So i've been wanting to learn another language for a while now, this will be my 3rd. i decided to try picking up Chinese! I have a few chinese friends that aren't willing to teach me but are willing to be practice partners to try to have conversations with them when im done with the basics and move on to constructing sentences and such.
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.
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.
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.
Chinesepod is a great site, although many of the features are only available through a paywall.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. :\
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.
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.
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. :\
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.
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.
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.
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. :\
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.
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.
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.
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. :\
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.
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?
Spanish accents are definitely used in conjugation (and elsewhere) but they are definitely not like tones. I don't remember that tones change between phrases, but there could be some cases where they do.
Chinese characters are all monosyllabic. Thus you can have like 2000 words assigned to the same pronounciation of the same syllable of a single tone. You decipher the meaning of the word through the context and through the tone you use.
The thing with this is that you can get a ridiculous number of four character idioms that make no sense when you fuck up a pronunciation, and are incredibly difficult to remember the meaning of if you don't learn the story behind the idiom.
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.
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.
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. :\
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.
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?
I think I know what you are talking about, although it has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. Let's say the characters that make up the word dumpling are both tone 3. But when they are put together, the first character, water, has to be tone 2 because saying two tone 3 words back to back is really hard to say. This only applies to two tone 3 words and no other tones. (this is assuming there is no tone 0)
P.S. "My dog" is three characters, 'wo de go' or "I of dog," with "I + of" meaning "my".
But yeah I don't know where this is going, actually. O_O. It is nothing like Spanish accents though. Spanish accents might as well not be there. It's the same as saying they're like English accents.
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.
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.
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. :\
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.
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?
I think I know what you are talking about, although it has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. Let's say the characters that make up the word dumpling are both tone 3. But when they are put together, the first character, water, has to be tone 2 because saying two tone 3 words back to back is really hard to say. This only applies to two tone 3 words and no other tones. (this is assuming there is no tone 0)
P.S. "My dog" is three characters, 'wo de go' or "I of dog," with "I + of" meaning "my".
But yeah I don't know where this is going, actually. O_O. It is nothing like Spanish accents though. Spanish accents might as well not be there. It's the same as saying they're like English accents.
Yeah i was using a hypothetical situation. I guess we're not quite getting our points across right but point is i know how tones sound and how many there are.
So like i said before, im not afraid to SOUND bad phonetically. It's more of saying the wrong word and/or using the wrong tone. Which isn't drastically different from learning another language.
I'd say break the bank and get a textbook. Websites have never really cut it for me when it comes to Chinese, but textbooks have a somewhat intuitive progression of words to learn.
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.
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.
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. :\
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.
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?
I think I know what you are talking about, although it has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. Let's say the characters that make up the word dumpling are both tone 3. But when they are put together, the first character, water, has to be tone 2 because saying two tone 3 words back to back is really hard to say. This only applies to two tone 3 words and no other tones. (this is assuming there is no tone 0)
P.S. "My dog" is three characters, 'wo de go' or "I of dog," with "I + of" meaning "my".
But yeah I don't know where this is going, actually. O_O. It is nothing like Spanish accents though. Spanish accents might as well not be there. It's the same as saying they're like English accents.
Yeah i was using a hypothetical situation. I guess we're not quite getting our points across right but point is i know how tones sound and how many there are.
So like i said before, im not afraid to SOUND bad phonetically. It's more of saying the wrong word and/or using the wrong tone. Which isn't drastically different from learning another language.
If you don't mind reading in pinying, and sounding wrong, then you should be just fine. Listening might be challenging though. Also, make sure you learn chinese from someone who speaks 'proper' mandarin. To be honest, there is no 'proper' mandarin, but you don't want to learn chinese from someone with a strong regional accent or dialect. Btw, this is still bad chinese, but it's pretty darn good for a non-native speaker.
tons of Asian Americans can't read/write Chinese or Canto, but speak it fluently. they even have classes for people like us (haha) in college.
for the OP, zhongwen.com is pretty useful when you are learning
the tough part is staying motivated. you can learn, it just takes time and practice - so for a lot of people, immersion is a good way to improve because you really have no choice but practice.
Start by playing the Chinese version of SC2 ! If you use Terran its even better XD
Seriously though, I think you will need a teacher, Since Chinese is not alphabetical, the only way to learn is to memorize a few hundred basic words and start from there.
On November 13 2010 14:38 DarkwindHK wrote: Seriously though, I think you will need a teacher, Since Chinese is not alphabetical, the only way to learn is to memorize a few hundred basic words and start from there.
Yea. Those people claiming not to be able to "read" but can speak are missing the point. You learned the language with the words, u simply forgot afterwards. It's not the same as completely ignoring the words and trying to learn spoken chinese.
