Help me learn Mandarin Chinese

China's a big country with many dialects. I guess if you compare it witht he many variations of English, no wonder there's some disagreement. I mean, there's no actual consensus to how many characters are in the language, so...

Yeah, and many of the regions have their own local dialects anyway. Mandarin seems to be universally understood, though (based on hearsay; dayo/dylannnnnn plz jump in), and the written form is just about everywhere because the govt forces it.

Bed.

not so much dialects (which would mean variations on putonghua) but completely, mutually unintelligible versions of chinese!

written chinese is pretty much universally understood (if you're literate)

Out-of-work tutor available:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgN1Bk_mzkw&feature=related

http://resources.allsetlearning.com/chinese/grammar/

~useful~

skritter for ios is basically incredible

oh yeah? what isi it?

srs-based flashcardy system with full stroke recognition etc

http://www.skritter.com/ios <– video explains everything

thanks for pointing me to this thread, dog latin!

class starts on Monday. It's just a USDA class (this one, actually), and we'll only cover 150 words during this first 10-week session but i'm still really excited! and pumped to hopefully be moving into the intermediate courses, this time next year. prepare for lots of stupid questions from me, ILX!

skritter is awesome. i've going through the 101 list, but i've also got it synced up to the textbook i'll be using for my class. i just spent the last hour memorizing the characters for chapter 1, got it down pat! :) and it's awesome that it ties in the pronunciation too.

by the way, rì (time, date, sun, etc) is so fucking hard to pronounce for me.

it's not a phoneme that's used at all in english, I don't think

best advice I can give is to do your best scooby doo impression

yeah, the best i can do sounds like a constipated dog, so i think i'm getting there!

loool @ scooby doo impression. rì/日 is definitely on the tricker end of pronunciations for native English speakers, so don't fret Z S. You'll have an ace time. Also I might be dumb but I can't find the name of the textbook in your link. Which one are you using?

Skritter is indeed awesome. I've been chucking a load of known and new vocab lists into it, currently at 769 written characters learned and 869 written words learned aaaaand it's just started crashing. But still incredible. When it finishes adding all my known vocab lists I should be nudging 1,000 characters (so if the crashing gets worse I will be bloody annoyed).

oh, the link didn't include the name of the text, it was just a link to the class. the book is the new practical chinese reader, which i've read is kind of outdated and not the best, but...that's the assigned text! i'm going to combine it with skrillexskritter and rosetta stone, so hopefully i'll be set. plus my roommate speaks mandarin, so she'll be good to practice with (as long as i don't get too pissed to talk to her due to her occasional passive aggressive roommate notes)

NPCR is probably the most used with native English speakers, so you're well set there. Excellent that your roommate speaks Mandarin btw – I don't have any convenient Mandarin speakers ANYWHERE and it's retarding my growth.

http://sinoglot.com/blog/2012/06/back-up/

found this interesting re mandarin pronunciation made me rethink some
tongue positioning issues pronunciation issues even after 6?? years of speaking the lang

never had a 日 issues as far as i can tell

狗日的 great curseword

http://boxun.com/news/images/2011/08/201108191146yuanqing1.jpg

Wooo! I'm learnding via Skritter. Only problem is it seems to be adding words and vocab a little bit fast for me. I'd only just got used to the first 5-6 characters and now it's added something like 10 more without really revisiting the old ones. Also, some characters look literally identical to me, and yet mean different things. Also, I'm sure 'rén' (meaning man) was written differently to how it was written yesterday... what gives?

人入？

i never tried the flashcard/electroflashcard thing because i found the best way to put chinese characters in my head was the boring way my chinese teachers told me to put chinese characters in my head: writing them over and over again, copying out chinese texts etc

i don't like the idea of learning the spoken language then trying to figure out characters either. just grind thru learning tohose fucking characters while learning the spoken language at at some point things will joint up together. i found out i could learn a lot by watching subtitled chinese tv just tpfilling in my knowledge of characters by being able to match up sound to shape.

if you do this at a certain point u will be able to sing ktv songs and impress everyone EVEN IF you have have no idea what you'er singing

Rot In Hell, Chinese Communist Party Fuck Chinese Communist Party btw

download weixin for your phone too dawg

Okay, cool. Have you tried Skritter yet dylann? It's actually very good (although I'm aware it's no replacement for lessons, or being in the country). It's actually very good at teaching writing, pronunciation, definitions and reading all in one.

i tried it when they first released their iphone app. i have pleco on my android phone.

i communicate in chinese everyday but since needing to write university shit, i rarely have to write it. even when i lived in china, i was typing/texting and memory of a character wasn't important. it's weird: you can type a charaqcter everyda and sort of SEE IT IN YOUR HEAD but fuck if you can write it by hand. so frustrating when it coems time sto wtire ea short note or njot down somebody's name.

