China Romance
General Discussion and Useful Links => Newbies Corner => Topic started by: Ricky on May 22, 2010, 07:53:59 am
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Hey folks. I've been absent for...well...like ever. But neither here nor there. I have returned. To be honest, I had kind of given up a little bit as my last pairing went rather sour after alot of time and effort went into. But, to all endings, there is a begining. And just as I was letting my final credits dwindle away, in walks this (figuratively speaking of course) girl who redefines awesome, and rekindles my heart. So. I am planning another trip to china. To be honest, i've been just wanting to go back and tour the country more than I did on my previous visit anyway, so this is definitly a win win. But, since my previous relationship fell apart, I haven't been practicing my mandarin at all. I still remember most of it, but i'm sure its rusty. So, my question is really a 2 parter. First, Changsha. Which dialact? Mandarin, or Cantonese. Second, have any of you used any particular software or system that works well? I have used the pimsleur (spelling) method before, it worked great, and I can remember most of what I learned and I haven't even used it in about 6 months. However, I'm really hoping to utilize the computer, and learn to read/write as well as speak. If only the reading and writing part at a low level, that would be acceptable and something to grow off of at least. I have been looking into the Tell Me More system. But it is a wee bit pricey. So before I commit to anything, I wanted to run this situation by you all and see if you had any insight into the language and the tools you used/choose to learn it. Thanks Fellas.
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Ricky,
Welcome back, .... The language for Changsha is indeed Mandarin. In fact Mandarin is the official language for the whole of China, for schools, Government etc,etc. ...Everything official is only available as such in Mandarin. The odd other dialect of any size is used for there day to day talk, but everyone in China (except maybe the very old) speaks and reads Mandarin and simplified Chinese (mandarin)
Where Cantonese would come in handy is Hong Kong/Macau or in the southern provinces of mainland China...
David....
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I use Rosetta Stone. I'm really quite impressed with it. It teaches by full immersion. There is no English explanations at all. It's expensive, but I think it's worth it.
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I did a course at my local university, although local colleges and adult education centres usually have Chinese courses. I guess we're so multicultural in the UK that language learning is especially popular here.
Our teacher was a Chinese woman and luckily she was from Wuhan so I could learn a similar dialect to what my ex-lady spoke. She was a great, very enthusiastic teacher and I couldn't fail to learn a lot from her. It's particularly important to learn Mandarin from a native speaker as it's a great chance to get the tones spot on.
If you want to read Chinese then the Tuttle flashcards and related books are the best way to learn.
I have to say though that don't assume there's one standard Mandarin or interpretation of Chinese characters. It's the same in Japan - Tokyo and Kansai have quite different dialects and Tokyo dwellers don't like going on vacations in the countryside because they think nobody will understand them! The exact Mandarin you will learn will depend on who you learn it from. Most TV in China and Japan has subtitles to get round the dialect problems.
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Sunny told me of a man from America she met in work the other day. He apparently spoke quite good Chinese so she asked him how he learned. He said he used Rosetta Stone.
I downloaded it and am using it now and am finding it very good. I did use the Pimsleur before too but it gets a bit dull after a while. The Rosetta stone also has speech recognition built in so if you have a microphone on your computer you have to speak in at various points and it evaluates your pronunciation which is a good feature.
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is there a place to download that for free or is there a charge irishman ??? if you can please send the details
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Rosetta Stone is a fairly expensive program depending on the level you get. For the English version basic up to LV 3 was around $400 Can,
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I have been here nearly a year now and i'm using the typical English system of shouting very loud in English.
After 12 months I can now order a taxi to take me home.
But can I get anywhere near to having a conversation? No is the answer.
Learning Chinese by courses is not for me. It is far easier to teach my wife English ::) My wife is still trying to find one of those 'Around Tuit' courses for my Chinese Lessons then I have promised her I will learn
Mind you I am really picking up collequial phrases and by the time the Olympics hit London I may be able to have that conversation.
