How to learn Chinese

[TeneReef]

Written Mandarin is more unifying than spoken Mandarin.
I've read on another forum [http://www.chinese-forums.com] that only 53% of Chinese can speak standard-like Mandarin (with a big stress on ''-like'' because the accents can be thick and tones reversed, as in in Sichuanese Mandarin). 90% of Chinese can read and write standard Mandarin (although this percentage includes both Simplified and Traditional ''spelling'').

I don't know how much faith I would put into that statistics but spoken Mandarin is definitely the only standard for spoken Chinese and no other dialects even come close. Unless something major and unexpected happens, this trend will only continue and the number of native standard Mandarin speakers will only grow.

But, China must be the only country in the world that subtitles their TV programs in the same language. So you get standard Mandarin audio, and standard Mandarin subtitles, all at the same time.
One may think a majority of Chinese population is deaf, so they provide hardcoded subtitles.

[linguoboy]

But, China must be the only country in the world that subtitles their TV programs in the same language.

Here we call that "closed captioning for the hearing impaired".

[Śrāmaṇera]

But, China must be the only country in the world that subtitles their TV programs in the same language.

Japan does it a lot too (not 100% of the time like in China, but still a lot). Especially in talk shows.

[eddeux]

I'm studying on my own for fun now. So far I've focused on pronunciation and speaking. I haven't started learning Hanzi yet (will do that once I'm 100% sure I have pinyin pronunciation and tones down), but I recognize a handful from watching my favorite singer's subtitled music videos.

But, China must be the only country in the world that subtitles their TV programs in the same language.

Japan does it a lot too (not 100% of the time like in China, but still a lot). Especially in talk shows.

I've noticed some Korean talk shows do the same as well, and I'm grateful. Gives me a chance to read Hanguel at a faster rate and improve my speaking.

[Babelfish]

It happens that Israel does so as well... maybe because the local film industry doesn't have good microphones

[enricmm]

It happens that Israel does so as well... maybe because the local film industry doesn't have good microphones

什麼？

我一直以為以色列是個豐富的國家。為什麼你們沒有好的麥克風？

[Babelfish]

我们影业的预算是小的（或者至少往常）。
The budget of our film industry is small (or at least used to be).

[enricmm]

這個藉口不太好。麥克風很便宜，或許於希伯來字母的短元音有關。

[marywhite]

Hey, I have been using this e-book for a while, and I think it good to help learn Chinese. I highly recommend this to you. Hope you'll enjoy it.
http://www.huayuschool.com/experienceBook/en/index.htm

[linguistixx]

In my opinion, learning both at the same time makes much more sense. If you can not write and read, just speak, it is very difficult to learn and remember new words, as you can not associate them anything at all. If you are able to write everything that you can speak, you are more likely to remember this vocabulary on the long term. Moreover, I think it is important to get away from pinyin as soon as possible. There are some good textbooks that let you gradually get away form pinyin and at a certain stage just offer characters (and English or the language X).

[TeneReef]

How to learn Chinese?
-Go to China!

[linguoboy]

Chinese are hard because of its 4 tones of voice of pronunciation whereas Japanese is hard to learn principally because of complicated grammar. Its not the like!

What makes you think Japanese grammar is "complicated"? Or that Chinese grammar isn't?

IME, Chinese is a lot like English when it comes to learning grammar: The basics are pretty simple, but the further you go the more complicated it gets. You should've seen my classmates trying to wrestle with the proper use of 了 or the 連...也 construction. We didn't even get into the various ways Chinese has of expressing counterfactuals, which are a nightmare if you're used to signaling this through changes in tense.

As for me, Chinese is difficult to learn yet not because of complicated Han characters but mostly because of humdrum sounding. Warrior is SHI, pig is SHI, 10 is SHI, it seems everything is SHI. But however Chinese people realize each other due 4 tones of pronunciation.

"Pig" is zhū (豬). Could this be part of your problem?

[Marah]

What makes you think Japanese grammar is "complicated"?

I imagine that when people say that they just mean that the word order is different. I think many find it harder to come up with a sentence in Japanese because of this.

