On November 13 2010 13:31 Karliath wrote: No the Spanish thing is just a stress, not really a tone. the "accent" is the physical mark above the letter, I think. Or wtv, but still. Spanish is like this: my nAme is kArliath. me llAmo kArliath. cOmo te llAmas? The accent/stress is simply what you stress, not a tone for the word. Just like in English, where you stress the O in doorstep instead of the E. I honestly don't know how to explain Chinese tones, but it is nothing similar. Unless I'm not understanding what you said correctly, you can't really equate things like that. First of all, in a sentence, it would be ridiculous to think, "oh yeah, so characters 3 5 and 8 I have to pronounce as if I were asking a question, and characters 4 7 and 9 I have to pronounce as if I were angry, and character 10 I have to pronounce like I'm shocked." EVEN if you can belt it out this way fluently, it will sound wrong because you will think it sounds right as long as you hold a 'questioning tone.' I guess talking to a friend would help this matter. Maybe im not explaining myself right, but yes i understand about how "ma" has 5 ways to say it and they all mean different things, i know how the tones sound as well. I know tones sometimes change depending if there's a certain word (or some type of word, something along those lines) but still mean the same thing as the word in its original tone. ie: lets say "dog" and "cat" are pronounced the same but "dog" is in tone 1 and "cat" is in tone 2. If you want to say "My dog" you have to say "dog" in the tone u would say "cat". Am i right? edit: similar concept to singing no? | ||
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