Willy
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is there a place to download that for free or is there a charge irishman ??? if you can please send the details
I'll take the fifth on that Ted ;)
I'll bring you a copy when I visit in September if you like?
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I guess that Rosetta Stone is the way to go then. Now I wish I would have purchased it in march when I saw it on sale at Best Buy in Florida. ???
Dave C
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Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard
"Hard for whom?" I mean hard for me, a native English speaker trying to learn Chinese as an adult, going through the whole process with the textbooks, the tapes, the conversation partners, etc., the whole torturous rigmarole. I mean hard for me -- and, of course, for the many other Westerners who have spent years of their lives bashing their heads against the Great Wall of Chinese.
Chinese is hard for Chinese people too .If you don't believe this, just ask a Chinese person. Most Chinese people will cheerfully acknowledge that their language is hard, maybe the hardest on earth. At any rate, they generally become aware at some point of the Everest-like status of their native language, as they, from their privileged vantage point on the summit, observe foolhardy foreigners huffing and puffing up the steep slopes.If you take the English idiom "It's all Greek to me" and search for equivalent idioms in all the world's languages to arrive at a consensus as to which language is the hardest, the result is that Chinese easily wins as the most incomprehensible language."
After all the writing system is ridiculous.Beautiful, complex, mysterious -- but ridiculous. I, like many students of Chinese, was first attracted to Chinese because of the writing system, which is surely one of the most fascinating scripts in the world. The more you learn about Chinese characters the more intriguing and addicting they become. The study of Chinese characters can become a lifelong obsession, and you soon find yourself engaged in the daily task of accumulating them, drop by drop from the vast sea of characters, in a vain attempt to hoard them in the leaky bucket of long-term memory.
For one thing, it is simply unreasonably hard to learn enough characters to become functionally literate. An estimate is it takes seven to eight years for a Mandarin speaker to learn to read and write three thousand characters. There are a lot of popular books and articles that downplay this difficulty, saying things like "Despite the fact that Chinese has [10,000, 25,000, 50,000, take your pick] separate characters you really only need 2,000 or so to read a newspaper". Poppycock. I couldn't comfortably read a newspaper when I had 2,000 characters under my belt. I often had to look up several characters per line, and even after that I had trouble pulling the meaning out of the article. .
At the end of three years of learning Chinese, I hadn't yet read a single complete novel. I found it just too hard, impossibly slow, and unrewarding. Newspapers, too, were still too daunting. I couldn't read an article without looking up about every tenth character, and it was not uncommon for me to scan the front page of the People's Daily and not be able to completely decipher a single headline.
As if all this weren't bad enough, another ridiculous aspect of the Chinese writing system is that there are two (mercifully overlapping) sets of characters: the traditional characters still used in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and the simplified characters adopted by the People's Republic of China in the late 1950's and early 60's. Any foreign student of Chinese is more or less forced to become familiar with both sets, since they are routinely exposed to textbooks and materials from both. This linguistic camel's-back-breaking straw puts an absurd burden on the already absurdly burdened student of Chinese. In fact, there is absolutely no shame in giving up Chinese altogether, when you come right down to it.
Now consider the American undergraduate who decides to study Chinese. What does it take for this person to master the Chinese writing system? There is nothing that corresponds to an alphabet, though there are recurring components that make up the characters. How many such components are there? Don't ask. As with all such questions about Chinese, the answer is very messy and unsatisfying. It depends on how you define "component" (strokes? radicals?), plus a lot of other tedious details. Suffice it to say, the number is quite large, vastly more than the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet. And how are these components combined to form characters? Well, you name it -- components to the left of other components, to the right of other components, on top of other components, surrounding other components, inside of other components -- almost anything is possible. And in the process of making these spatial accommodations, these components get flattened, stretched, squashed, shortened, and distorted in order to fit in the uniform square space that all characters are supposed to fit into. In other words, the components of Chinese characters are arrayed in two dimensions, rather than in the neat one-dimensional rows of alphabetic writing.