Only problem is it seems to be adding words and vocab a little bit fast for me. I'd only just got used to the first 5-6 characters and now it's added something like 10 more without really revisiting the old ones.

I agree, the default setting seems to assume that the user is Rain Man! But luckily it can be adjusted.

You can go into Settings, then the Vocab tab, and switch "Add Frequency" to Manual Only. Then you can add new characters into the stream at your own pace, one at a time, by clicking on the + button at the top of the screen when you're studying.

ah nice one. how you finding it Z S?

Great! And actually I just signed up for 6 months more ($39.99), because I'm certain I'll be using it a lot.

I went to my first Mandarin class on Monday, and I could really feel the difference. Everyone was writing wǒ really slowly and laboriously, and I was busting it out with ease, without even having to think about it! Plus I knew the characters well enough that I noticed errors in my teacher's writing on the whiteboard (although he may just be a really sloppy writer)! /braggin

Can I remember wǒ, given I've been using Skritter for just two days? I'm guessing it means 'mouth' and is drawn a bit like a small square? Probably not...

我口

Another thing about skritter that I didn't realize at first is that you can swipe up on characters to erase them and start over again, which is useful for learning new characters when you just want to write them 20 times in a row.

chinese script doesn't show up on this pc.

oh i was wrong. I shoulda known - wǒ bi shi etc..

你鄙视我？我更鄙视你！

Why are there more than one characters for xin (heart, mind rad.61)? That's been confusing me somewhat

i think there's only one form, isn't there? 心, except for the two forms it appears in when used as a radical, in which case it looks like 忄 or (used in the 慕 in 羡慕 or in the 恭 in 恭喜发财 KUNG HAY FAT CHOY).

lots of similar looking characters to get it mixed up with, though.

必？ 小？ 伈？

卵 is a cool character

soz, lots to respond to

http://sinoglot.com/blog/2012/06/back-up/

found this interesting re mandarin pronunciation made me rethink some
tongue positioning issues pronunciation issues even after 6?? years of speaking the lang

― dylannn, Thursday, 28 June 2012 19:38 (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i never tried the flashcard/electroflashcard thing because i found the best way to put chinese characters in my head was the boring way my chinese teachers told me to put chinese characters in my head: writing them over and over again, copying out chinese texts etc

― dylannn, Thursday, 5 July 2012 19:34 (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i don't like the idea of learning the spoken language then trying to figure out characters either. just grind thru learning tohose fucking characters while learning the spoken language at at some point things will joint up together. i found out i could learn a lot by watching subtitled chinese tv just tpfilling in my knowledge of characters by being able to match up sound to shape.

― dylannn, Thursday, 5 July 2012 19:36 (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

btw I applied for HSK level 2 and now I'm shitting my pants.

that's cool. did we talk about the hsk on this thread before? have we talked about hanban before?

there's no composition thing for hsk level 2 is there? composition is the killer.

re skritter/writing characters: i do 60-70% of my daily communication in chinese and sometimes i doubt i could reproduce close to half of it with a pen and paper. it's all typed, spoken.... there was a point where i was writing thousands of characters off the dome (with hardcore studying beforehand). but now if i have to write something by hand, it usually comes back to me very very slowly and only because i have the building blocks stuck in my head. but a lot of it has evaporated. let this be a warning to you.

First lesson lunchtime today! Woop!

How was it?

dylannn: Yeah, we've talked about the HSK before. I don't really know what's in it yet, apart from the word list, which I'm reasonably comfortable with.

Well, it was pretty straightforward. Although the other girl in the class turns out to have a lot more experience than me, but that's not really a bad thing. I have to practice at least 3 hrs a week. Learning this is using parts of my brain I didn't know I had.

It's really great when you discover that you're behind in one aspect of the language but ahead in another.