Helpful Links for Learning Chinese
Written By: 孙智谦 on July 4, 2007
3 Comments
 “What did you say?” |
| I don’t feel like making fun of the news right now, so I thought I’d post something worthwhile. I’ve been learning Chinese for about 4 years now, and in that time I’ve come across a lot of resources for learning the language. I thought I’d post a little information here on what I consider to be good products for helping people learn it. Lest anyone think I’m a great philanthropist, I’ll tell you the truth; I tend to lose great links if I leave it up to myself to keep track of them, so I figure if I post them all here on Due-east.org, my web host will back the info up, and I’ll always have access to it. |
| First, a little information about Chinese as a language. What we call “Chinese” is actually just one dialect from among a very large group of dialects (or languages…it’s a hotly-debated subject in some circles). Its official name is Putonghua (普通话 / 普通話) or in English, Mandarin. According to Wikipedia, there are seven modern major dialects/groups/languages in Chinese. The names of the seven main groups are Gan, Guan (Mandarin), Kejia (Hakka), Min (including Taiwanese and Hokkien), Wu, Xiang, and Yue (Cantonese). I’ve seen other sources that group them differently, so it’s a little fuzzy, but each of the seven groups listed above have many, many subdialects, so it can get pretty complicated. The seven groups are quite different from one another, to the point that speakers of languages from one can’t understand speakers of another. |
| Thankfully, for those who want to learn the Mandarin dialect of Chinese, the modern written language used in newspapers, magazines, and official documents is based on the Mandarin dialect, so any literate person in China can at least understand some Mandarin in that regard. The only problem with that is that there are 2 forms of the written language, Traditional Chinese (繁體字) and Simplified Chinese (簡體字). Traditional Chinese is used in Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and lots of overseas communities, whereas Simplified Chinese is used on the mainland. Why the difference? Simplified Chinese was adopted by the Communist government in 1949 in an effort to curb illiteracy in China. As its name implies, the characters in the simplified style of writing are less complicated and supposedly easier to understand and write. In some cases, the simplified characters are quite close to the original characters; however, in other cases the simplified characters are so simplified that they don’t resemble the original characters very much at all. There are even many cases where Chinese characters have been simplified in this new style to the point that one will represent what used to be two or three or even more traditional characters. Both writing systems have people fiercely loyal to them. |
| Mandarin Chinese gets a bad rap as being the hardest language on earth to learn, but that’s not really the case. It’s not an easy language for English speakers to learn, but it’s not the hardest (in my opinion) either. I think Cantonese is much harder to learn, and I’ve heard that Fujianese is even harder. The reason it gets such a bad reputation is that it’s a tonal language, which means that how you say the word is just as important to its meaning as the word itself. For example, if you say the phrase “a poem” with the wrong tones, you could come out acutally saying “a handful of s**t” instead. If you’re musically inclined, you’re a step ahead of those who aren’t. Learning to speak Mandarin well comes much easier to musically inclined people. We’ll get to tones more in a minute. But Chinese is easier than English in that there’s no verb conjugation in Chinese. Those that have studied French or Spanish or similar languages will remember the days of memorizing how to conjugate regular verbs and irregular verbs for all the tenses one would want to use when speaking. None of that exists in Chinese. I go, you go, he/she/it go, we go, you (plural) go, they go…it’s all the same. The language also doesn’t have all the same tenses that romantic and germanic languages do. In Chinese, if a person wants to say that he did something yesterday, he just says, “Yesterday I go store,” instead of, “Yesterday, I went to the store.” It’s remarkably simple in that respect. There are helper words that are used to indicate time frames, but it isn’t as complicated as English. |
| A little more about the tones…Mandarin has four distinct tones and a fifth, neutral tone. When a word carries the first tone, the word is pronounced in a raised, flat pitch. When a word carries the second tone, it is pronounced with a rising sound, as if you’re saying, “What?” when you don’t understand what someone says. The third tone is a dipping sound; the word falls and then rises in pitch as you say it. The fourth tone is a falling sound, as if you’re saying, “No,” in an emphatic way. The fifth tone is neutral and tends to carry the tone of the word before it. For example, if the word before it fell and rose in tone, the word with the 5th tone tends to be pronounced high, but not with as much emphasis as the first tone. The more you practice the language, the more you’ll get used to this. Mandarin’s tones are difficult to for most people to master, but people learning this dialect versus Cantonese definitely get off easy (people can’t seem to agree on how many tones Cantonese actually has!). |
| When it comes to learning Chinese, we’re not stuck with having to listen and repeat only (thankfully), which is great for visual learners. There are a few different systems of romanization (expressing foreign languages using letters from the alphabet of romantic languages) that people use to help learners. Perhaps the most famous romanization system used for Mandarin is called Hanyu Pinyin (pronounced peenyeen). It uses different accent marks borrowed from other written languages such as French (acute, grave, trema, and what looks like an inverted circumflex) to indicate the tones used to pronounce the words they affect. Pinyin is used in China on street signs, for computer input, as brand names, on maps, and lots of other ways, so knowing how to read and write it is very useful to somebody visiting China. Taiwan uses a different romanization method called the Wade-Giles system. Neither system is perfect, and I personally think that aspects of both systems should be combined into one better system, but I’m not a scholar so nobody listens to me. heheh… |
| If you’ve made it this far and haven’t died of boredom, congratulations! You may just be happy learning Chinese! It’s a beautiful language from a beautiful country full of beautiful people and culture. Now, I’ll give you some links and information on learning Mandarin and a couple of the other dialects, should you be crazy enough like me to take on learning more than one dialect. I’ll try to keep the links generally grouped, but some links may fall under multiple categories, so read the descriptions before passing over something. |
Chinese Courses and Podcasts
Chinese Reference Sites
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Thanks so much for the link to ChinesePod. We think what we’re doing is pretty special, and can unlock the door to Chinese that is otherwise pretty difficult to pry open, and we’re glad you think so too.
Given your rather long history learning the language, I’d be really interested in any feedback you might have concerning our lessons, particularly the advanced ones.
Cheers!
Hey, John.
Yeah, ChinesePod is a great site. Ken’s a genius for getting the site started. I have no complaints about the site at all other than that I kind of liked the old design a little better (no offense to you guys at Praxis) because it was more intuitive for navigating around.
I’m self-taught and have been for the last 4 years, so I’m not quite ready for your advanced levels yet. I’ve still got a long way to go. The intermediate lessons and elementary lessons are great, though! Keep up the good work!
I’d love to see a CantonesePod as well. While it’s not as popular as Mandarin in the world, it’s still pretty popular. I’m learning it as well, and there doesn’t seem to be any good site for that on the internet, so it’ll be even slower going for me learning it.
Thanks!
Chris
Hi,
I have just stumbled across your site, and really like it. Thought I would ask if you would mind adding a link to my blog about learning mandarin.
I also write about Chinese music and culture.
I really like your blog and am going to subscribe.
Charlie.