On November 13 2010 14:38 DarkwindHK wrote: Seriously though, I think you will need a teacher, Since Chinese is not alphabetical, the only way to learn is to memorize a few hundred basic words and start from there.
Yea. Those people claiming not to be able to "read" but can speak are missing the point. You learned the language with the words, u simply forgot afterwards. It's not the same as completely ignoring the words and trying to learn spoken chinese.
Yup. Born in Taiwan, I learned Chinese as a main language in school until fourth grade, when I transferred to an American school. Because my family and extended family spoke Chinese, the newspapers, magazines, and books around the house were Chinese, news on the tv was in Chinese, and the country I lived in was Chinese, I never lost the ability to speak or read. However, now in my senior year of high school, I can only write the most basic of Chinese sentences.
I would give up on trying to learn how to read or write in Chinese. It is exceedingly difficult. Speaking and listening is not too difficult, but you will definitely need a teacher. Don't try to just learn from online or something, otherwise you might end up with a ridiculous accent. To be honest, it's best to take some classes.
Been trying to learn it myself and while i learned english, german and french without much trouble, learning chinese is something totally different...
some things i noticed: - The words look nothing like the words you know (in western languages words are often much easier to remember) - It's really hard to get used to the tones, I still have trouble recognizing them and even using them is hard for me (and cant remember what tone to use for what word) - Grammar is different
I live in China, have been living here for quite some time now, my gf is Chinese, if we meet her friends/family they often don't speak any/much English, but still i have not picked up much of the language...I still only speak very basic Chinese (that half the Chinese ppl dont even get because i suck at using the right tones)...
Going to uni soon to study Chinese, I think learning in a group will be easier as you are not the only one struggling to learn all this new stuff... Learning Chinese rly needs a strong will and it's very easy to get discouraged imo...
If I had the choice (and would not be living in China) I think I'd go for another (western) language, so much easier to learn and not nearly as frustrating Or maybe go for Korean, I think that's alot easier ^^
On November 13 2010 14:37 zzaaxxsscd wrote: the tough part is staying motivated. you can learn, it just takes time and practice - so for a lot of people, immersion is a good way to improve because you really have no choice but practice.
This is definitely crucial. More important than any website or book (although I admit that having those tools is helpful) is talking to fluent Chinese speakers on a regular basis. Only that way can you really ingrain Chinese grammar, which people have already noted is radically different from English, into your brain. Don't focus solely on memorizing characters, because the structure of the language is far more important to having a basic grasp than knowing some hundred characters' meanings. Also, nowadays there are online Chinese dictionaries and IME input systems, which somewhat forgo the need to memorize characters. I know I certainly rely on dictionaries in my translations because I only know a few thousand characters, but there are many, many thousand that you will only see a couple times ever. Don't be daunted by the characters. The basic ones boil down to perhaps a few hundred. Likewise, don't be intimidated by Chinese grammar being very different. While it will take some getting used to if you didn't grow up hearing Chinese, the structures are all extremely logical.
I am currently using a site called LiveMocha... it puts you in touch with people who want to language swap. I don't do any of the exercises on the site but I chat with people and get lessons and give english lessons and all that. It's really awesome...
I'm definitely one of the many that can speak but cannot read/write. Luckily, speaking is much more practical than reading or writing.
I've spoken to a bunch of people that have "learned" Chinese and their tones are TERRIBLE. However, for the most part, your sentence structure and context should be able to carry the meaning, even if the listener is cringing. In short, even if you've learned the language, it's hard.
I don't see why you want to learn Chinese so badly. Would it be so bad to pick another Latin based language for simplicity sake? Russian or French or something like that?
On November 13 2010 12:44 Disregard wrote: I can understand Cantonese fluently while only basic Mando but cant read squat...
edit: Whats the saying? You need to know about 10000 characters to read Chinese?
Not quite true. Primary school kids in China learned bout 2000 - 3000 Characters and that's more than enough to read the newspaper.
There are only about 2000 to 5000 commonly used characters in Chinese. Of course you will have to learn words which is combination of characters which is quite easily when you identify the domain.
Hanzi carries contextual meaning and it gets easier once you have a foundation because you can *guess* the meaning of most paragraphs and words in context.
A typical kid in primary school learns about 10 characters and each week goes through about 1 unit which consist of 40 or 50 characters.
50 x 40 = 2000 so you need about 2 or 3 years to master the basics. It will take a lot longer to master the language though but that's not needed, if you just want to get to a level where you are able to converse and read general publications then 3 years is more than enough.
Tones are extremely important and there is no way around it except discipline. For a westerner, just remember to stress your tones because you are naturally weak at it.