Quite often you just completely forget how to write a character. Period. If there is no obvious semantic clue in the radical, and no helpful phonetic component somewhere in the character, you're just sunk. And you're sunk whether your native language is Chinese or not; contrary to popular myth, Chinese people are not born with the ability to memorize arbitrary squiggles. In fact, one of the most gratifying experiences a foreign student of Chinese can have is to see a native speaker come up a complete blank when called upon to write the characters for some relatively common word. You feel an enormous sense of vindication and relief to see a native speaker experience the exact same difficulty you experience every day.
One of the most unreasonably difficult things about learning Chinese is that merely learning how to look up a word in the dictionary is about the equivalent of an entire semester of secretarial school. When I was in Taiwan, I heard that they sometimes held dictionary look-up contests in the junior high schools. Imagine a language where simply looking a word up in the dictionary is considered a skill like debate or volleyball! Chinese is not exactly what you would call a user-friendly language, but a Chinese dictionary is positively user-hostile.
I have to mention this problem because it's one of the most common complaints about learning Chinese, and it's one of the aspects of the language that westerners are notoriously bad at. Every person who tackles Chinese at first has a little trouble believing this aspect of the language. How is it possible that shùxué means "mathematics" while shūxuě means "blood transfusion", or that guòjiǎng means "you flatter me" while guǒjiàng means "fruit paste"?
By itself, this property of Chinese would be hard enough; it means that, for us non-native speakers, there is this extra, seemingly irrelevant aspect of the sound of a word that you must memorize along with the vowels and consonants. But where the real difficulty comes in is when you start to really use Chinese to express yourself. You suddenly find yourself straitjacketed -- when you say the sentence with the intonation that feels natural, the tones come out all wrong. For example, if you wish say something like "Hey, that's my water glass you're drinking out of!", and you follow your intonational instincts -- that is, to put a distinct falling tone on the first character of the word for "my" -- you will have said a kind of gibberish that may or may not be understood.
Intonation and stress habits are incredibly ingrained and second-nature. With non-tonal languages you can basically import, mutatis mutandis, your habitual ways of emphasizing, negating, stressing, and questioning. The results may be somewhat non-native but usually understandable. Not so with Chinese, where your intonational contours must always obey the tonal constraints of the specific words you've chosen. Chinese speakers, of course, can express all of the intonational subtleties available in non-tonal languages -- it's just that they do it in a way that is somewhat alien to us speakers of non-tonal languages. When you first begin using your Chinese to talk about subjects that actually matter to you, you find that it feels somewhat like trying to have a passionate argument with your hands tied behind your back -- you are suddenly robbed of some vital expressive tools you hadn't even been aware of having.
Someone once said that learning Chinese is "a five-year lesson in humility". I used to think this meant that at the end of five years you will have mastered Chinese and learned humility along the way. However, now having studied Chinese for over six years, I have concluded that actually the phrase means that after five years your Chinese will still be abysmal, but at least you will have thoroughly learned humility.
There is still the awe-inspiring fact that Chinese people manage to learn their own language very well. Perhaps they are like the gradeschool kids that Baroque performance groups recruit to sing Bach cantatas. The story goes that someone in the audience, amazed at hearing such youthful cherubs flawlessly singing Bach's uncompromisingly difficult vocal music, asks the choir director, "But how are they able to perform such difficult music?"
"Shh -- not so loud!" says the director, "If you don't tell them it's difficult, they never know."
by David Moser
University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies
Well that makes me feel a whole lot better !!!!!
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You know, I only want to be able to talk to her about every day things, not discuss astrophysics. :o :o :o I did not think it would be so difficult.
Dave C
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???.....Well that was a downer to learn how hard it is to learn Chinese.....Not that I EVER expected it to be easy as I have tried (not very hard) to teach myself some basics without much progress. On the flip side though I am an exceptionally fast learner and have even managed to create my own pages on the Chinese social network called Qzone (http://user.qzone.qq.com/1423693309)....Still much to learn but not bad for only a weeks worth of work....and NO you cannot use Google site translation as it simply does not work when your logged on...and most times even if your not.
