Trying to learn Mandarin without knowing Pinyin is like trying to learn English without knowing the alphabet. Start here to get the basics.
The word dictionary "Look up all chinese words in a text" is particularly powerful and produces beautiful results. It also has facilities to create your own quiz.
This works great to annotate entire article as you can provide a URL.
Really great and well made videos... Check out "Lesson #1: Vegetables" and go from there. I thought I would go crazy with the same music track over and over but I didn't so you should be safe!
Good article to read before embarking on the adventure... From it:
I have seen highly literate Chinese people forget how to write certain characters in common words like "tin can", "knee", "screwdriver", "snap" (as in "to snap one's fingers"), "elbow", "ginger", "cushion", "firecracker", and so on.
It really is true; I've tested those words on my Taiwanese born wife and she wasn't able to write down a single one...
One point to think about however before giving up: I think with the advent of various supporting software and portable computing devices such as Android mobile phones with on board translation software it is becoming increasingly feasible to learn Mandarin in a "reasonable" amount of time.
Writing Chinese characters with pinyin, auto-translating text and the ability to look up instantly every word in a text removes some of the barriers of learning Chinese. This means you should "cheat" your way to learning Chinese at every opportunity.
Otherwise, yeah, learning Chinese is definitely one of the crazier adventure someone can embark in!
1 comment:
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