Regional dialects are hard lol. I'm a native speaker and I can't understand half of the Chinese that I've met who speaks mandarin to me. You shouldn't worry about this though, this is not something you can improve on without living in Chinese for 10+ years.
On November 13 2010 17:11 meeple wrote: I am currently using a site called LiveMocha... it puts you in touch with people who want to language swap. I don't do any of the exercises on the site but I chat with people and get lessons and give english lessons and all that. It's really awesome...
I've heard of LiveMocha but have never heard whether its good or not, that's cool to know.
I don't plan to learn chinese through and through by myself. If i like it i plan on taking classes. I have friends that can tell me if im developing a terrible accent or not in the meantime.
I just need good/decent tools to get started and so far from what i see is that books are better than sites (more or less).
I don't see why you want to learn Chinese so badly. Would it be so bad to pick another Latin based language for simplicity sake? Russian or French or something like that?
I don't really have much interest in those. Im really not interested in something simple anyways, i want a challenge. I usually have some fun that way..
Must you really learn to read? As a Korean I'm terrified.. I have no knowledge of Hanja ]:
Some day, I want to learn Mandarin, Cantonese, Russian, German.. hell, everything. So far all I've got is English, Korean, high-school level Latin, and broken Japanese..
On November 13 2010 14:29 Karliath wrote: If you don't mind reading in pinying, and sounding wrong, then you should be just fine. Listening might be challenging though. Also, make sure you learn chinese from someone who speaks 'proper' mandarin. To be honest, there is no 'proper' mandarin, but you don't want to learn chinese from someone with a strong regional accent or dialect. Btw, this is still bad chinese, but it's pretty darn good for a non-native speaker.
On November 13 2010 14:38 DarkwindHK wrote: Seriously though, I think you will need a teacher, Since Chinese is not alphabetical, the only way to learn is to memorize a few hundred basic words and start from there.
Yea. Those people claiming not to be able to "read" but can speak are missing the point. You learned the language with the words, u simply forgot afterwards. It's not the same as completely ignoring the words and trying to learn spoken chinese.
Yup. Born in Taiwan, I learned Chinese as a main language in school until fourth grade, when I transferred to an American school. Because my family and extended family spoke Chinese, the newspapers, magazines, and books around the house were Chinese, news on the tv was in Chinese, and the country I lived in was Chinese, I never lost the ability to speak or read. However, now in my senior year of high school, I can only write the most basic of Chinese sentences.
Huh. Most everybody I know that made it through around fourth grade in China all have really good reading/writing/speaking (at least compared to us raised-in-the-west kids D: ). Never knew one that couldn't write but could do the other two.
On November 13 2010 14:19 xMiragex wrote: So like i said before, im not afraid to SOUND bad phonetically. It's more of saying the wrong word and/or using the wrong tone. Which isn't drastically different from learning another language.
Really, if you don't want to become super-fluent with really correct pronunciation and everything I wouldn't worry about using the wrong tone. When we listen to people who don't have Chinese as their first language (ie. some cantonese, some foreign-born kids), we mostly ignore their tone because they never get it right anyway, and figure everything out from context . It doesn't matter if you mispronounce "dumpling" as "sleep"
On November 13 2010 14:19 xMiragex wrote: So like i said before, im not afraid to SOUND bad phonetically. It's more of saying the wrong word and/or using the wrong tone. Which isn't drastically different from learning another language.
Really, if you don't want to become super-fluent with really correct pronunciation and everything I wouldn't worry about using the wrong tone. When we listen to people who don't have Chinese as their first language (ie. some cantonese, some foreign-born kids), we mostly ignore their tone because they never get it right anyway, and figure everything out from context . It doesn't matter if you mispronounce "dumpling" as "sleep"
but it sounds terrible. ever hear foreigners try to speak japanese and sound like a fool? ever hear people try speaking spanish and they pronounce the R's like they would in english? it's like that for chinese, except even worse. i've heard students at my university who are in advanced chinese (3rd year learners) and they sound like dumbasses.
if you wanna learn how to speak chinese, you need to learn tones. not just tones, but enunciation, pronunciation, and natural flow. you can't just build vocab and grammar.
On November 13 2010 14:29 Karliath wrote: If you don't mind reading in pinying, and sounding wrong, then you should be just fine. Listening might be challenging though. Also, make sure you learn chinese from someone who speaks 'proper' mandarin. To be honest, there is no 'proper' mandarin, but you don't want to learn chinese from someone with a strong regional accent or dialect. Btw, this is still bad chinese, but it's pretty darn good for a non-native speaker.
edit: Majority of my family speaks fluent Mandarin and they emphasize the accent at the end of words a lot stronger. Except the younger generations such as me since we're all from suburban Guangdong.
EPT