That said I believe in the "Immersion" method and I am currently making plans to live in China and take Mandarin classes for a whole year, 5-hours per day, 5-days per week!!! My attitude is that of...If I cant pick up how to learn at very least enough to have basic conversations with my love...She will simply have to learn English, which she states that is a desire of hers anyway. On my visit there recently to see her I was amazed at how quickly she picked up English words for things as we conversed. When we were eating she would tell me the names of some foods in Chinese and it would take me 5-6 tries to get it correct as where it would only take her 2-3 tries to get it in English.
That being said, I promised her that if we were to become married I would ask her (and parents)...In Chinese and would be able to hold a "basic" conversation with her family as a gesture of respect....So I am thinking that I have a good motivator for learning as she is an exceptionally beautiful, and intelligent young lady that has me wound around her finger.
I may get the first lessons on Rosetta Stone just to get the "basics" down as a primer before I leave for school.....by the way the school is called IMandarin...http://www.imandarin.net (http://www.imandarin.net)
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They may be able to teach chinese but I wouldn't count on correct translations...
Chinese Courses in China
iMandarin offers a comprehensive and flexile selection of Mandarin lanuages programs in china. Over 15 types of Chinese courses at 8 different levels accommodate the diverse goats of our students.
I think the correct word they wanted was GOAL not GOATS. ???
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Rostta Stone is a Virtual method of what my wife does to learn English. I recently had a teacher around our home taking photographs of the labels that my wife has on just about everything.
The label are written in Chinese and English. The English is the item and the Chinese is the phonetic sounds that make up the word in English. She is having great success with it.
The teacher is going to suggest the students do this.
Willy
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That is really a great idea Willy. I've heard of other people doing that and I would imagine it is a great way to keep the learning fresh and constant.
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its a great way to keep it fresh and constant but also practing speaking also helps to i think
chinese is a hard one to learn because of the tones and learning single words even makes the
process take longer because you know the words but cant string them together in a sentence
someone told me to learn bits and peices of sentences that you could eventually put together
and it does seem to help better but my problem is i do it for a week then i lay off it for a week or so
thats not helping to lay off it for so long
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I came across this in my never ending search to improve my woeful Mandarin. It's free and gives you a list of useful Chinese sentences provided with dialogues and with pinyin pronunciation as well. It's all divided up into sections that are useful in everyday situations. Here's the link:-
http://www.chineselearner.com/speaking/ (http://www.chineselearner.com/speaking/)
It's the most down to earth site I've found just check out the Anger & Displeasure or the Negative Expressions sections and you'll see what I mean!
There's even a section for us married guy's...............All with pronunciation so we can speak it correctly!
都是我不好。
dōu shì wǒ bù hǎo 。
It's all my fault
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是我不对。
shì wǒ bù duì 。
I am to blame.
这事我没有做好。
zhè shì wǒ méi yǒu zuò hǎo 。
I didn't do it right.
对不起，是我的错
duì bù qǐ ， shì wǒ de cuò 。
Sorry. I am wrong.
我错了。
wǒ cuò le 。
It's my fault.
;)
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wow paul looked at it good site for us
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Seems good but I see it's a certain pattern? I'm I wrong? :o ::) ???
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I came across this in my never ending search to improve my woeful Mandarin. It's free and gives you a list of useful Chinese sentences provided with dialogues and with pinyin pronunciation as well. It's all divided up into sections that are useful in everyday situations. Here's the link:-
http://www.chineselearner.com/speaking/ (http://www.chineselearner.com/speaking/)
It's the most down to earth site I've found just check out the Anger & Displeasure or the Negative Expressions sections and you'll see what I mean!
There's even a section for us married guy's...............All with pronunciation so we can speak it correctly!
都是我不好。
dōu shì wǒ bù hǎo 。
It's all my fault
.
