UniLang

Hi, my mother tongue is mandarin however, my usage of mandarin is very poor. I do not recognise the characters so i am unable to read it . I am ok with daily conversation. My goal is to be able to read articles in Chinese.

How do non native speakers learn chinese? In my country the way chinese is taught is very rigid and because of that it makes the youths here feel that chinese is very mundane. I am one example of them

Your country 是哪个？

Hottiedoggie wrote:How do non native speakers learn chinese? In my country the way chinese is taught is very rigid and because of that it makes the youths here feel that chinese is very mundane. I am one example of them

The same way we learn any other language?

Obviously, you have to spend more time on the writing system than you would for most other languages. For me, that meant a lot of time reviewing flashcards. But people use flashcards to learn languages written in alphabetic scripts as well. Similarly, most Chinese courses in the USA emphasise speaking over reading and writing, but you can find conversation courses for other languages which do the same.

My class textbook started every chapter with a short dialogue in Chinese. We prepared this the evening before and then read it aloud in class. The teacher would correct our pronunciation, then she would go on to explain the grammar. She would ask questions and we'd tried to answer appropriately. As we got more advanced, we would have brief conversations in Chinese amongst ourselves. Eventually, we started completing written assignments as well.

OldBoring wrote:Your country 是哪个？

Singapore!

linguoboy wrote:

Hottiedoggie wrote:How do non native speakers learn chinese? In my country the way chinese is taught is very rigid and because of that it makes the youths here feel that chinese is very mundane. I am one example of them

The same way we learn any other language?

Obviously, you have to spend more time on the writing system than you would for most other languages. For me, that meant a lot of time reviewing flashcards. But people use flashcards to learn languages written in alphabetic scripts as well. Similarly, most Chinese courses in the USA emphasise speaking over reading and writing, but you can find conversation courses for other languages which do the same.

My class textbook started every chapter with a short dialogue in Chinese. We prepared this the evening before and then read it aloud in class. The teacher would correct our pronunciation, then she would go on to explain the grammar. She would ask questions and we'd tried to answer appropriately. As we got more advanced, we would have brief conversations in Chinese amongst ourselves. Eventually, we started completing written assignments as well.

But there lots of chinese characters. Chinese isnt like english where if you do not know a word you can still use phonics to read the word out

Hottiedoggie wrote:But there lots of chinese characters. Chinese isnt like english where if you do not know a word you can still use phonics to read the word out

Our dialogues had rubi text in Bopomofo. (We used Taiwanese materials.) Most Chinese courses just use Pinyin and introduce characters gradually, if at all.

Yeah, I imagined Singapore. The country that proudly claims to have bilingual education.

I can't say Chinese courses at my alma mater emphasized speaking over writing, no way! All of the ones I took required us to be able to write Chinese to some degree (depending on how far along we were in each course). I skipped first semester, though.