[Pangu]

As for me, Chinese is difficult to learn yet not because of complicated Han characters but mostly because of humdrum sounding. Warrior is SHI, pig is SHI, 10 is SHI, it seems everything is SHI. But however Chinese people realize each other due 4 tones of pronunciation.

"Pig" is zhū (豬). Could this be part of your problem?

Hahaha good one...

[linguoboy]

Warrior is SHI, pig is SHI, 10 is SHI, it seems everything is SHI.

"Pig" is zhū (豬). Could this be part of your problem?

Hahaha good one...

獅豬易形！

[hedwards]

I'd have thought it'd be so much harder to learn Chinese just going by pinyin. The characters can be a useful guide to meaning as well as distinguish between identical sounds. Also there's a difference between being able to recognise a word and being able to write it. In the beginning knowing how to write basic sentences provides a good introduction to Chinese characters, but if spoken fluency is the goal then there needs to be a focus on just recognising/pronouncing characters rather than being able to write them. In my intermediate level of Chinese, there are many characters and words that I know the meaning of when I see them, but I wouldn't have a clue how to write them from memory. Perhaps this is because I only ever write Chinese on a PC using pinyin input, rather than on paper with a pen.

I tried learning Chinese without learning the characters and I gave up.

Well, not on Chinese, I gave up on trying to avoid the characters as I was having to do far more work than if I just learned the characters.

The hang up was vocabulary. The amount of vocabulary you can learn without knowing the characters is limited. And flash cards are basically useless. You can find the Chinese word for an English concept, but you can't do the reverse. I know that natives learn anyways, but they're immersed in the language and absolutely have to learn to speak and listen to survive. Barring that level of necessity, I just don't think that you're going to learn much without the characters.

Anyways, if you're dong a systematic approach of starting with the radicals and components and learning the other characters, it's not so bad. It's a ton of work, but as you learn more components you reinforce the other ones and the meaning/sound becomes the hard part to remember after a while. Not the actual character.

At this point, I'm kind of enjoying the challenge. I just wish that the Chinese would discover the "space bar" as it can be hard at times to figure out how many words are in a sentence.

[ling]

I just wish that the Chinese would discover the "space bar" as it can be hard at times to figure out how many words are in a sentence.

I wish Chinese writers would discover the period (full stop). The comma gets tiresome after about ten or so lines of text.

[hedwards]

I just wish that the Chinese would discover the "space bar" as it can be hard at times to figure out how many words are in a sentence.

I wish Chinese writers would discover the period (full stop). The comma gets tiresome after about ten or so lines of text.

I'd noticed that, but assumed that my Chinese reading wasn't good enough to realize that this was just a clause.

I should have mentioned it in my previous post, but the literacy figures being what they are is probably the driving force behind the government's push to have pinyin included on signs. I saw that even in areas where foreigners rarely go. I assume that's partially because of the difficulty of looking up characters you don't know.

[Pangu]

I should have mentioned it in my previous post, but the literacy figures being what they are is probably the driving force behind the government's push to have pinyin included on signs. I saw that even in areas where foreigners rarely go.

China has a literacy rate of 92.2%, it's not the best but it's relatively high for a developing country.

I, too, have noticed Pinyin in signage while traveling in China. However, they are rare and tend to be older, maybe from a few decades ago when China's literacy rate was lower?

I assume that's partially because of the difficulty of looking up characters you don't know.

It would no more difficult than looking up any word you don't know in any language. It's even easier if you have a smartphone

[linguoboy]

I assume that's partially because of the difficulty of looking up characters you don't know.

It would no more difficult than looking up any word you don't know in any language. It's even easier if you have a smartphone

Nonsense, it's considerably more difficult. I've been using Chinese dictionaries for ages and I still stumble. Just yesterday I spent ten minutes trying to track down a character that it turned out I already knew because the "hand" radical was written in such a way that it resembled 才 and I didn't realise there didn't exist such a character.

Smartphones have been godsend however. I was at a Chinese candy store with some friends recently and I was surprised how good the OCR software on their phones was. It's no exaggeration to say that they would've been incapable of looking up the characters without it.