是我不对。
shì wǒ bù duì 。
I am to blame.
这事我没有做好。
zhè shì wǒ méi yǒu zuò hǎo 。
I didn't do it right.
对不起，是我的错
duì bù qǐ ， shì wǒ de cuò 。
Sorry. I am wrong.
我错了。
wǒ cuò le 。
It's my fault.
;)
Words to learn for a long and happy marriage
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Absolutely ;D
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fully agree i really think my wife needs to memorize these phrases
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Sunny told me of a man from America she met in work the other day. He apparently spoke quite good Chinese so she asked him how he learned. He said he used Rosetta Stone.
I downloaded it and am using it now and am finding it very good. I did use the Pimsleur before too but it gets a bit dull after a while. The Rosetta stone also has speech recognition built in so if you have a microphone on your computer you have to speak in at various points and it evaluates your pronunciation which is a good feature.
I just finished lesson one in the "speech" specialised section. It was difficult and I only got about 86%, but it seems way easier than Pimsleur. I use a usb headset and it picked up my pronunciation and errors well. (strange how the lessons where I had errors mostly contained my poor pronunciation ::) )
I will continue to use Rosetta Stone for a while and see how I go.
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I'm sure everybody does this. I found the book, New concept English. It is what they use at the local school that teaches English. I also found a PDF version on line. So my wife uses that to study and practice her English when I am not helping her.
But as far as Chinese I am her teacher, I teach her the English and then she teaches me the same lesson in Chinese.
She learns the English a lot faster than I do the Chinese that's for sure. But as she told me , I don't need to know Chinese for her to get a visa.
And any of you guys that bought the Ectaco Partner 900 translator. As far as a straight translator it is rotten. But has turned out to be a learning tool for her and is well with the money in that aspect. And I say that after 9 months of use.
We both use it and it is great for learning. But rotten at walmart.
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Yesterday I was taking the bus. While waiting for it a asian man looking homeless walked past the bus stop mumbling something, maybe chinese? It made me realize I have to get off my butt and start learning some soon.
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My chinese is not too good...
Lots of people here in barrow know about me trying to learn the language and about going back there.
What I have noticed these last few weeks, a lot of the Chinese people here always try to talk with me in English and chinese. So it's sort of helping ma, that and of course talking with Sophie everyday
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I think I will go with Willies lesson. If they don't understand speak a little louder. If you are asked a question the answer is always no. I was thinking maybe throw in a little Spanish, or pig latin would they notice?
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I have just started the journey as well. I only know a few sentences like "Hello, how are you, im fine, my name is, good morning, miss"... But I have enrolled for a Chinese course at my job (I work in a school for adults...). So I get it for 8 euros, employee discount haha.
It is 24 hours all together. And has a continuation course next year. But I believe I will learn the basics. And thats what I need. I am somewhat good at learning languages or at least I like to think so.
So after I get the basics. Things will probably become easier. But I do know that learning Chinese will be hard. Especially the intonation parts. Finnish is the worlds most boring language. We speak with a monotonic boring voice always. So that is something really hard for me.
I learnt Japanese basics by myself just watching Japanese drama series for a few years. Now I can understand the "every day language" on Japanese.
I can't find any Chinese series. I would have tried to same otherwise. I've looked for Chinese movies but those don't really feel so helpful. Only Chinese series I found was "Gondor Hero". That was an awesome series anyway. But the language used in it is nothing close to everyday Chinese...
Seems like learning the hard way is the only way :(. But I have bought and gotten quite a few Chinese movies. So I can watch those again every now and then. And it will be worth it even if I learn one new word. Or notice something new related to the culture, customs etc.
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.... 都是我不好。
dōu shì wǒ bù hǎo 。
It's all my fault
.
是我不对。
shì wǒ bù duì 。
I am to blame.
这事我没有做好。
zhè shì wǒ méi yǒu zuò hǎo 。
I didn't do it right.
对不起，是我的错
duì bù qǐ ， shì wǒ de cuò 。
Sorry. I am wrong.
我错了。
wǒ cuò le 。
It's my fault.
;)
I just been given extra kisses for sayinmg these to her...hehehe...And was told I am a GOOD HUSBAND... ;D ;D Thanks Paul.. ;)
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I learnt Japanese basics by myself just watching Japanese drama series for a few years. Now I can understand the "every day language" on Japanese.
I can't find any Chinese series. I would have tried to same otherwise. I've looked for Chinese movies but those don't really feel so helpful. Only Chinese series I found was "Gondor Hero". That was an awesome series anyway. But the language used in it is nothing close to everyday Chinese...
I think you mean Condor Heroes... That series was in cantonese (guangdonghua) if I remember correctly (it's been years since I have seen it on TV). Most of the TV series from the 80's and 90's were in cantonese if you got them overseas. TVB produces mostly cantonese series now, but the other networks are getting more exposure...
(BTW, there are at least 2 more series if you liked the story...and one or two "rebirths" of the series floating around)
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I just learned something today. I always wondered why there are two words for "2" - liang and er. I hit a translation and realized "liang" could be considered the same as our word "both". I love these little Ah ha moments. I don't know it it's entirely correct, but it makes more sense to me now. I just wanted to share...
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I remember the same and when I asked my Chinese friend, he said it was like our word for couple, or pair, or both.
Are you still taking Chinese lessons Neil? I am mainly learning from some programs I have.
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I had one of those "ah" moments too this week when I found out the word "narrlee" (that of course is my version of the spelling ::) ) meant Where and There...but why this should be is still way beyond me. Also it seems contradictory in that I could point to something and say " Where it is" Mandarin don't you just love it!!!! ;D
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ha. Just the other day I was listening to my Pimsleur cd, and they said "Where? There." = "Nar? Nar." In some ways it makes more sense to me than English.
Yeah Rhonald, I still study sometimes. Not as often as I should though. I have Pimsleur and 3 levels of Rosetta Stone's Mandarin. I haven't been taking any lessons lately. My Chinese friend here in town has been very busy lately, and so have I.
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Good to hear Neil. I have had and tried Pimsleur when I was learning Spanish and thought it a quality product. I never saw it in the store for Mandarin so I have bought Living Languages, Earworms & the Michel Thomas products. I love the voice of the Asian girl on Earworms and like their method of teaching but I have only seen their level one course. I also listen to Ask Benny on youtubes.
I see that you said that you have been busy " Ne hung mung" but I hope to hear that soon you will get a chance to travel to China again. I know you have not quit had the success we all hope for but I still liked hearing about your journey as it still helps others in their own process.
And Paul, on earworms, the Englishman cues us to remember what narlee means as refering to narlee as - Narlee where it should be. And another example he uses is - on my tour I saw a Toilet - toursaw for toilet.
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Rhonald,
Toilets (ce suo) are usually narlee... :o
All kidding aside, xian zai ni zai na li. (Where are you right now?)
Neil hen mang.
Problem with typing the wrong words in romanized english is that if you learn it that way, you aren't learning it properly and will make it harder to be understood if they understand pinyin.
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Neil hen mang.
I'm trying to figure out what you said... I get the first two words. Neil very...mang. I hit up MDBG and found a few words:
茫 - vast, with no clear boundary / fig. hazy / indistinct / unclear / confused
漭 - vast / expansive (of water)
铓 - sharp point / point of sword
忙 - busy / hurriedly
You're right. Pinyin without the tones is very non-mang (pointless).
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You're very busy. Hen mang...
The problem is that not everyone here can view the accents... so I generally strip them out.
Another problem that we encounter is that translation is also based on context. Case in point, type in pointless into a translator program... the computer can't take into account the context properly. And it's not consistent either... if you type pointless into MDBG, you get 9 different phrases. Google will add one more and Zhongwenweb will give you another...
Which is why you (and I and everyone else) has to practice with a native speaker...otherwise we won't learn the difference...